The pianist of Studio BB

John Wyver writes: Come with me a little further down the rabbit hole that is Studio BB in the original Broadcasting House. This post follows my two-part ‘This temple of the arts and muses’, the first element of which is here and the second here. And it is prompted by the presence of the grand piano in the photos of Studio BB, as below. This is the story of who played that piano for much of the time during the television years of 1932 to 1934. And unlike the majority of posts on this blog it has romance at its heart. Cyril Smith was a young classical pianist who studied at the Royal College of Music between 1926 and 1930. Despite making his professional concert debut in 1929, he found bookings hard to come by, and so he took what he later described as a ‘bread-and-butter’ job with the Baird television company. ‘The firm’, he recalled in his autobiography Duet for Three Hands, ‘then very new and amateurish, wanted an accompanist to provide a background to the strange entertainment…