Did a Scottish film 'beat Hollywood to the punch' as the first ever talkie?

Playwright Graham Moffat played the character John Snodgrass, with his wife Margaret playing Janet Struthers,
in the play Till the Bells Ring

By Pauline McLean

"Wait a minute. You ain't heard nothing yet."

That promise, spoken by Al Jolson in the 1927 film The Jazz Singer, made movie history.

The first recorded dialogue on film, Jolson's eight well-chosen words marked the birth of the "talkies", delivered by one of the biggest stars on Earth.

The moment has long been celebrated in popular culture - most memorably in the 1952 film Singin' in the Rain - and there are plans for a variety of events to mark the centenary next year.

But what if those words weren't the first?

Researcher Marc David Jacobs has uncovered evidence that the first-ever talking feature film was Scottish.

And it was screened in Edinburgh - a whole year before Jolson's voice hit the cinemas.

The film was based on this stage production

Graham Moffat was a Glaswegian playwright who wrote plays for his touring company. In 1925 he decided to turn his debut play, Till the Bells Ring, into a film.

He approached a London-based company called De Forest Phonofilm, which had patented a system which allowed synchronised audio to be recorded directly onto film.

The early quality was poor, and it was mostly used to record short performances such as vaudeville or music hall acts.

But the Moffats had a much more ambitious plan in mind.

They wanted the entire company involved in a 45-minute feature film with synchronised sound and dialogue throughout.

The cast of six included his wife Margaret - a noted actress and one of the first suffragettes to be arrested in Scotland - and his daughter, Winnifred Moffat.

There was even a role for their dog.

A year later, they screened the film, first at a disastrous private demonstration which was marred by faulty equipment.

And then on 11 October in Poole's Synod Hall in Edinburgh, where it was billed as "a super talking picture of Victorian Scottish life".

Jacobs said: "Silent movie audiences would have been used to walking in and out, or leaving halfway through so people had to be warned not to come in in the middle of the film and disturb everyone.

"They had to be told not to talk themselves, just as if they were at an actual play.

"And people do, and it's amazing.

"You can see in the reviews, even the sort of people who are professionally being paid to watch these films, there's a sense of wonder."

An advertisement in the Edinburgh Evening News from October 1926 - calling the film a "super talking picture"

The film ran for a week, with the Scotsman reporting "the movement and sound are perfectly synchronised and after the listener becomes accustomed to the phenomenon of screen figures appearing to talk and the ear attunes itself to the sounds there is no difficulty in catching the spoken words."

The paper also commended Graham Moffat's "true Scottish humour" and was so impressed with the offering it sent a reporter back for a second screening.

The film was clearly well-marketed and caught the attention of the press.

So why has it fallen into obscurity in the history of sound on film?

According to Jacobs, the film was acquired by an unscrupulous exhibitor who re-released it in 1933 as a brand-new film.

Moffat sued and won his case in 1935, after which all copies of the feature were returned to him. But the film was apparently never shown again.

He died in Cape Town in December 1951, never having made another.

One of his plays - Bunty Pulls the Strings - became a huge hit on Broadway, but his landmark contribution to cinema has never been recognised or celebrated.

Marc David Jacobs said there was a "sense of wonder" in the reviews for the Scottish talkie

And the film itself? Jacobs believes the only surviving copy of Till the Bells Ring is in the BFI National Archive in Hertfordshire.

It has not been shown privately or publicly since being acquired by the BFI more than 50 years ago.

He hopes the print can be examined and restored and a search undertaken for any other surviving material.

And he feels that would see the Moffats and their film get the credit they are due.

"I was amazed to discover the unbelievable story of the Scottish family production that beat Hollywood to the punch," he said.

"But I was even more astonished by the complete lack of interest in it.

"It was as if it was impossible to believe that a major piece of world cinema could have come out of a tiny London studio, hired by a canny Glaswegian playwright.

"But it did. And nearly a century after it was last seen, the time has finally come for the world to recognise Graham and Maggie Moffat's world-beating achievement."

