The Birth of Television

Lecture

The Birth of Television

The BBC had first experimented with television before the Second World War. In 1936 it launched a television service, based in a decaying Victorian building in Alexandra Palace north London. The team who went to work there were affectionately know as “the fools on the hill” - the phrase reveals what BBC Radio broadcasters thought of the new medium – not much!

Many of the original technicians and producers came from the film industry. Their optimism is nicely captured in a phrase used by Gerald Cock, Director of Television, in the Radio Times of 23 October 1936. He said “I believe viewers would rather see an actual scene of a rush hour at Oxford Circus directly transmitted to them than the latest in film musicals costing £100,000.”

Whether he was right the BBC would have to wait until after the war to discover. The Alexandra Palace operation was closed down as soon as war began and the BBC did not broadcast television again until June 1946.

SLIDE – The Birth of Television

The service it launched in this first year of peace and majority Labour government was as limited as the pre-war version on which it was based. It came on air at three in the afternoon on weekdays and at five on Sundays. It reached an audience of 25,000 exclusively middle-class households in the London region. The signal was not available anywhere else and television sets were very expensive.

An expanded service was not offered until 1949 – when the English Midlands got television for the first time. The North of England was ‘switched on’ in 1951.

Many of the programmes were the ones the BBC had pioneered in 1936. Several of the presenters were veterans of the Alexandra Palace experience. Including

SLIDE - Jasmine Bligh/Joan Gilbert

Television was still very much a rarity. In 1949 two thirds of the population had never seen a television set – let alone owned one. Radio remained the dominant popular medium. Techniques were very basic – so, for example, televised plays were usually just stage productions performed live in front of cameras.

News involved an invisible presenter reading a script which was illustrated with still photographs.

Such dull fare did little to convince people that a television set was worth buying. It took a major public spectacle to do that – one that millions of Britons longed to watch but knew they could not attend.

This was the coronation of 1953.

(SLIDE – 3)

The Coronation appealed to the BBC’s sense of itself as a cherished and respectable British institution. It invested heavily in technology and took immense care to ensure that it could cover the ceremony meticulously and at length.

Watching the young Queen Elizabeth II formally elevated to the office of Monarch appealed to the British people too. We have seen how the Royal Family was depicted during the War years as the crowned head of a national family united in common purpose. This role as symbolic leader and unifier of a nation facing evil – and emerging triumphant – had done a great deal to repair damage to the royal family inflicted by the abdication crisis.

Now the public yearned to see live images of the Queen. The figures tell the story.

(REFER to SLIDE 3 – Licence holders and viewing figures)

It was a festival of pomp and ceremony well calculated to cheer a nation still emerging from post war austerity.

(SLIDES 4 + 5)

The BBC made sure that viewers enjoyed it. They deployed their top presenters – including the great Richard Dimbleby, the former radio man who had covered the liberation of Belsen concentration camp. For many viewers this was the first time they had seen moving images of a man whose voice was familiar to millions for his work as a radio correspondent.

(SLIDE 6 – Dimbleby and Wilmot)

And the effect was lasting. People who had rented TV sets for the big day decided that they liked them and decided to keep them afterwards. Millions more watched a big event on television for the first time and resolved to buy a set when they could afford one.

The next big development in British television came about as a direct result of the election – two years before the coronation, in 1951 – of a new conservative government. Exhausted and frustrated by the austerity and continued rationing of food (bread story) imposed by Clement Attlee’s great reforming Labour Government, the electorate decided to trust Labour’s great innovations – including the NHS, the welfare state, council housing and nationalised industries – to Churchill’s Conservatives.

This was not as mad as it might sound. The Conservatives had been broadly persuaded by Labour’s success in 1945 that policies such as universal health care, unemployment benefit and state subsidised housing were immensely popular. Instead of promising to repeal them – as it might have done in the 1930s – the
Conservative Party promised to manage Labour’s welfare state better.

But some Conservatives retained their zeal for free-market solutions. Among them was Selwyn Lloyd MP.

First a bit of background

The 1945 Labour Government has commissioned Sir William Beveridge, the architect of the welfare state, to write a report on the future of the BBC. Though critical of the corporation – which he regarded as secretive, self-satisfied and monopolistic – Beveridge came down firmly against the alternative: American style commercial television funded by advertising.

