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Television in the Fifties

© Allan Lee

Television Comes of Age

As we enter the new century, television is entering its fifth decade as a serious broadcasting medium. Prior to the fifties, television was experimental, run by people who were viewed with suspicion by colleagues in radio. (In fact staff at BBC Television's studios at Alexandra Palace in London were referred to by the rest of the corporation as 'The Fools on the Hill'.).

But it was in the fifties that the medium that was to change the world we live in came of age. At the start of the decade, the number of sets was tiny (Britain's population of more than 50 million had merely 350,000 sets between them). TV sets themselves were the size of a cocktail cabinet, though the screens were rarely more than 14 inches across. To experience the full glory of British television in the fifties, check out http://www.whirligig-tv.co.uk/ which features pictures, RealVideo and plenty of nostalgia from a largely forgotten era.

By the middle of the decade, the first NTSC colour television system had been developed and began to be used in the USA. Britain and America were the prime movers in the television industry in the 1950s - Europe was still recovering from the devastation of World War 2, and many other countries simply hadn't bothered. (And some didn't bother for decades to come!).

It has to be said, at least in the first half of the fifties, many TV programmes would not have been out of place at an educational evening in the local library; gardening hints from the TV gardener... cookery lessons from the TV chef... or an exhibition of juggling by a czech circus act. Many performers' agents were understandably wary of the new medium - their clients could find themselves using up a lifetime's material in one evening.

Television wears a Crown

Ironically, it was a ceremony that's more than a thousand years old that opened the door for the new medium. The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth the Second of England was the first major event to be televised around the world (or at least around the parts of the world that had TV sets!). It was the Queen herself who decided to let BBC cameras into Westminster Abbey to show her Coronation (against the advice of her Prime Minister of the time, Winston Churchill). The BBC technicians behaved impeccably, and the spectacle drew a TV audience in Britain alone of 20 million people (some of them standing ten deep around the TV sets). A telerecording (which in those days consisted of a 16 mm film taken from the TV screen) was flown to the US, where it was screened to an equally large audience. Radio was relegated to a supporting act - a role it has had to put up with ever since.

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