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■ Introduction 88
■ Collecting the evidence 89
■ Inventing television technologies 92
■ television institutions 94
■ reception contexts 97
■ British approaches to commercial television 99
■ Professional cultures in a ‘Golden Age’ 101
■ Programmes and forms 103
■ the ten most popular programmes in March 1958 104
■ the ten most popular programmes in september 1964 104
■ the ten most popular programmes in november 1974 105
■ the ten most popular programmes in november 1984 105
■ Case study: a history of British youth television 107
■ summary of key points 110
■ Bibliography 110
DOI: 10.4324/9781315619675-5
4
10.4324/9781315619675-5
Television Histories
Television Histories
Introduction
This chapter discusses ways of approaching the history of television, focus- ing on Britain but with a comparison with and contrast to other countries.
Television Studies has historically focused on television in national contexts.
But the assumption that programmes would be viewed and discussed by a sig- nificant proportion of a national population is now proving less secure than before. The three factors that have given rise to this change in the nature of television are:
■ The proliferation of channels and streaming platforms
■ The presence of several television sets and a range of viewing devices in a single household
■ The increasing control of television production and distribution by corpora- tions and institutions whose activities cross national boundaries
So it is important in thinking about television now to understand that many of the theoretical and critical approaches to the medium derive from a television history that is undergoing significant change. While the methods of analysis proposed by Television Studies in the past remain significant and useful, it is important to pay attention to the present and the possibilities for television that are being shaped for the future. Although this chapter aims to provide informa- tion about some moments in the development and change in television across the period from the 1930s to the 2000s, it is concerned less with providing a consistent story and a set of key facts, than with how the history of television can be approached critically. This is because the historical study of any subject involves making assumptions and value judgements about what is important, how links between events and processes are explained, and what the implica- tions of a history might be. New scholarship can also push us to think again about television history and whose stories were privileged. History is always a process of narration, which makes sense by including some information and excluding other information, by linking causes and effects and by implying a direction to the ways that events unfold. So this chapter does tell parts of several stories, but tries to suggest that the history of television can be told in many alternative ways.
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Collecting the evidence
Histories of television face numerous problems in relation to the evidence on which they are based. Relatively inexpensive video cassette recording became available only in the early 1980s. Until that time, studying television from the past relied on gaining access to the archives of material held by television broad- casting institutions themselves. Only in the past few decades could students and academics studying television collect examples to work on easily. Yet much tel- evision of the past is also becoming less commercially available in the age of streaming, compared to the archive availability offered in the DVD era. Even when massive libraries of DVDs or digital files can be assembled by interested individuals, by academic institutions or in national archives, it is not easy to know how these resources should be used. When there is plenty of stored televi- sion from the past to look at, what principles should be brought to bear in order to decide what to study? Perhaps whole days or even weeks of the output of a particular channel or channels should be studied. Perhaps programmes of a simi- lar genre broadcast on different channels should be collected, having decided how the boundaries of a genre should be defined. Perhaps the most popular pro- grammes in a given month or a year should be analysed, on the basis of the audi- ence ratings that show which programmes were watched by the most people.
Perhaps all the programmes shown by all the channels at a certain time, such as on Friday evenings, for example, should be compared and contrasted with each other. Perhaps it is not programmes at all that should be a focus of interest, but instead the different television advertisements, links and trailers that con- nect them together, since these are the stitches which hold a flow of television together as an object for study.
Writing a history of television over the past 40 years or so looks easy, since it is not so difficult to gather evidence, but paradoxically this produces the problem that there is simply too much that could be investigated. To write the history of earlier decades of television is difficult in other ways. Some broadcasting organi- sations such as the BBC or Granada Television in Britain maintained archives of programmes on tape or film. But these are far from complete. A few programmes were recorded on film from the 1930s, and more programmes were recorded on videotape after its invention in the late 1950s. But the purpose of recording pro- grammes was not primarily to preserve them for future television students and scholars, but instead:
■ To train staff in how to produce, direct and shoot television
■ To make recorded repeats possible
■ To make programmes available for export
Often, such practical difficulties as lack of storage space meant that institutions such as the BBC found it too expensive and difficult to keep sizeable programme archives. Tapes and film copies were simply thrown away, or expensive vide- otape was used again for recording a newer programme, meaning many pro- grammes have been lost. The technologies to record programmes on film or videotape were attractive to television institutions because they made it easier to make programmes. Film inserts could be used during live broadcasts, and
genre a kind or type of programme.
