FEATURE BY JONATHAN RIGBY
Assistant floor manager Paddy Russell in July 1955, checking props for Rudolph Cartier’s production The Vale of Shadows – an adaptation of Jean Anouilh’s Eurydice. This picture was taken by Anouilh himself.
Four nights before Christmas 1961, viewers tuning into the first instalment of a BBC series called Return and Answer were probably unaware that this modest show marked a significant epoch in the corporation’s history. The criminologist Edgar Lustgarten, best known at the time for fronting various cinema featurettes, was on hand, as Radio Times put it, to quiz ‘famous personalities of the past about their actions, motives, and beliefs’.