← HistoryExtra podcast
HistoryExtra podcast
British TV history: everything you wanted to know
00:59:15
David Hendy answers listener questions on the history of television in Britain – from 1950s 'horror plays' to why early presenters were given electric shocks
Loading summary
Transcript44 lines
- [00:01]
Shopify Advertiser
This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Upgrade your business with Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet. Shop pay boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning fewer carts going abandoned and more sales going cha ching. So if you're into growing your business, get a commerce platform that's ready to sell wherever your customers are. Visit shopify.com to upgrade your selling today.
- [00:23]
Abercrombie Advertiser
Build your fit to the day with Abercrombie's newest denim drop. I'll tell you where to start. Abercrombie's 90s straight jean goes with any shirt from tees to sweater polos. Super versatile. Their loose and baggy jeans are more trend forward so I grab those when I go out with friends right now. Get 25% off on almost everything at Abercrombie offers valid in stores and online January 23, 2025 to January 28, 2025 in US and Canada. Exclusions apply as indicated online. Price reflects discount.
- [00:53]
Atlassian Advertiser
This episode is brought to you by Atlassian. Atlassian makes the team collaboration software that powers enterprise businesses around the world, including over 80% of the Fortune 500. With ATL Atlassian's AI powered software like Jira, Confluence and Loom, you'll have more time to do the work that matters. In fact, Atlassian customers experience a 25% reduction in project duration per year. Unleash the potential of your team@atlassian.com Atlassian.
- [01:22]
Jane Fonda
Bored with your boring cardio? Stop pedaling that snooze cycle to Nowheresville and try some cardio that's actually fun. Supernatural Fitness available on Meta Quest. Isn't that right Jane Fonda?
- [01:34]
Supernatural Fitness Advertiser
Cardio will never boring again Sweat to.
- [01:37]
Jane Fonda
The beat of thousands of chart topping songs inside stunning virtual landscapes.
- [01:42]
Supernatural Fitness Advertiser
Bet your stationary bike can't do that.
- [01:44]
Jane Fonda
Visit getsupernatural.com and join the next fitness revolution. Supernatural VR Fitness only on Meta Quest rated T4T.
- [01:56]
David Hendy
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. What were the first ever TV sets like? Why were early TV presenters given electric shocks? And what was behind the 1950s appetite for horror plays? In this everything you wanted to know episode, historian David Hendy joins Matt Elton to answer listener questions about a century of British tv, from the Quatermass experiment to Blue Peter. Together they explore how the medium reflects a rapidly changing society.
- [02:36]
Matt Elton
David, could you give us a very brief overview of what the broadcasting landscape was like in the years before television?
- [02:43]
Supernatural Fitness Advertiser
Yeah, and before is actually quite a tricky word when it comes to television, because in a way, all media have a kind of complicated story of emergence. So, you know, first of all, there's the idea of a medium, then there's the kind of working through and the invention of the technology, which is usually by lots of different people in lots of different places. And then there's the moment when it actually becomes a medium, something which is publicly available, publicly usable by large numbers of people. So if we take television just to get the dates right here, well, we could start at the end and say, well, the first regular so called high definition service in Britain was in 1936 when the BBC launched its service. But there'd been experimental television since the late 1920s. The technology had been worked out properly or fairly well in the mid-1920s. But go back to the 19th century and there are all sorts of experiments and theorizing, laboratory work on the idea of television and the dream of seeing things at a distance, if you like, projecting images through space is even older. The implication of that is, in one sense, television as an idea and as a technology is really developing at the same time as some other media. It just takes a bit longer to work out. Having said that, having said that, of course, if we're Talking about the 1920s and the 1930s, we're talking about a world of radio. Broadcasting means Radio. In 1922, the British Broadcasting Company, as it was at the beginning, was formed, a kind of cartel really, of all the main radio manufacturers. And in that the 14 years, if you like, between 1922 and the BBC's television service being launched in 1936, you've got the BBC establishing its monopoly, growing number of stations. A national institution. It becomes a national institution, especially under kind of the leadership of John Reith. It's dignified, it's professional, it's got a range of programs, it eventually has a choice of programmes, the national and the regional. So 1935, by the time we're on the eve of the BBC establishing its first regular television Service, you've got 98% of the population of the UK could in theory pick up a BBC radio service. Two thirds of British households or thereabouts have a license to listen to radio. And broadcasting means radio. Radio is a normal, central, taken for granted part of family life.
- [05:36]
Matt Elton
You alluded to there some of the complexities of what seems like quite an innocent question about the dawn of television. And I suspect that complexity might feed into the next question, which is from John Wilson on Facebook, who asks, I'd like to know about the various inventors. As I understand it, there were several efforts to develop a working model around the same sort of time. Also, he'd like to know about the drawbacks of those early images and what the broadcasters did to overcome them.