Programmes of the same genre have shared characteristics.
ratings the number of viewers estimated to have watched certain programmes, as compared to the numbers watching other programmes.
flow the ways that programmes, adver- tisements, etc. follow one another in an unbroken sequence across the day or part of the day, and the experience of watch- ing the sequence of programmes, adver- tisements, trailers, etc.
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videotape made special effects much easier to achieve than during a live record- ing. So the copies of programmes that can be found in broadcasters’ archives represent a fragmentary patchwork that was not intended as an objective record or even as a collection of television programmes that could sum up a decade or a channel’s output. A further difficulty is that where programmes were pre- served they were usually those that had acquired some status and importance.
There are few existing copies of light entertainment programmes made before the 1960s, since news programmes, documentaries and some high-profile drama were the kinds of television thought useful to preserve. The low cultural status and sheer mass of episodes of soap opera – particularly daily episodes of US daytime soap – results in a fragmented archive of the genre, particularly its early decades (Levine 2020).
Contemporary Television Studies has focused on the study of programmes in their original audio-visual form. So this section has so far considered the writing of television history in terms of the possibilities of watching television programmes as they were broadcast in some earlier time. Other kinds of history writing can be undertaken by using other kinds of evidence, and some of the recent historical work on television uses written sources to gain an understand- ing of the television of the past. For example, looking back at the pages of the BBC’s listings magazine Radio Times, or ITV’s TV Times, can be instructive in understanding how programmes and programme schedules were offered and advertised to their audiences. These magazines also contain features such as interviews with actors and producers, and articles by journalistic commenta- tors. They can reveal much about the attitudes to television that were assumed, and the balance between information, education and entertainment in the television of particular periods. These listings publications also contain let- ters pages with viewers’ questions, comments and evaluations of programmes.
Although they are hardly representative, these sources give a partial snapshot of the ways that viewers established a relationship with broadcasters, and reveal some of the attitudes to programmes that might have been significant in a par- ticular period.
The archives of broadcasting institutions, especially the BBC, also contain some records of viewer responses to programmes. Some producers kept the letters that viewers wrote to them about programmes, and broadcasters have always engaged in various kinds of audience research. The BBC had an Audience Research department, doing similar things to what focus groups do now by gath- ering information by questionnaire and interview in order to gauge what viewers like or dislike, and what they approve of or do not approve of about programmes.
As well as raw numerical information about audience sizes, these sources provide another glimpse of how people responded to the television they watched in the past. The unofficial archives created by fans – including off-air recordings, per- sonal records of broadcasts or collected objects – can provide information and programmes missing from official archives as well as shape understandings of audience relationships. In broadcasters’ archives, as well as the personal collec- tions of programme-makers donated to public and university archives there are also numerous paper records about the making of programmes. The BBC in par- ticular has maintained extensive archives of letters, memos, reports and policy documents that give insight into how and why programmes were made. So the
soap opera a continuing drama serial involving a large number of characters in a specific location, focusing on relation-
ships, emotions and reversals of fortune.
schedule the arrange- ment of programmes, advertisements and other material into a sequential order within a certain period of time, such as an even-
ing, day or week.
producer the person working for a televi- sion institution who is responsible for the budget, planning and making of a television programme or series of programmes.
focus groups small groups of selected people representing larger social group- ings such as people of
a certain age group, gender or economic status, who take part in discussions about a topic chosen for investigation.
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issue of evidence in television history is a complex one, since it involves these questions:
■ What are the different kinds of evidence available about television in the past?
■ How does the selection of evidence make some kinds of history writing pos- sible, and others extremely difficult?
