Lance Sieveking


Lance Sieveking was an English writer and pioneer BBC radio and television producer. He was married three times, and was father to archaeologist Gale Sieveking and Fortean-writer Paul Sieveking.

Biography

Lancelot De Giberne Sieveking, D.S.C was born on 19 March 1896 in Harrow, Middlesex. He was a very creative child, writing from the age of six, and starting a novel aged 13 which would ultimately see print when he was 26. In-between, he "actively support the Suffragette movement" before war broke out.

World War I

Sieveking served during World War I. Lance signed up with the Artists Rifles before "join the Royal Navy Air Service, the D.F.C" before being "shot down over the Rhine" in 1917 and held as a German prisoner-of-war.
Upon his return to England, he attended St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and was close friends with fellow-Cambridge student Eric Maschwitz. The two were both editors on The new Cambridge chap book between 1920 and 1921.

BBC

He made his name with the BBC, starting out as assistant to the Director of Education, before "he went on to introduce the first running commentaries and adapt numerous classics for radio drama... it has been argued that the production of the first television play springs from his ingenuity". He was drama script editor for ten years before retiring "six years later in 1956".
He wrote The Stuff of Radio, and his radio dramatisation of C. S. Lewis' first Chronicles of Narnia title The Magician's Nephew was approved by Lewis personally. In 1927, he designed "an eight-squared drawing meant to assist BBC radio's football commentators,"
Another early BBC radio drama producer, Val Gielgud, said of the "not altogether fortunate" Sieveking:
Harry Heuser interprets Gielgud's words in the following way:
In 1930, while radio drama was still relatively new, Sieveking found in the still-newer medium of television a place in which he could experiment with new ideas. To that end, he brought an adaptation of Luigi Pirandello's short play L'uomo dal fiore in bocca to television as "The Man with the Flower in His Mouth", airing on 14 July 1930 – the first British television play. Very little of Sieveking's work survives in whole or in part, but the short opening lines of this early work – narrated by Sieveking – have been saved for posterity and can be heard here. In 1967, "The Man.." was re-made, "authentically re-produced and presented by the original producer, Lance Sieveking, supported by the original art-work and music recording".

Papers

His papers are housed in the Lilly Library, Indiana University, and consist of "correspondence, radio plays, manuscripts for short stories, for novels, and for nonfiction works, diaries, drawings, and photographs" as well as "many photographs from the World War I period showing airplanes, North Africa and from Lance's captivity as a German prisoner-of-war."

Television