And the first words ever spoken in the world's first talking feature?

The heroine, Aggie, says: "Still anither mornin' and never a word or a sign o' him.

Eh, me! The sun's gettin' through, so we'll be wearin' oor braws to the kirk the day."

To be fair, Al probably had the better line.

First published at BBC, October 6 2026

Digger review: Tom Cruise takes the 'biggest risk of his career' in this 'love-it-or-hate-it' folly

By Nicholas Barber

Tom Cruise's performance as a bizarre oil tycoon makes Digger the "weirdest film" he has ever made – and could it be a flop. But there's much more to this divisive, satirical comedy than viewers might expect, including two high-concept twists.

Tom Cruise does things that seem terrifying to the rest of us, whether it's clinging to the sides of planes or riding motorbikes off the tops of cliffs. But his new film is the biggest risk of his career. He isn't in danger of breaking any bones, for a change, but he is in danger of being called pretentious and self-indulgent – as well as being associated with what could well be a humungous flop.

Most people won't go to see it – and some people who do will walk out halfway through

Directed and co-written by Alejandro G Iñárritu, the Mexican director of Amores Perros, Birdman and The Revenant, Digger isn't just the weirdest film Cruise has ever made, it's the weirdest film that almost anyone has ever made.

Most people won't go to see it – and some people who do will walk out halfway through. But that doesn't mean that Digger is a failure. It's just that it's a bizarre, hectoring, conceptually challenging eco-satire, so it's not likely to be mistaken for Mission: Impossible.

The first way in which it departs from Cruise's recent work is that his character, Digger Rockwell, isn't an athletic, ageless, roguish-yet-noble hero. With a mountain of prosthetic make-up, and someone listed in the end credits as "T Cruise's hair artist", the actor has transformed himself into a balding, greying, paunchy Texan oil baron. And we get to see just how paunchy he is when he is shown in his underwear in a cheeky homage to one of Cruise's breakthrough films, Risky Business.

It's the kind of extreme makeover that is amusing in small doses – such as when Cruise cameoed as the monstrous Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder – but for the main character to look so jarringly strange is quite a choice.

Still, nothing in Digger is subtle. Rockwell's historic mansion is decorated with more stuffed exotic animals than a Victorian natural history museum, but (irony!) he's deeply worried about the health of his scrawny pet cat. He has some feelings, then: he's also fond of his half-sister, a green-energy entrepreneur played by a gravely under-used Sandra Hüller. But this swaggering mogul doesn't care about anything except money – and he cares about the environment least of all.

When an underling calls Rockwell to say that his company's oil-drilling operation in Alaska has cracked a glacier in two, he responds by feigning ignorance, laughing off the problem, ranting about all the jobs he's created, and furiously passing the buck.

But reality hits when an iceberg the size of a small country splits from the glacier and starts drifting towards northern Europe. In a matter of days, a tsunami will put several major cities under water.

What's fascinating about the scenario is that it would have seemed embarrassingly over-the-top a few years ago, but now seems as plausible as a documentary

The blowhard US president, played by John Goodman, convenes an emergency meeting in Rockwell's mansion, so a dozen white men in suits and military uniforms are soon sitting around a table, shouting and swearing (there's a nice joke about the absence of women in the room).

A scientist, played with heartfelt distress by the excellent Riz Ahmed, struggles to get them to understand the situation, but eventually they settle on a plan. They will use their military might to change the iceberg's direction. And if that doesn't work, maybe they will take control of the narrative so that a US company isn't blamed for the subsequent devastation. The main thing, the president's religious adviser assures them, is that God is on their side.

What's fascinating about the scenario is that it would have seemed embarrassingly over-the-top a few years ago, but now seems as plausible as a documentary. The iceberg story is appalling, but it could fit next to any article about El Niño.