- [06:02]
Supernatural Fitness Advertiser
Fascinating question and a slightly complicated answer, because there is a complicated pre history and early history for television as a technology. And that's a history that takes in developments in France, in Germany, in Russia, in America as well as the UK. So you've got lots of people experimenting in the 19th century with the electrochemical effects of light on photosensitive material like selenium, for instance. There are people who talk about seeing by electricity. That's one of the kind of phrases that's used. So you've got Edmond Becquerel in France, who's working on the idea of transmitter screens. You've got George Carey in Boston, Massachusetts, who's working on the idea of scanning images. In Germany, you've got Paul Nipkoff, who's developing the idea of a scanning disk, something that kind of breaks up light rays. He calls it a. An electric telescope. That's what he sort of defines as what he's trying to achieve. A lot of these are more like testing lab theories, really, rather than anything practical. The closest we perhaps get to something which is sort of the future of television at this stage is Boris Rosing in Russia, who before the First World War, is using an early sort of cathode ray tube for something like television. He can't quite get enough amplification and power to make it work. In Britain you've got Campbell Swinton, who's working on similar ideas. But I mean, in all of these cases, no one's really thinking about television as a kind of domestic medium of entertainment. It's more like people are trying to develop the equivalent of what we would now call video calling, seeing by telephone. I suppose that one of the crucial figures, though, certainly in the British context, is John Logie Baird. And it's in 1924, 1925, that he's in. Has things on the south coast in a little attic room and he's lashing together a strange device. He's using kind of sealing wax and string to lash together an old tea chest and an empty biscuit box, hat boxes, a bit of cardboard, darning needles and some scrap timber all balanced on top of a washstand and then connected with a whole kind of tangle of wires. And after a lot of testing and adjustment, he manages to send a beam of light through a rapidly spinning disc punched with holes. And that allows a very, very simple image. It's the image of a silhouette of a Maltese cross. It's scanned, it's transmitted and it's displayed on a screen which he set up about two or three yards away. So it's pretty basic, but he's quite good at getting publicity and he wants funding and he attracts the attention of people like Harry Gordon Selfridge of the department store, who kind of, I think, sees an opportunity here for selling something and he invites Baird to demonstrate his equipment. In London, 1926, the first television set, it's called a televisor, goes on sale and the public are invited in to watch this device at work. It's really a kind of curiosity, a bit like a Victorian kind of magic lantern show, really. And now, meanwhile, out of vision, so to speak, not really getting the same public attention. There are scientists at EMI in America and Marconi in Britain who are taking up that original idea of the cathode ray tube, an entirely electronic system, as opposed to Baird's more mechanical system. And later that will be the approach that will take over. But at this stage, Baird and his technology is the one that takes off because it gets backing, it gets publicity. If we think about those early images, I mean, the question was about those early images as well. They were pretty grainy and flickery. So one of the things that Baird showed was a dummy's head. And someone who went to see it, in fact a BBC engineer, said it looked like this, a curiously ape like head swaying up and down in a streaky stream of yellow light, which wasn't very impressive even by 1932. The images were described as looking as if everything was in a heavy and persistent shower of rain. The scanning system was kind of really crude. So, you know, if you're performing in front of the camera, you had to sit very still in a darkened box to be blinded by a beam of light that was kind of furiously dancing over your face. And you had to wear curious makeup. The experimental transmissions had to make use of scarce radio wavelengths, and that meant that the image and the sound came separately, they weren't synchronised. You'd have to watch the image first and then listen to it later. And the screens were at best the size of a postcard. So, you know, this was tricky stuff. Now, what are the key factors here, the challenges that need to be overcome? First of all, bad technology uses medium wave frequencies, and those are already kind of occupied, thank you very much, by radio, and they set a limit to what can be done. So even if the image can be improved at the kind of camera end, there's a limit to what it will look like for the viewing public because of the kind of the wavelength that it's carried on. The number of lines here is the crucial thing. Baird's images at the beginning had 30 lines, which is not many. Earmar and Marconi, when they came to market with their cathode ray tube system, they leapt up to 405 lines. And now Baird, in a kind of last ditch attempt not to be left behind, upped his game and came up with a 240 line version. But you can still see that the line quality is not what we're used to today. And I think what's interesting in terms of overcoming these challenges is that the Post Office, which was regulating broadcasting in Britain, just laid down the law to the BBC and said, look, you're going to be obliged if you launch a television service to use both of these. You can't just get rid of the Baird system. So in the early days, 1936, when it launched its service, the BBC had to use both systems. It had to have one studio that used Baird, another studio that used EMI Marconi. And it has to swap days. Some days they'd broadcast with bed, some days they'd broadcast with EMI Marconi. And so the technology had a lot of kind of bumps at the beginning. The one thing I'd add to that, which is it's also about content. You know, people would not watch television, they would not kind of make the effort and spend the money if there wasn't anything worth watching. And I think a lot of the people who were in the BBC were most anxious about that. What could we do that would actually be worthwhile and get people to invest money in TV sets?
- [13:32]
Matt Elton
Let's get into that then, because that's a really good point. What were some of the early programs that were made and what would we, I suppose, make of them today?