■ How does one kind of evidence (such as recordings of programmes) relate to other kinds (such as broadcasters’ archives or commercial printed publications)?
■ How can the attitudes and responses of audiences be reconstructed, and what do they tell us?
■ How have television institutions’ attitudes to their programmes shaped the evidence available?
As John Caughie (2000) has argued, the inability to record early television encour- ages the view that television is ephemeral by nature. Until the multi-channel era enabled by free-to-air digital television, the versions of British television’s own past that were aired from time to time (in reruns of old black-and-white programmes, compilation programmes of old television advertisements or brief clips from old programmes in quiz shows) were frequently presented in a humor- ous context. Television from the past was used like a family photo album, which invited the audience to be amazed, embarrassed and amused by what television was. Programmes such as Channel 4’s TV’s 100 Greatest Moments (1999) repre- sented television’s memory of itself, and the audience’s fondness for programmes of the past (Holdsworth 2011). But the history of television that appeared on television was almost exclusively told in terms of memorable programmes, and was often derided and made the subject of comedy. Television in Britain seemed unable to take its history seriously (in comparison to television coverage of other histories such as those of architecture or cinema). But the increased demand for programme content in the multi-channel age makes the repeating of past pro- grammes a notable feature of the schedules.
Derek Kompare (2005) has explored how US television’s practice of syndica- tion has long seen repeats of older programmes, particularly sitcoms and science fiction, incorporated into the afternoon schedules of local television channels.
With the proliferation of cable, satellite and digital channels, the archives of old programmes that broadcasters have preserved have gained some economic value. Specialised US cable channels like TV Land, the Sci-Fi Channel and the programming block Nick at Nite built their schedules from repeats of older pro- gramming, shaping US popular culture’s understanding of television history. In 1995 the BBC gained income from its vast library of old programmes by making business deals with the American cable and satellite company Flextech and the media corporation Pearson to screen programmes from its archives. The export of new BBC programmes, another source of revenue, was also made possible by links with the American Discovery Channel in 1996 and the start of BBC World transmitting programmes internationally. The UK pay channel Gold shows repeats of ‘classic’ British comedy. The arrival of digital television brought a range of free-to-air BBC and ITV digital channels whose brand identities are shaped around certain genres or demographics, with schedules that blend new
digital television television pictures and sound encoded into the ones and zeros of electronic data. Digital signals can also be sent back down cables by viewers, making possible inter- action with television programmes.
syndication Us television industry practice of selling the rights to repeat a programme to local stations and cable channels. A key part of the Us classic network business model as huge profits could be made from selling the rights to hit programmes.
cable television originally called Community Antenna television (CAtV).
transmission of tel- evision signals along cables in the ground.
satellite television television signals beamed from a ground transmitter to a stationary satellite that broadcasts the signal to a specific area (called the ‘footprint’) below it.
free-to-air televi- sion programming for which viewers make no direct payment.
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and archive programming. ITV3 shows repeats of drama series that previously aired on ITV, particularly crime drama and soap opera. BBC Four began as an arts, culture and music channel, blending archive and new programming. It has since been reshaped to showcase the BBC’s archive with a focus on documenta- ries, with a small number of new programmes and imported foreign-language crime drama.
BBC Four has also screened newly made dramas that are set at landmark moments in British television history or around the careers of important tel- evision stars and programme-makers. Figure 4.1 is an image from The Road to Coronation Street, a 2010 drama written by Daran Little about the creation of the longest-running British television soap opera. First broadcast in 1960 on ITV and still running today, Coronation Street was an innovative programme in its time. Daran Little’s play lovingly recreates the efforts of the soap opera’s creator, Tony Warren, to get the programme made and the shooting techniques used to make its first episodes. In Figure 4.1 we see a detailed creation of a 1960 television studio, with Warren in the centre as he learns the techniques of production.