Most of the British establishment – including the majority of Conservative MPs – were similarly hostile. Lord Reith, the man who had created the BBC, compared commercial broadcasting to bubonic plague. Hostility to what was regarded as crude, materialist, populism united right and left. The left hated American television because it served the interests of profit-making capitalists. The right usually despised it for replacing high culture and serious news with popular entertainment shows i.e. what we have come to call dumbing down.

This loathing of independent, commercially funded broadcasting was shared by bishops, university academics, trade unions and most of the national newspapers. A National Television Council – chaired by Christopher Mayhew, a former minister in Attlee’s government – insisted that commercial television would be a national disaster that would “vulgarise, bowdlerize and coarsen,” British life.

SLIDE: The Horror!

The establishment consensus was boosted during the Coronation when, to squeals of outraged horror, American broadcaster NBC broadcast advertisements involving its mascot, a chimp called J. Fred Muggs, during coverage of the service in Westminster Abbey. If the juxtaposition of a hirsute simian with our own dearly beloved monarch was not awful enough – and too many it was obscene – the Americans had gone one worse by advertising deodorant during the ritual anointment of the new Queen: simply dreadful.

Selwyn Lloyd disagreed

SLIDE – Back to Lloyd

Selwyn Lloyd backed a dissenting minority version of the Beveridge report which favoured commercial television. He led a group of backbench MPs who promoted the cause and won enthusiastic support from advertising agencies and manufacturers of television sets. This group won support from Norman Collins, a former controller of BBC Television and Lord Woolton, a Conservative moderniser who had helped to refresh his parties campaigning techniques in time for the 1951 election.

On the Conservative benches in the House of Commons a new breed of MP – those with backgrounds in manufacturing industry, advertising, law and banking rather than hereditary wealth – saw the potential of commercial broadcasting. They benefited from Churchill’s reluctance to defend the BBC monopoly.

The act permitting commercial TV was passed in 1954. It specified that advertising would be in spots – i.e. interludes between programmes – and required commercial broadcasters to maintain strict standards of editorial independence and impartiality.

ITV launched on 22 September 1955.

(SLIDE – The Launch of ITV)

ITV revolutionised news coverage – and confronted the BBC with a stark challenge.

When the Independent Television News service (ITN) first went on air, the BBC was still using its staid and antiquated formula of an unseen voice – often that of an actor – reading a stilted script illustrated by monochrome still pictures. ITN introduced journalists as news-readers. It allowed them to write their own scripts. Above all it put them on screen where the viewers could see and get to know them.

(SLIDE – ITN’s First Presenter Christopher Chataway)

Another early ITN presenter was Robin Day – who went on to become one of the best known current affairs presenters in British broadcasting.

ITN was bound by the same rules as the BBC, but it interpreted them in a more creative way – using short films brilliantly and covering stories the BBC ignored. It attracted a huge audience.

So did ITV entertainment. Game shows such as Beat the Clock

(SLIDE – Beat the Clock)…and yes that is Bruce Forsyth

And Sunday night at the London Palladium

(SLIDE – Entertainment for the Masses)

…changed British life fundamentally. ITV gave the public what the public wanted – as opposed to what the establishment thought was good for them – and the public liked it.

(SLIDE – The Impact of ITV)

Numbers alone don’t tell the whole story. Peoples topped going out to pubs, football matches, theatres etc. and stayed home to watch television instead. In the winter of 1957-58 an ordinary Sunday evening might see 50% of the adult population huddled around what was soon colloquially known as ‘the box.’

Class divide/snobbery ITV for the working class/ BBC for the educated middle class (I can remember playground arguments about this. My parent thought ITV was bad for me. They thought it would “rot my brain.” They did not forbid me from watching it, but they made it plain that they disapproved. At my primary school in Lincoln in 1969 I discovered that this encouraged many of my contemporaries to conclude that I was mad and probably horribly posh. Many people of my generation remember similar experiences.

The success of ITV – and the BBC’s response which was to adapt and compete – meant British audiences were soon well served by two channels. TV dinners became popular, newspapers began to write about television just as, before the war, they had learned to write about radio.

Something else changed too. Politicians had to learn to use the new medium. There was no point in ignoring it. Politics had entered the television age.

(SLIDE – Nixon/Kennedy) Explain.

SLIDE – Harold Macmillan – fireside chats etc.)

Reading – Dominic Sandbrook – Never had it So Good. (Handout)

Curran and Seaton – Chapter entitled The Fall of the BBC in Power without Responsibility.

Andrew Marr – Chapter entitled Into the Crowded Air, in My Trade.