- [13:39]
Supernatural Fitness Advertiser
One of the things that we'd have to remember is that there is, before the BBC gets going with its own service in 1936, there is this sort of period of experimental broadcasts that is a kind of almost hidden history of television programmes. So, you know, the Baird Company in their Longacre studio in Covent Garden, from the end of 1929, with a bit of help occasionally from the BBC, would have programs that would go out once or twice a week and they'd have comedians, they'd have singers, they'd have puppet shows, they'd had someone who would be drawing a cartoon live. And then when the BBC put in a bit more help and support after 1930, they would occasionally simulcast, if you like, a radio live show with a dance band and on one occasion, outside broadcast from the Epsom Derby. So they were quite ambitious in these early experimental days. And then in 1932, when Broadcasting House, new gleaming broadcasting house had been built for radio, the BBC decided it would hand over one of its basement studios for some experimental television work. And what happened then was that a lot of the performers and the celebrities and the stars who were coming into Broadcasting House to do something on radio would be hassled down into the basement and asked to do a quick turn in front of the camera. So you'd have ballet dancers, you'd have Josephine Baker, for instance, who would pop up, lots of performing animals, you know, boa constrictors, alligators, Sally the Seal, who, as I understand it, could play the saxophone as well as wiggle her flippers. And so you had lots of these random variety programs. And that feature feeds through to the BBC. So in November 1936, it starts its first regular television service. And variety shows of different sketches and performers, jugglers and singers and so on are bread and butter stuff for this service. There are interviews with people in the news, artists, health tips, fashion parades, cookery shows, home improvement advice, but also the ambition to try and get the cast of, say, a leading West End stage play to come up to Alexandra palace, where the television studios were, and do a scene from that play, and actually occasionally to stage a whole full cast play there in Alexandra Palace. So, you know, there was a full cast production of Cyrano de Bergerac from 1938, there was the Sunday play and 1937, the year before, full scale coverage of the coronation of King George vi. The cameras weren't allowed in Westminster Abbey for that coronation, but they were parked outside showing the procession. And I suppose if you had to choose one emblematic programme from that pre war period, it would probably be Picture Page. It was a live magazine show, a kind of chat show in many ways, the precursor of a show that we might recognize, like the one show now, lots and lots of different guests and items. How would they link it? They weren't quite sure. They came up with the idea of the Canadian actor Joan Miller, sitting at a kind of mock up of a telephone switchboard, switching people through to different guests, Switching you through now. And what the viewers didn't know, by the way, was that Joan Miller knew when to do this, because of course, everything was live. Knew when to do this by receiving a mild electric shock on her ankles that was sent by the studio Director what would we think now if we were to actually see them? And of course, seeing them is almost impossible because everything was live, not recorded. I think we'd be struck by. By the oddness. Obviously everything was live and therefore very often a bit ragged, a bit under rehearsed, cameras in the wrong place, lines fluffed and so on. We'd probably be struck by the fact it was very static. It was extremely hard to move cameras and to cut between them. It took a while to work out how to do that. And the acting and the performances would probably strike us as very stagey. This was a kind of generation of celebrities who'd been trained on the stage, they'd been trained to project, they weren't yet necessarily used to the intimacy of television. I think the thing that would feel less strange, quite familiar, I think, is the idea of an evening in front of the tv, because that evening spent in front of the tv. What we'd get is actually the kind of mix of programme genres that we're used to today. A bit of drama, a bit of light entertainment, a bit of variety, some interviews, a bit of topicality. I kind of think the one thing, though, in a way that would be missing, would be the amount of news and current affairs that we're used to on television today.
- [18:55]
Matt Elton
Which leads us nicely to our next question, which is from Gareth O'Connor on Threads, who asks, when did the concept of TV news bulletins first emerge?