Judged purely a satire, then, Digger is powerfully resonant. But there is more to it than that. The film has two high-concept twists which raise new questions about everything you've seen so far. I won't reveal any more. All I'll say is that the first full-length trailer looked so exaggerated and artificial that some people wondered if Iñárritu had actually made a musical. The truth is even more surprising.

If this art-house extravaganza had featured an actor known for leftfield indie films, it would have been lauded as a daring experiment

Iñárritu is a multiple Oscar-winner, and Leonardo DiCaprio won his Oscar for starring in The Revenant, so some commentators (me included) assumed that the project was a blatant attempt by Cruise to bag one for himself. (Aside from being given an honorary Oscar at last year's Governors Awards, he has never won anything on the big night.)

But Digger puts paid to that theory. If Cruise was driven to win prizes, he wouldn't have made a film as eccentric or as politically blunt as this one. Rather than being a crowd-pleasing prestige picture, it's a love-it-or-hate-it folly – and there probably will be more people in the "hate it" camp than the "love it" one.

Personally, I loved it. Some of its excesses are, well, a bit too excessive, and most viewers will wish it was shorter. After about 90 minutes, you get tired of close-ups of Goodman yelling while snake-sized veins bulge out of his forehead. But when Cruise is clambering all over the set, delivering thunderous lectures on the oil industry, I couldn't help grinning at the gargantuan scale of his performance, the conviction of the script's grim environmental message, and Iñárritu's antic style.

If this art-house extravaganza had featured an actor known for left-field indie films, it would have been lauded as a daring experiment. But as it features the actor at the very top of Hollywood's A-list, many viewers will wonder what he was thinking.

But you have to hand it to Cruise. When he's making an action blockbuster, he wants it to showcase the most outrageous stunts ever seen. And when he's making an oddball apocalyptic tragicomedy, he goes for it with the same limitless, daredevil ambition.

First published at BBC, September 29, 2026

Stevie Wonder surprise-releases four previously unheard tracks from 'Song in the Key of Life'

Stevie Wonder promoting ‘Songs in the Key of Life’ after its original release in 1976
Photo: Richard E. Aaron / Redferns

By Kory Grow

Today, Stevie Wonder surprise-released Songs in the Key of Life 50: The EP, which contains four previously unreleased studio recordings. He recorded “It’s Easier,” “My Life Story of Love,” “I Can See the Sun in Late December,” and “I’m Into Livin'” during the sessions for his celebrated 1976 album but held onto them for the past half century. Now that he’s planning a tour commemorating the 50th anniversary of that album, he decided to finally issue them.

“We’ve lived with Songs in the Key of Life for 50 years, but there’s still more to hear,” Wonder said. “We didn’t add these songs to the album, but they were part of what I was feeling and discovering as we made it. They bring me back to that time in my life, and now they get to become part of yours.”

The recording engineers who mixed the original album, John Fischbach and Gary O. Adante (credited as Gary Olazabal), mixed the songs for the new EP. The songs further extend the legacy of the original album, which included another four-song EP, A Something’s Extra.

The tracks were timed to the 50th anniversary of the release of the diamond-certified album, which came out on Sept. 28, 1976. The EP arrived on streaming services at 4:54 a.m. PDT, the time the original Songs in the Key of Life sessions wrapped, at which time bassist Nathan Watts remarked, “Fo’FiftyFo’,” which became an in-joke Wonder and his musicians have used to mark the end of sessions ever since.

When Rolling Stone ranked the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, Songs in the Key of Life placed at Num,her Four. “[The album] encompasses an incredible range of life experiences — from the giddy joy of a baby in the bathtub (‘Isn’t She Lovely,’ featuring the cries and giggles of Wonder’s infant daughter Aisha Morris) through tributes to his musical heroes (‘Sir Duke’) to dismay about the indifference of the wealthy (‘Village Ghetto Land’),” the magazine said. “Wonder pulled from every imaginable musical source — the ecstatic ‘Sir Duke’ references Duke Elington and Ella Fitzgerald, while ‘As’ featured Herbie Hancock on Fender Rhodes.”

