Television and Radio
In 1938, Lawrence took a night off from Susan and God to perform the play for NBC's emerging television audience, which then consisted mostly of customers at bars, hotels, pedestrians in other public places in New York City and NBC employees. Probably less than 100 - 200 receivers could pick up the telecast. Photos of the 1938 live broadcast are featured in a major article in Life (magazine) published a week later, as it was one of the first full-length plays done on live television. In 1943, Lawrence hosted a weekly series of American radio shows, some of them featuring discussions with guests and others adaptations of Hollywood hit films. In 1947, she returned to NBC for a production of the 1913 Shaw play The Great Catherine. In order to promote The King and I, she appeared on various television programmes, including the Ed Sullivan-hosted Toast of the Town, with Rodgers and Hammerstein joining her to perform selections from the show. Additionally, she appeared on several BBC Radio interview and variety shows before and after World War II.
Read more about this topic: Gertrude Lawrence
Famous quotes containing the words television and/or radio:
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“We spend all day broadcasting on the radio and TV telling people back home what’s happening here. And we learn what’s happening here by spending all day monitoring the radio and TV broadcasts from back home.”
—P.J. (Patrick Jake)