- [19:04]
Supernatural Fitness Advertiser
Well, I mean, there had been news bulletins on BBC radio from the start, so there was a kind of model that television could work with, but it was a very limited model because at the beginning of radio, the BBC had been hobbled by the newspaper lobby. And that meant it was limited, extremely limited in what it could do in terms of news bulletins, really, just in the evening. Once newspapers had been sold, the BBC had to rely on news agency wires and so on. Didn't really have its own news team. That starts to happen in the 1930s, but only bit by bit. So when the regular BBC television service started in 1936, it kind of started in a rather backward way with news, a backward step by outsourcing it really entirely. There was no television news department, so what you had was an occasional 10 minute edition of British Movietone News that was just screened. Now jump forward to after the Second World War. By that stage, the BBC has a huge amount of journalistic experience of its own in the wartime, it's developed war correspondence, it had the war reporting unit, it's reported from all over the world. But Television still doesn't have its own separate news team. News at the BBC is operated by a kind of all powerful news division. It's ultra cautious, it's ultra sober and it's really keen to have a kind of consistency of. Of editorial tone and voice across the whole BBC. So the TV people up in Alexandra palace in Muswell Hill are pretty desperate really to have their own television service, something that's a bit more visually appealing as well as being up to date and informative. Actually, in 1948 they kind of take the leap and they come up with their own thing called Television Newsreel, which is short, it's lively, it's visual, but it's really done not by television journalists, but by the TV people's own film department. So it's visually interesting, it's kind of cinematic in terms of its short reports, but it's not necessarily journalistically up to date. And News Division over in Broadcasting House, anyway, are rather kind of cross about it. They intervene, they assert their own rights of control and then they replace it with something called News and Newsreel, which actually turns out to be kind of right dull, unsurprisingly. So in 1955, on the eve of ITV coming along, newsreaders on BBC television are still not appearing on screen. Newsreaders are only heard in voiceover, which is extraordinary. And I think the kind of, the crucial moment of change really comes in 1958-1960 when, and first of all, you've got Hugh Carlton Green becoming head of a new powerful news and Current affairs directorate. And he kind of blows away the cobwebs and gets rid of some of the kind of the more ultra cautious figures in News Division. And then when he's Director General, he kind of pushes that even further. Took a while to get there. So TV news bulletins, they emerged in stages.
- [22:28]
Matt Elton
You mentioned ITV there, which, which listeners outside of the UK may not be so familiar with, is one of the commercial competitors to the BBC that emerged. And I want to get into that a little bit more in a minute. Before we do, is there anything else we should say about the role of the Second World War and television within it that we've not discussed previously?
- [22:47]
Ryan Reynolds
Hey there, Ryan Reynolds here. It's a new year and you know what that means. No, not the diet resolutions. A way for us all to try and do a little bit better than we did last time year. And my resolution, unlike Big Wireless, is to not be a raging and raise the price of wireless on you every chance I get. Give it a try@mintmobile.com switch $45 upfront.
- [23:08]
Atlassian Advertiser
Payment required equivalent to $15 per month new customers on first 3 month plan only taxes and fees Extra Speed slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited. See mintmobile.com for details.
- [23:18]
Jane Fonda
Bored with your boring cardio? Stop pedaling that snooze cycle to Nowheresville and try some car that's actually fun. Supernatural Fitness available on Meta Quest Isn't that right Jane Fonda?
- [23:30]
Supernatural Fitness Advertiser
Cardio will never be boring again.
- [23:32]
Jane Fonda
Sweat to the beat of thousands of chart topping songs inside stunning virtual landscapes.
- [23:37]
Supernatural Fitness Advertiser
Bet your stationary bike can't do that.
- [23:39]
Jane Fonda
Visit getsupernatural.com and join the next fitness revolution. Supernatural VR fitness only on Meta Quest.
- [23:46]
Supernatural Fitness Advertiser
Rated team for Team Hablas Espanol Spritz.
- [23:49]
David Hendy
To Joyce Comedy if you've heard that.
- [23:52]
Babbel Advertiser
Sound from Babbel before, I bet you do. Babbel is the science backed language learning app that actually works with quick 10 minute lessons handcrafted by over 200 language experts. Babbel gets you on your way to speaking a new language in just a few weeks with over 16 million subscriptions sold and a 20 day money back guarantee. Just start speaking another language with Babbel right now. Up to 55% off your Babbel subscription at babbel.com Spotify podcast spelled B A B-B-E-L.com Spotify podcast rules and Restrictions may.
- [24:18]
Supernatural Fitness Advertiser
Apply well, I think one of the things that's actually really interesting about television and the Second World War is that certainly in Britain it didn't exist. So what happened is that on Friday 1st September 1939, so just before war is declared, 10am, the people who are on duty in Alexandra palace get a message from Broadcasting House saying, you've got to switch off transmission at the end of this morning's schedule. So at 10 minutes past midday, just as a Mickey Mouse cartoon is finishing up, television shuts down and it's not reopened again until the 7th of June 1946. So almost a year or over a year after VE Day. So in many ways the Second World War is a kind of interregnum for television. I would say, though that's not quite the whole story. Now one of the reasons that television is closing down is the BBC knows that its staff are going to be redeployed for the war effort. They're going to be going off to the services or the intelligence agencies and so on. So its staffing is going to be depleted. A lot of the engineers from television have Already, by the 1st of September gone to the RAF to help with radar. Another reason is about transmitters. Now, there was a huge anxiety in the lead up to the outbreak of war that broadcasting transmitters would help Luftwaffe pilots navigate their way to bombing targets. Now, radio had found a way around this by having a kind of regional, pooled network system of transmitters. Television just had one transmitter, it was at Alexandra palace, so you couldn't fool the enemy about its location. It was a risk. So that was one of the fundamental kind of defence reasons for shutting down television. Now, as it happened, a small team of BBC engineers did actually stay behind and kept things ticking over. And the reason for that is that they helped the RAF to use the Alexandra palace television transmitter as part of British air defences. The RAF and the BBC had been working on a way of intercepting the Luftwaffe's electronic navigation system. And what they did was they managed to intercept them, pass the navigation information through their own transmitters before sending them back to the Luftwaffe pilots. They called it bending the beam. And what it meant was that the pilots were given just slightly misleading information about where they were and therefore were possibly going to miss their targets. So this was going on with lots of BBC transmitters during the wartime. I mean, when television did restart Then in 1946, that is an interesting moment in itself, because across a lot of Europe, a lot of countries are pausing their television efforts. They're waiting for higher definition technology to come along. The BBC decide that it's actually more important to just get going. And to do that, they're going to stick with the old pre war technology because this is a period of post war austerity as well. So there's not much money around to invest. So the BBC is sort of trading off different priorities here. It wants to get a service up and running, but it's going to be a service which actually is going to take quite a while to kind of spread and establish itself after the war.
