This Is Your Life
Radio Times
23 September 1955
Radio Times This Is Your Life article
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Producing Life

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These Were Your Lives

a review of the first series


Eamonn Andrews


Yvonne Bailey

Eamonn Andrews, introducing This Is Your Life, is unassailably the one person in all Britain whose past has already been unravelled in full view of the television audience.


As the unsuspecting 'principal figure' when this American programme was first tried over here in July, he endured shocks and surprises enough to earn him absolution from any similar experience in future.


Like a psychiatrist who has himself been psycho-analysed, Eamonn Andrews is now entitled to summon up remembrance of things past for some other personality, famous or unknown, among the audience thronging the studio tonight.


The producer, Leslie Jackson, is sticking closely to the recipe propounded by the show's inventor, Ralph Edwards, the American television impresario who brought it to England during his recent vacation. The principal figure in the programme will have no idea that he or she has been chosen until invited to step on the stage.


The picture grows as, one by one, voices from the past, and the people themselves, crowd in on the subject to recall the experiences and emotions, some half-forgotten, of a lifetime.