Calypso on Radio, Film and TV

Bal Creole

A Man from the Sun

During the 1950s, BBC television periodically presented calypso and other forms of Caribbean music. The first program of this type was Boscoe Holder's Bal Creole (televised in June 1950), which offered an overview of the traditional music and dance of Trinidad. Holder arrived from Trinidad with his dance troupe earlier that year; during the following decades, he led an active career as a dancer, choreographer and painter. The first television drama on the life of Caribbean migrants in London appeared in 1956. Titled A Man From the Sun, the play starred Trinidadian actor Errol John and included Guyanese vocalist/actor Cy Grant, who sang Lord Kitchener's "My Landlady." Grant also served as a reader for another major BBC program devoted to Caribbean culture: Caribbean Voices. Between 1943 and 1958, this weekly radio show broadcast the work of numerous Caribbean writers, such as George Lamming, Samuel Selvon and Derek Walcott.

Calypso had its broadest exposure in Britain during the late 1950s, when Cy Grant was hired to sing a new calypso about recent events every evening on a BBC television news magazine titled Tonight. Grant, originally from Guyana, served as a flight lieutenant in the RAF during World War II and was a qualified barrister. During the 1950s, he sang calypsos and folksongs in nightclubs and acted in a variety of plays and movies. In 1958 he starred in Calypso, an Italian/French film that was shot in the Caribbean and also featured Trinidadian calypsonian Spitfire. By the 1960s, Grant felt that being typecast as a "calypso singer" limited his opportunities for other acting roles.
 

Cy Grant on Tonight

Cy Grant in Calypso

Next: British Calypso Themes