- [28:03]
Matt Elton
So to return to the point you made about the founding of ITV, does the formation of this new channel reflect TV's desire to keep up with a changing population, with changing demographic shifts? And are there other ways in which television as a medium attempted to do that?
- [28:21]
Supernatural Fitness Advertiser
I think that television, I mean, especially in the hands of the BBC, which, you know, it was until, until 1955, had this kind of question hanging over it, which was, should the BBC follow public taste or should it lead public taste? And the kind of answer it usually came up with was, well, a bit of both. But that, of course raised all sorts of questions that, you know, when public Taste. When society is changing, where are you in that change? Are you merely reflecting change? What if it's change of a kind that you don't like? So the art of being a broadcaster in many ways is to constantly ask these questions, to be full of doubt. Now, in the post war period, in the run up to the arrival of itv, television coincides with the creation of new towns, the spread of the suburbs, and the idea that television can be a kind of a handmaiden, if you like, just as radio had been, of a kind of blissful family life. But there's this worry that as television spreads, and it does spread slowly, we've got new transmitters, you know, at the beginning, just one transmitter in London, but then, you know, 1949, there's a transmitter in Sutton Coalfield. So television comes to the Midlands, then there's a transmitter in Hull Moss. So television comes to the north of England, then Scotland, then Wales, the West country and so on. And so there's this idea, an anxiety, if you like, that television is threatening distinctive regional cultures. So that's one of the debates that takes off the spectre of sameness, of homogenisation and the fear that television is going to create a kind of a whole nation now of kind of passive individuals. There's an interesting insight here from Richard Hoggett, whose Uses of literacy, published in 1957, is quite interesting. Now, Hoggett, at this stage when he wrote that, doesn't yet own a television set. But that doesn't stop him from passing judgment. He talks about TV viewers dead from the eyes downward. He talks about an endless flux of the undistinguished and the valueless. Now, I would say that television people at this point are thinking really hard about how do you reflect regional differences in identities and tastes? And, you know. So, for instance, in 1951, when the whole MOSS transmitter starts, you have a kind of a celebratory set of programs. You get a variety gala from London, but you also get a music hall night from Leeds with, you know, Gracey Fields and brass bands and so on. You get. Get cookery programs, but you also get ballet, you get piano recitals and so on. So the BBC is constantly trying to think about different tastes, different regions, different classes. But it's also attached to the idea of universalism. In other words, it likes the idea that what it's about is bringing the best of everything to everyone, that everyone should have access to the best of everything. So it doesn't want to abandon the idea of universalism altogether. Now, one of the Things that it's grappling with, as well as regionalism and class and so on, is about a Britain that's becoming much more ethnically and culturally diverse as well, accelerated by immigration from the Caribbean and from the Indian subcontinent. And you'd have to say that the response of the BBC was pretty mixed to that. It's not that it ignored the issue of ethnic diversity altogether. It does investigate racism, for instance. It does have really kind of profoundly interesting dramas on tv, like A Man from the sun that was broadcast in 1956, a kind of insight into the life of Caribbean immigrants trying to make their life in London. But very often the BBC, an overwhelmingly white, middle class institution, is thinking of this as a problem, a problem to be solved. And it's only really in 1965 that it actually starts to do programmes specifically for immigrants. So it starts with Make Yourself At Home, which was for immigrants from India and Pakistan, well received, well liked. But its message was essentially one of integration. It's more about what they, the immigrants can learn about us rather than what we can learn about them. So it's, you know, the tone is a little bit kind of awkward. And I suppose the classic example of where the BBC was getting it wrong in terms of, you know, demographic change was the Black and White Minstrel show. You know, it started in 1958. There were already people of color, plentiful voices in Britain. To say white people blacking up that minstrelsy tradition, if you like, is not acceptable. But here's a program that continues until 1978, which is quite extraordinary, which is.
- [33:33]
Matt Elton
A date that means that listeners to this podcast may be familiar with that programme. Some of them less problematic, I suppose. Example of programming that listeners may also have memories of is children's programming. Are there specific examples that you think are particularly revealing or emblematic?