Stevie Wonder in 2026. Photo courtesy Buzz (Wales)

The four songs on the EP expound on the double album’s themes of acknowledging all life and love have to offer. It opens with “It’s Easier,” an upbeat breakup song with the message, “It’s easier to say, ‘Love, bye-bye’/Than to go around with a heart that wants to cry.” The similarly heartbroken “It’s My Life Story of Love” finds Wonder singing, “It’s my life story of love that never comes true,” though he sounds more hopeful than plaintive as he proclaims he’ll win his love back in lyrics he co-wrote with the Supremes’ Susaye Greene. “I Can See the Sun in Late December” is a slow-shuffling ballad about nostalgia for warmer times. And “I’m Into Livin'” is an easy, jazzy funk ballad on which Wonder sings, “I’m into livin’ for your sweet, sweet love, L-O-V-E, love,” his voice rising and falling with the music.

As on the original album, Wonder plays most of the instruments on the EP’s songs, including drums, GX-1-Dream Machine, Bass-GX-1-Dream Machine, Fender Rhodes, and electric bass, variously, in addition to singing. Gregory Phillinganes played the Rhodes on “My Life Story of Love,” and Watts played bass on “It’s Easier” and “I Can See the Sun in Late December.” “I’m Into Livin'” features backup vocals by Shirley Brewer (who sang on the album’s “Ordinary Love”), Thelma Houston (who later recorded the hit “Don’t Leave Me This Way”), and longtime Wonder backup singer Deneice Williams.

Wonder will perform the 17 songs from the original double album on a world tour this fall. It kicks off in Birmingham, England, on Oct. 13 and wraps in Los Angeles on Dec. 19.

First published at Rolling Stone, September 28, 2026

Former ABC presenter Margaret Throsby injured after being hit by e-bike

By Penny Burfitt

Margaret Throsby is recovering in hospital after she was hit by an e-bike on a shared path. (Supplied: Holly Throsby)

The family of former ABC Classic presenter Margaret Throsby wants to see teenagers' use of certain e-bikes restricted after she was badly injured on a shared pathway.

The 84-year-old suffered a hip fracture and head injuries when she was struck by an e-bike being ridden by two teenage boys.

The incident happened on a shared path in the Illawarra, south of Sydney, last Friday. 

The veteran broadcaster, who spent 55 years as a renowned presenter across the ABC, remains in hospital where she is recovering after surgery.

Ms Throsby's daughter Holly Throsby, a musician and author, said her mother was badly hurt.

"It was one of those massive fat bikes that kind of looked like a motorcycle, so it's very heavy and then you've got two boys on it," she said.

"It was a really high impact, so she's broken her hip and thumb and she had some really big haematomas on her head.

"It was a really sickening scene."

Ms Throsby said the teenage riders apologised and waited with her mother for emergency services to arrive.

Ms Throsby said she wanted the use of e-bikes restricted among children because it seemed "civically irresponsible" to allow unlicensed children to ride such heavy, fast bikes.

"These fat tyred e-bikes closely resemble motorbikes, and yet it's become completely normalised for them to be ridden by teenagers, often two on one bike … on the same paths as walkers, and often without helmets," she said.

"It feels inevitable that more injuries or even fatalities will occur if there isn't some change to legislation and enforcement of existing legislation."

The day after Ms Throsby was injured, NSW Police ran an operation in the region, interacting with 37 e-bike riders under new inspection laws.

In a statement, a spokesperson said they issued several fines and cautions, including 15 youth warnings.

A recent operation on Sydney's Northern Beaches saw 36 illegal e-bikes seized.

Safety concerns

In a statement, a Transport for NSW spokesperson said any serious injury on shared paths was concerning.

"E-bikes can provide a healthy, affordable and sustainable transport option, but bikes must be legal types, and riders must use them safely and follow the road rules," they said.

"On shared paths, riders must always give way to pedestrians."

Figures from the Sydney Children's Hospital Network show the number of children coming to hospital with e-bike injuries has risen by a third in the past year to 94. 