Presenting television from the past and programmes about television’s past shows how important television is to the shared memories and experiences of genera- tions of viewers, and for culture in general. While television as a medium has always placed great emphasis on the moment of ‘now’, partly because live broad- casting has been so significant throughout the development of the medium, both the television industry and the discipline of Television Studies have an awareness of the significance of television history.
Inventing television technologies
The history of television can be thought of in terms of progressive technologi- cal development, from the earliest mechanical devices for broadcasting pictures, through the invention of magnetic tape to transmit prerecorded material, to the
culture the shared attitudes, ways of life and assumptions of a group of people.
Figure 4.1 In 2010, The Road to Coronation Street dramatised the creation of the ItV soap opera at the beginning of the 1960s
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invention of cable television, satellite transmission and now streaming platforms delivering programmes via broadband internet. But technologies cannot be seen in themselves as the drivers of the development of television. The development of technical innovations requires the resources of large organisations, and the will to implement technologies that can be sold to a public. They require the stimulation of demand for new technologies, and a framework of regulation and law to govern their implementation. For example, the level of satellite dish own- ership rose to five million homes in 1996, largely because of the exclusive rights to football matches. Sky Television had bought these rights for its subscription Sky Sports channel using money gained from its majority shareholder Rupert Murdoch’s non-television media interests. The recognition of a potential market, and programme content that can be sold to this market, is a precondition for the successful introduction of a new television technology.
The idea of television goes back to the late nineteenth century, when after radio had been invented it seemed a natural next step to transmit pictures to accompany sound. Scientists across the developed world were aware that the way to transmit pictures would be to find a way of breaking down a camera’s visual image into tiny areas of black, white or shades of grey. These tiny areas could be reassembled on a television screen to reproduce the original image as a series of tiny dots. The prin- ciple is the same as the way that newspaper photographs had been transmitted by telephone wires since the beginning of the 1900s, by decomposing an image into clusters of larger or smaller black dots, producing areas of darker or lighter space which together added up to the shades and outlines of a photograph. The discovery of the chemical element selenium enabled this vision of television to seem closer, since a bank of selenium sensors in an electronic camera would turn the different amounts of light falling on them into different strengths of electrical current. If the changing signals for each tiny selenium receptor were sent to a receiver, the changing light and dark of a television picture would result. Inventors in Britain, Russia and Germany worked on different methods of scanning images with sele- nium sensors in the years before and after 1900, but without perfecting a workable system. The British inventor John Logie Baird, and engineers at the Marconi EMI company, worked separately on competing systems of television broadcasting in the 1920s, with government and BBC support given to Baird (Figure 4.2). British television formally began on 2 November 1936, trying out both the Baird and Marconi systems and broadcasting to only about 300 receivers in the London area.
We can chart television’s history through a series of eras defined by technol- ogy and industrial shifts. John Ellis (2000) suggests a periodisation of television into eras of scarcity, availability and choice. The era of ‘scarcity’ is the broadcast era, taking us from television’s inception to the 1970s. Terrestrial television was broadcast by a small number of outlets: the BBC 1, BBC2 and ITV channels in the UK and the CBS, NBC and ABC networks in the US. This meant programmes needed to have a broad family appeal. Here television was received by antenna over the air, and was characterised by liveness, if you missed a programme you couldn’t see it again until it was repeated.
The era of ‘availability’ is the 1970s to the 1990s, this is the cable and satel- lite era with new technologies of distribution enabling viewers to pay a subscrip- tion fee to access to hundreds of new channels. This allowed channels to target smaller segments of viewers rather than the broad address of the broadcast era.
streaming platform company that provides video on-demand via the internet, can be subscription-based or supported by advertis- ing or a licence fee e.g. Disney+, BBC iPlayer.
regulation the control of television institu- tions by laws, codes of practice or guidelines.
subscription pay- ment to a television broadcaster or streaming platform in exchange for the opportunity to view programmes on cer- tain channels that are otherwise blocked.
terrestrial broadcast- ing from a ground- based transmission system, as opposed to broadcasting via satellite.
network a television institution that trans- mits programmes through local or regional broadcast- ing stations that are owned by or affiliated to that institution.