- [33:51]
Supernatural Fitness Advertiser
I think the answer to that would be it would be different depending on our age. Right? I mean, you know, different generations have a nostalgia for the children's programs of their childhood quite naturally. So, you know, people growing up in the 50s would probably go gooey at the memory of extraordinary kind of puppet shows. Bill and Ben, the wooden tops and emblematically, I suppose, Andy Pandemic, you know, which was first screened in 1950, that floppy hat with the pom poms, the baggy striped rompersuit, the jerky walk, the strings that were just a little bit too visible and it was very unspectacular and it was very cosy and it was very comforting. But actually, what's interesting as a BBC children's program was that there was a kind of seriousness of thought behind even Andy Pan. The idea was that it was perfectly judged for the average three year old, that it wasn't about passively viewing, you know, viewers, little viewers were encouraged to join in, to clap, to stamp, to stand up, to sit down, to be active. Jump forward to the 60s, you've got play school, playful, spontaneous, a little bit messy around the edges for slightly older children, Crackerjacks, which I think is kind of emblematic in a different way. It's broadcast just. It starts just before the launch of itv and it's clearly a response to itv, the BBC trying to kind of do children's programs that were maybe a bit less worthy and a bit more exciting. It's really a variety show for children, comedy competitions, live audience, fairly frenetic kind of pace. Jump forward to the 1980s and I think perhaps one of the emblematic programs then was actually a series that started in 1978 and that's Grange Hill, which in many ways is a soap opera. It's a credible soap opera that tackles the full range of social issues for children. You know, family breakdown, bullying, drugs. It's a pretty realistic portrait of secondary school social life, really. And I think in many ways they're all emblematic of a BBC that regarded children not just as future consumers, but as citizens in the making, if you like. And if they were citizens in the making, they were entitled to the kind of the full service, the rich mix of programs that adults had in miniature. So there would be drama, there would be entertainment, there would be variety, there would be wildlife programs, there would be news in things like Newsround and so on. And if we think of a series that spans several generations, perhaps the most emblematic of all is probably something like Blue Peter and that starts in 1958. It's a magazine show that features toys and games and guests and film reports and stories and so on. It's got presenters who we kind of come to regard as almost members of the family. For me, for my generation, it was Valerie Singleton and John Noakes and Peter Purvis. For other people of other generations, it would be a different set of presenters. For all of us, it's probably the pets. And those pets were really important. They weren't just incidental, they were there as surrogates for children who didn't have their own pets at home, like me. And this was a series that was meant to be empowering. It was simple food recipes, things that you could make with that famous sticky back Plastic. And when they ran charity appeals, it was a way of kind of interesting the viewers in the issues of the world and allowing them to try and improve the world, to change the problems of the world without actually having to have money. So, you know, it was milk bottle tops and stamps and so on. So the relationship with the viewers and the design of the program was both, you know, entertaining but infused, I think, still with BBC value. So even in that age where, you know, ITV comes along, programmes for children that we associate with the BBC have a slightly different flavour still from itv.
- [38:10]
Matt Elton
I think a subject about which we've had a couple of questions is the relationship between television and the world of politics. Are there any specific political episodes that you think shaped TV as a medium? Or I suppose the relationship between politicians and broadcasters?
- [38:27]
Supernatural Fitness Advertiser
I mean, there are so many moments where, you know, there's a row between politicians and broadcasters. War is often the occasion for these rows to become especially heated. And we can think of the Falklands or the Iraq War more recently in America, possibly one of the examples would be the Vietnam War, which was sometimes thought of as the living room war. It brought into people's living rooms through television the failures of the American military campaign and the strength of public opinion against the Vietnam War. So war is particularly important, I suppose, in the British context. I'd probably just choose two slightly different examples. The first would be the suez crisis of 1956. So here's a moment where the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, has come up with a plan, with the collusion of of France and Israel to provoke a military attack on Egypt and then to occupy the Canal Zone. Now it's accepted even by the Prime Minister and the Government, that television needs to cover politics. What isn't yet settled in 1956 is who exactly controls the coverage, who will speak, when will they speak? What are they allowed to say? Say politicians believe it's very much still the party machines that decide this. They kind of just tell the broadcasters this person is speaking about this subject. There's also a kind of curious 14 day rule where broadcasters are not supposed to cover any issues that are due to be debated in the next fortnight in Parliament. And that's a rule that's sort of reinforced by the Conservative government in 1955. Now that's the context in which on Saturday 3rd November 1956, Eden goes on television with a Prime Ministerial broadcast to justify his action. And it's immediately clear that not just public but political opinion at Westminster is divided, very, very bitterly divided by his actions. The BBC felt its. It was its duty to reflect that difference of opinion. The Labour leader, Hugh Gaitskill, wanted, as we would now think quite naturally, a right of reply to Anthony Eden. Eden then insists that wartime conditions now applied, that the BBC had a duty to support the government and even threatened effectively to take over the BBC. And the BBC called the government's bluff. To cut a long story short, Gaitskill gets his broadcast. So the BBC kind of pushes and is pushed, almost kind of surprises itself into a more confident position, asserting the broadcaster's right, if you like, to decide for itself what could and could not be reported. So that's a specific interest. The second example I'd give is not an incident, but a person, and that's Robin Day. Now, Robin Day, as an interviewer, wasn't the first person on television to subject public figures to what Harold MacMillan called the hot, pitiless, probing eye of television. But Robin Day deals with politicians, you know, in election programs and panorama and so on. He very quickly establishes a reputation for being utterly forensic in his approach, if not abrasive in his approach. And I think what's interesting about it is that in many ways he's emblematic of a moment where the television studio becomes the crucible of public political debate. It moves from Westminster because, of course, this is a time when Parliament is not televised. So the TV studio is where politics starts to happen and politicians have to think about how they perform on television very, very seriously in a way which I think they'd sort of taken for granted and rather neglected until that point.