The NSW government earlier this year announced reforms including a power output enforcement of 250 watts, and motorised assistance being cut out at 25 kilometres an hour.  

But E-bike Safety Australia's Ben Horwood said the incident highlighted a need for better education.

"Young riders, particularly those without a driver's license, need to have mandatory education and also have accountability [by] having an ID tag on the back of a bike," he said.

Mr Horwood's company runs e-bike safety courses in 12 NSW high schools, including Bulli High School in the Illawarra.

He has called on the NSW government to mandate and fund the program in all high schools.

"A e-bike is a high-powered vehicle for a 12-year-old," he said.

"They haven't been taught how to ride it in 90 per cent of the cases and they have no understanding of road rules."

NSW Minister for Transport John Graham has been contacted for comment.

Ms Throsby said her mother was "in OK spirits" but it would take a long time to recover from the incident.

First published at ABC News, September 29 2026

Rod Stewart announces his retirement

Announcing his final tour, an emotional Rod Stewart thanked fans for his “extraordinary life”. AP PHOTO

London

Rod Stewart is retiring after more than 60 years on stage.

The 81-year-old Maggie May singer – who has scrapped a number of shows due to health problems – has announced he will quit life on the road for good after one final tour that will run from April until June 2027.

Stewart confirmed his plans in an emotional statement in which he thanked his fans for giving him such an “extraordinary life”.

“My dear friends, The time has come to say farewell to life on the road. After more than six decades, The Final Encore will most definitely be my last,” he wrote.

“I’ve been singing the music I love since I was 19 years old, and I’ve had the privilege of taking it around the world to all of you. It has given me a life beyond anything I could ever have imagined, and I hope I’ve given you some fond memories in return.

“So, may I take this opportunity to thank you for making this extraordinary life possible. I hope you’ll join me so I can thank you the best way I know how … with the music and one hell of a show. See you there.”

Stewart’s final tour – The Final Encore – kicks off in Dublin, Ireland on April 23.

He will perform in cities including Manchester, London, Berlin and Prague before wrapping the shows in Hannover, Germany on July 24.

Stewart has been on the road with his One Last Time tour since March, but pulled out of a number of concerts in June after suffering from an acute upper respiratory infection, laryngitis and vocal strain

He then cancelled more shows after undergoing heart surgery last month to allow himself time to recover.

His spokesperson said in a statement: “Doctors are pleased with his recovery, and Stewart is doing very well and has returned to his normal daily activities.

“On the advice of his doctors, he will take the next four weeks to recuperate and regain full fitness before returning to the stage. Unfortunately, this means he will be unable to continue his current tour dates.”

The Da Ya Think I’m Sexy? hit maker was said to have been “feeling better and very much on the mend”, and apologised to fans for cancelling his tour.

First published at Canberra City News, September 29, 2026

Håkan Hardenberger on giving life to new music

Legends

On ABC Classic FM

Presented by Mairi Nicolson

Many composers speak of an instant compulsion to write music for Håkan Hardenberger, and he says he's addicted to the whole experience of giving birth to new music. "I think I'm some sort of vampire. I need it to keep me alive. I couldn't just play things like the Hummel all the time, there's obviously something in the mental process of dealing with these new pieces that sustains me."

The Swedish virtuoso who’s been described as ‘the best trumpeter in the galaxy’ has inspired a vast new repertoire from composers like Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Brett Dean, HK Gruber, Peter Maxwell Davies and Sally Beamish.  Works that have extended the trumpet’s possibilities exponentially, and then some.

On Legends, Hardenberger also stresses that the trumpet can be poetic, as vulnerable and moving as a singing voice. He cites the famous Swedish tenor Jussi Björling as one of his childhood influences. “I always look for melody – no matter how avant-garde or complex the score. After all, isn’t that a basic human instinct?"

Hear the Håkan Hardenberger episode of Legends this Sunday, October 4 2026, at 8pm

First published at ABC Classic, September 29, 2026