Hello Olympics, Hello London

Title: Hello Olympics, Hello London

Description: Today we talk with Ryan Stevens of the Skate Guard Blog about the fascinating movie Hello London. This movie captures the excitement of early figure skating and the burgeoning celebrity culture in film and sports.

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Ryan Stevens of the Skate Guard Blog
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Begin Transcript:

Thank you again for listening to Beyond the Big Screen podcast. We are a member of the Parthenon Podcast network. Of course, a big thanks goes out to Ryan Stevens of the Skate Guard Blog. Links to learn more about Ryan and Skate Guard can be found at http://skateguard1.blogspot.com/ or in the Show Notes.
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, [00:00:00] this is beyond the big screen podcast with your host, Steve Guerra. Thank you again for joining us today on beyond the big screen. And we’re here to discuss today. The 1958 fictionalized documentary called hello London, alternatively known as London calling. We will discuss the evolution. Figure skating over the course of the 20th century, the famous figure, skaters, Sonja Henie and the complex sport and industry of figure skating.
I’m very happy today to be joined by Ryan Stevens to discuss this interesting production. Thanks for joining us, Ryan. Ryan Stevens as a former competitive figure skater and C F S a skate Canada judge. [00:01:00] He has been writing about figure skating since 2013. Ryan has had media credentials with skate Canada covering the 2016 Canadian tire national skating championship and Halifax as well as conducting interviews with many top figure skaters past and present in June, 2017, Ryan released a full length biography of British actress, figure skater and dancing.
Belita Jepson Turner, a contemporary and perceived rival of Sonja. Henie who we’re going to talk a lot about today. Ryan’s blog skate guard can be found at skate guard, one.blogspot.ca and in the show notes I’ll, uh, briefly just. Discuss the production details. It was a limited release in 1958. The film was never officially widely released in the United States.
And as a runtime of 78 minutes. [00:02:00] And as I said, it was released in the UK in 1960 as London calling Sonja Henie, which we’ll talk about more as well, was a very popular actress in about the middle part of the previous century. And this was her last film. Uh, Ryan, maybe you can give us a little bit of background on this film and how it ties into early and mid.
20th century figure skating. Well, I’ll go. London was really, it was an attempt at a comeback for Sonja Henie. She’d been after turning professional, uh, and coming to America in 1936 after winning her third Olympic gold medal. Uh, she was signed with 20th century Fox and she produced these very lavish, uh, skating, driven, uh, films that were huge box office hits, but over after the war, [00:03:00] and as, as, as the case with many, um, actresses that he’d look at, um, an actress like Esther Williams, who was, uh, she was a swimmer.
So. These kind of vehicles, uh, that are driven by a specialty such as swimming or skating. Obviously the skaters that were in the skating movies, they were able to sustain that fame for a certain level of time and it’s windled off. And that kind of happened with Sonia a little bit. And at the time she was doing shows at the center theater in New York and touring with her own ice reveal.
So when hello, Came out. It was an attempt at a comeback of sorts for her in the film world. She was going to do a planning to do a series of films where she visited different cities. So this one was, was based around her tour, going to London. And then she was, you know, looking at doing hello, Paris. Hello?
Uh, [00:04:00] St. Marets hello, Oslo. Just know different European cities in capitals around the world. And kind of tying in the stars, uh, musical and theatrical stars from the country that she visited. So unfortunately that didn’t happen. This ended up being her last film, but it’s certainly is a really wonderful example of how skating carnival.
Like hotel shows and carnival style productions and touring productions were thriving during that. And it spoke more to the road show aspect of skating, a professional skating then of the twat driven stories that were in her other films. Yeah. But I thought it was a really cool idea, especially when, uh, before we were, when we were planning this, that this was a promotional piece that probably worked really well for her skating enterprise, [00:05:00] as well as a tourism type show, almost like a Prado travel channel show.
Yeah. Yeah. I’d agree with that. Definitely. Well, at the time, at the time in England, uh, these ice pantomimes were thriving, uh, which was quite interesting because in America it was all, it was all about these hotels shows and touring productions, but the ice pantomimes in England, uh, during the era, when this.
We’re released. They were almost like staged shows on ice where the skaters would lip sync along, uh, to prerecord it prerecorded voice tracks. So it was, yeah, it was really quite interesting because at the time skating was thriving in a different way in England, professional skating wise, and it wasn’t a American.
And I think that this was in a way Sonia’s way of trying to get in on that Marquez. You use that term hotel show. Maybe you can tell us a [00:06:00] little bit more about what a hotel show was. Well, imagine going into a, a supper club or a, or a restaurant at a hotel being seated at a table to have your supper, to have a few cocktails and watching figure skating shoe.
On a small tank of ice while you were having dinner or having a few drinks, uh, they would, these shows would have usually a live singer or two they’d have a small cost of skaters. And usually some novelty acts. They might have a juggler. They might have. Um, a physical comedian, something along those lines, but they were small variety shows, uh, centered around skating that you could watch while you were having supper.
And they were huge in hotels across America, in, uh, the 19. Well, they actually started, uh, back before prohibition died out for some time, and then they made a comeback. And during the era that this film would have come out, they still would have [00:07:00] been thriving and. Oh, that sounds like a lot of fun actually.
Yeah. What would it, what would it be? Is there a, an analogy to that today or did, uh, did they carry through at all to closer to our times? I mean, if you look at today, uh, skating has certainly changed, uh, on the professional side, there isn’t a lot of it, unfortunately, um, There are still skating shows, uh, on cruise ships that people can watch.
There are skating shows, um, that hits, uh, different, uh, Uh, theme parks, like for instance, Canada’s Wonderland. I know they’ve had a nice show a before as well. So those kinds of things still go on, but not in the same scale as they did. Ice skating is a really interesting sport in that it has a really hyper-competitive world-class athletic element to it.
But like you’re saying, it also has this [00:08:00] entertainment element. Do those. Facets of the, of the sport or of the industry clash at all? I think they absolutely. If you look at the competitive side of figure skating today and how it’s developed, um, they certainly clash quite a bit, um, in the 1990s, um, after the whole scandal with, uh, Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding skating was absolutely huge.
You couldn’t turn on your television on a Saturday. Without having, uh, three different channels, having a professional, a professional competition or an ice show, um, that we’re usually competing with competing with each other. And the market is so saturated that by the late nineties, um, perhaps early two thousands, it just absolutely went Kaboom.