- [42:48]
Matt Elton
If we were to zoom out and have a look at the shifts in genre and I suppose the popularity of those across time? Are there particular moments in which particular genres were having their heyday? Can we trace, for instance, when soap or science fiction had a particular moment in the sun, if you like?
- [43:06]
Supernatural Fitness Advertiser
Well, I mean, let's just take those two, then, and let's go to the mid-1950s. There was a distinct fashion for what people at the time called horror plays on television. Crime thrillers, murder mysteries, but also, perhaps above all, and especially science fiction. And I suppose the great symbolic program from this period is 1953, the Quatermass experiment, which, I mean, in plot terms, it's kind of fairly basic. You know, a space rocket has somehow got a bit lost. It comes crashing to Earth. Of its three astronauts, only one survives, but he's been infected by some kind of alien life form and mutate horribly. It's a coming together at a particular moment of a really talented team and they work together to produce something that is genuinely new in the sense that most of the time, up till now, drama on TV has been about a single play. Here is a six part serial written especially for television, well written especially for television. And so it becomes a kind of weekly appointment to view you, you have to wait for the next week. It's a cliffhanger and so on. And it's got elements of live because essentially it's still being performed live in the studio. But there are also filmed inserts and those filmed inserts are quite cinematic. They have kind of tracking, they have movement, they have crossfades, the tempo keeps changing and so on. And I suppose that kind of science fiction that was embodied in the Crater Mass experiment tapped into a kind of post war anxiety about the Cold War and about the atomic bomb, that threat of invasion that was hanging over us, that sense of the danger of infection from unknown sources and so on. And it really did kind of encourage a whole series of follow ons with that model, that model of the multi part drama series that gets under our skin. And of course science fiction at that time was the perfect vehicle in many ways for imagining an imminent other world. Now the other example you posed was soap. And I suppose we talk about the 1960s here. I think. I suppose the moment is probably Coronation street, which is broadcast from 1960 from Granada, which, which incidentally Tony Warren did offer to the BBC originally when it was called Florizel street and the BBC said it's not really for us, so they missed the boat on that one and obviously it becomes a kind of long running hit. I think what's interesting about it is not so much the series itself, but the effect that these kind of programmes have on drama more broadly. So, you know, think of something like zed cars, another 1960s program, which is really about a northern police force. It's set in a northern police force, but the fact that it's police is almost incidental. This is about ordinary, messy lives, about relationships and so on. So it seems to me that the 1960s is the time when the soap opera ethos, if you like, infuses drama more generally and energises it in many.
- [46:39]
Matt Elton
Ways to start to draw us to a close. Little string music on threads asks why was TV considered lowbrow in comparison to radio and books and arguably still is in some people's opinion.
- [46:53]
Supernatural Fitness Advertiser
Yeah, I think, I mean, I'm not sure if there's a simple, straightforward, singular answer to this. I think there are several factors here and most of these factors are More about kind of, you know, myth than reality. I mean, I think that one of them is that radio people, and of course, radio was there before television, so they established the rules, if you like, in Britain. They venerated the voice. It was unpolluted by image and therefore it was more about ideas and about thinking. Television, by contrast, needs to show, right? It needs to be visual, and in some sense the visual is always perceived to be slightly distracting from the purity of the idea. So I think that's one idea that lurks in the background. There was also, and this is even more a myth than reality about the culture behind the scenes in the interview industry. You know, radio for many, many years, was an industry that tended to recruit from the universities and sometimes just the top universities or the literary world and so on. Television, even right at the beginning, was recruiting a bit more from showbiz. So, you know, it's a caricature, but an increasingly false caricature. But there is that kind of cultural difference behind the scenes. Something else, I think is competition. In addition, BBC Radio didn't really have any competition from commercial radio until the early 1970s, except competition with the television medium. BBC Television had competition with ITV after 1955, and therefore it's involved in a ratings battle in a way that radio never was. And the BBC cares about ratings. It cares about it because it wants to reach as many people as possible. It wants to have an influence. It's there to try and change the world, to introduce the greatest good to the greatest number. That's its ethos. And it also cares about ratings because it has to justify the license fee. If it's asking everyone to pay, it has to appeal to everyone, or at least enough of everyone to justify the license fee. So ratings mattered. And that inevitably has an effect on television. It nudges it into a slightly more popular direction than radio. I think perhaps the last thing to maybe kind of bring into this is the broad nature of the television audience. Radio, especially after the Second World War, was kind of almost organised into silos, if you like. First of all, it was the home, the light, and the third, different sort of taste communities, if you like. And more recently, radios 1, 2, 3 and so on. And that allows the audience to select the radio station it's comfortable with to expose itself to what it's familiar with. Television, for a large chunk of its history in Britain has just had one or two channels, and that means that viewers, if you like, have been exposed to the kind of stuff that's not for them. And I think that all of those things have come together to kind of create what I think is still a kind of misleading impression of television being low brow in comparison to radio. My last sort of thought on this interesting question is that there are plenty of people inside the BBC and I'm thinking here perhaps of someone like Hugh Weldon, a great impresario of television in the 50s and 60s, who really rejected the whole idea that there was low brow and high brow in television. His watchword was this. The BBC is about making the good popular and the popular good.
