C.S. Lewis’ Brush with Television

Abstract

This essay describes two hitherto unreported interviews that C.S. Lewis gave for broadcast on British television in the early 1960’s, and introduces a transcript of one of the interviews. Both interviews were arranged by Lewis’s former student, the theatrical critic and producer Kenneth Tynan, for episodes of the ITV artsmagazine programme ‘ Tempo’. For the first of these episodes, which was devoted to the subject of ‘Eros in the Arts’, Lewis was interviewed by politician and journalist Wayland Young; it is this interview which is published with the essay. The programme itself was banned for Sunday viewing and was never broadcast. Lewis was also interviewed for the replacement episode, called ‘The Oxford Octopus’, which concerned the role of the universities in the British arts scene. Lewis is not otherwise known to have been recorded on film, and unfortunately, no footage of these occasions seems now to exist; and there is no known text of the second interview. The essay also describes Lewis’s relationship with Tynan, the Tempo series, and the other content – so far as it can be discovered – of both episodes.