Pride and Prejudice (1952)

The BBC’s second attempt at Pride and Prejudice was a six-part serial adapted by Cedric Wallis, first broadcast live on Saturday 2 February 1952. Daphne Slater played Elizabeth Bennet and Peter Cushing — more than two decades before he became internationally recognizable from Hammer horror, Sherlock Holmes, and Star Wars — played Mr. Darcy. The cast also included a young Prunella Scales, later famous as Sybil Fawlty in Fawlty Towers, making her television debut as Lydia Bennet.

Live television, and nothing left of it

Like the 1938 production before it, the 1952 Pride and Prejudice was made and broadcast under conditions that guaranteed its disappearance. British television in the early 1950s was still transmitted live, episode by episode, with no standard practice yet in place for recording BBC drama off-air. Once each half-hour instalment aired, it existed only in the memory of whoever happened to be watching that week. None of the six episodes was preserved on film or any other medium, and none has resurfaced since. What can be reconstructed today comes from Cedric Wallis’s script, BBC production records, and contemporary listings and reviews — enough to establish who was in it and roughly how it was structured, but nothing that lets anyone actually watch it.

Why it’s still worth a page

A production this thoroughly lost isn’t something to recommend watching, since there is nothing to watch. Its interest is historical: it’s the version that put Peter Cushing in the role of Darcy years before he became a household name in an entirely different genre, and it’s the direct ancestor of the BBC’s 1958 remake, which reused Wallis’s script with a new cast rather than commissioning a fresh adaptation. Taken together, the 1938, 1952, and 1958 productions show the BBC returning to Pride and Prejudice three times within twenty years — always live, always ultimately unrecoverable — before television technology caught up enough, by 1967, to leave behind a version that could actually be kept.