- [50:39]
Matt Elton
And recent years, of course, have seen a series of rapid upheavals, including the Internet and streaming, to the world of television. Do you think that we've witnessed over the past decade or so the most dramatic period of development in TV's history, or are there others that compare?
- [50:54]
Supernatural Fitness Advertiser
Well, of course, as the old saying goes, it's perhaps too early to tell, but I mean, yes, I mean, clearly there have been huge, huge changes as a result of the Internet and streaming and so on. That notion of the television being the box in the corner of the living room for a start, is challenge. There it was a piece of furniture, part of the family coming together for a shared family experience. Now we are watching a lot of stuff on our mobile phones. It's a much more individualized experience. What else has changed? Well, the notion of, of a schedule, an evening's viewing that's been carefully curated by someone. Now we're time shifting, we build our own schedule, we jump between genres and channels and so on. The dominance of those big established broadcasters like the BBC, that's been challenged. The reality is companies like Netflix really are dominating and they have a huge amount of money. And that for one thing, is driving up production costs. That's actually a real challenge for a public service broadcaster like the BBC, for instance, which has had its income pretty well frozen by and large for the last few years. It has to think very, very carefully about where it puts its eggs. I think the kind of longer term question, perhaps the most interesting question creatively is, and it's really hard to answer that right now, is what is the effect on the kind of the art and the craft of the medium making television programs, the language, the grammar, the style, the narrative techniques, you know, what is the effect of kind of binging on box sets and all these other things? So I think that's something that we have to keep looking at and asking. It's clearly going to have an influence. There's a kind of implicit question, though, which is, is this unprecedented Perhaps in terms of technology, yes, but in terms of the culture of television, I think it's really important to kind of think about the late 1950s and the 1960s as being a seminal moment in television, especially in Britain. Not exclusively in America as well, I think, but in Britain you've got Hugh Carlton Green taking over as director general in 1960 and he's someone who wants to kind of, as he put it, open the wind, throw them open, blow the fresh air through Broadcasting House. He wants program makers to sometimes shock the audience. He creates television which really for the first time in Britain captures the spirit of the age. And he's helped BY that, by BBC2 coming along. So the BBC has an extra channel. Not everything has to appeal to everyone. You can have a choice. You've got extra license fee revenue coming in, especially after color TV starts. So there's more money, you can take more risks, you can lavish productions around. You've got the building of Television Centre which opens. So there's a kind of feel of optimism. And that feel of optimism about money and support and resources feeds into kind of creativity, I think. And this is the era of, of the Wednesday Play, play for today. You know those seminal examples, Kathy Come Home, up the Junction and so on that have immediacy and social relevance that actually set out to be socially committed to try and kind of effect a change in policy that become appointments to view and apart from anything else, become an extraordinary source of patronage and support to a new generation of writers and directors who are nurtured in BBC television in the 1960s and go on to work in cinema and film. People like Ken Loach for example. So I think that we shouldn't just answer the question about rapid upheavals by focusing on technology. We also have to think about kind of culture, the culture of television more broadly.
- [55:03]
David Hendy
That was David Handy, Emeritus professor in Media and Cultural History at the University of Sussex. David is the author of the BBC A People's History which is published by Profile Books. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Jack Bateman.
- [55:23]
J
Be honest, when's the last time you had a homemade meal? We get it between meetings, workout classes and the kids after school sports, who's got time to cook? That's where HelloFresh comes in. No matter how busy you again, Hellofresh has everything you need to get an easy home cooked meal on the table. With flavor packed recipes like Parmesan Herb Crusted Salmon. You'll be filling your kitchen with the cozy aromas of a homemade meal in no time. So go ahead. Try HelloFresh. It's homemade made easy. Learn more at hellofresh.
- [55:52]
Supernatural Fitness Advertiser
Com.