A History of the Origins of Television

A History of the Origins of Television

For the first half of the twentieth century, the dominant media in western society had been newspapers, radio and cinema. Then, in the early 1920s, a man named John Logie Baird created the first television, which has since become the dominant media of the second half of the twentieth century. Television has had an immense impact on human society in many forms including sociality, knowledge, experience and leisure.

After the first experimental broadcasts in America in the 1920s, the British Broadcasting Corporation was set up in 1922, however television broadcasting did not begin until 1936 when an estimated 23,000 people saw the first broadcasts. In 1939 television had ceased and was described as something that would amount to nothing. During the war the radio was extremely popular and this was the case for several years after as television sets were expensive and had limited broadcasting hours with poor receptions.

The BBC was dominated by their director general, John Reith, who had negotiated a position where the BBC was independent from both the government and free from the pressures of market forces. For the BBC had an assured income from all those who owned radio receivers. Reith had established a corporation with aims to inform, educate and entertain the public as a whole, making available cultural experiences that they would otherwise not have seen [HOLLAND, 1997: Page 8].

Up until the 1950s the BBC had a monopoly on broadcasting and it wasn’t until 1951 that various criticisms began to emerge. The 1951 Beveridge report was critical of the stance and arrogance of the BBC and there were even reports suggesting that it should be discontinued. In 1953 the coronation of the...

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...roducing a television output which is so often obsessed with class, dominated by anti-commercial attitudes and with a tendency to hark on about the past [Murdoch, 1989 cited in HOLLAND: p.23].

Murdoch’s savage criticism of the BBC strongly supported the commercialization of television with the belief that people should be allowed to choose from as many channels as possible. In 1990, the Broadcasting act enforced an auction system upon ITV companies. This meant companies had to bid to get their franchises renewed leading to a grossly commercialized market obsessed with profit making. The last of the terrestrial channels, channel 5 was set up in 1997, which signaled the decline in standards of television. A decline which has been due largely to the huge companies involved in television, the rise of satellite and cable television and a move into digital broadcasting.