of the era, the live television broadcasts meant that no record of the drama productions were kept outside of photographs, scripts and press reviews. The BBC Programme Organiser Cecil Madden later claimed that they had experimented with telerecording a production of The Scarlet Pimpernel, but were ordered by film director Alexander Korda to destroy the print as he felt it infringed his film rights. Despite the difficulties and challenges its production often presented, drama had become a central part of the BBC's television schedules; a BBC audience research survey conducted in 1937 found that 90% of those replying generally enjoyed the drama productions, a figure equalled only by outside broadcasts. In Christmas week 1938, drama accounted for fourteen of the twenty-two hours of programming broadcast. By the following year, drama programming had fifteen producers working on it, compared to nine for all other types of programmes combined. In 1939, the total audience for the BBC's programmes had grown to an estimated audience of 100,000 viewers, watching on 20,000 television sets. However, BBC television broadcasting ceased on 1 September 1939 in anticipation of World War II. The station remained off-air for the duration of the conflict. The British Government were afraid that the VHF transmission signals would act as a guiding beacon for German bombers targeting central London, and the technicians and engineers of the service would in any case be needed for war efforts such as the radar programme. The return of television and the 1950s BBC Television resumed broadcasting on 7 June 1946, and the service began in much the same way it had ceased in 1939, with many of the 1930s drama producers returning. In 1949 there was a major development in drama when Val Gielgud was made the new head of department, a position he had previously and successfully occupied at BBC Radio. Since producing the first television play in 1930, Gielgud had worked in television again, serving on attachment to the service at Alexandra Palace in 1939 and directing a half-hour adaptation of his own short story Ending It, starring John Robinson and Joan Marion and broadcast on 25 August 1939, less than a week before the service was placed on hiatus. Gielgud was an unpopular choice with many in the television service, with the channel's controller, Norman Collins, protesting that "Anything less than complete familiarity with all aspects of television production will mean... that the