The Time Machine
by Robert Barr, [director unknown]
The first TV broadcast ofÂ
The Time Machine, a little less than an hour, came live
from the BBC’s Studio A at Alexandra Palace on 25 Jan 1949 with a second revised
broadcast on 21 Feb 1949.
Seeing as how there are no recordings of the broadcast, I
wish I had my own time machine so I could send my Betamax® back to 1949.
— Michael Main
Thomas Sheridan in Fantasy Review: In the first showing, after a
brief interval in which the hands of the wall-clock recorded the passing of many hours,
the lights began to dip and rise to indicate the passage of the days, and as this effect
speeded up the walls of the room gradually dissolved. In the second performance this was
cut out, killing the impression of fast-moving time. But, outside, the sun moves ever
more swiFTLy across the sky until it is a continuous band of light, rising and falling to
indicate the equinoxes, and throwing into vivid relief the changing shapes of successions
of buildings which become more startlingly futuristic as the Traveller flashes through
the ages.