Lecture one: Television and the consumer society

Television was the third great phase of telecommunications to emerge in the United Kingdom with public television broadcasting beginning in 1936 and continuing through to present day. It has undergone enormous growth and change in the past 76 years and now in the year 2012 will we see the death of analogue television, the original terrestrial transmission used for broadcasting, now surpassed by digital which has both technological and long term economic advantages.

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) had began to test television as early as 1926 but it wasn’t until 1929 that the first official broadcast occurred. Having been established in 1927 to develop the rapidly growing new format of radio, the BBC was in a good position to make a foray into television as well.

Unlike radio which had great use beyond consumer purpose (i.e. military and business), television had no such prior base from which to expand from and thus its expansion in the United Kingdom was slow. Even as late as 1951 only 9% of British homes contained a television. Nonetheless television continued to gain traction and to this end the UK was the first country to have a regular daily television schedule direct to homes, by 1955 emerged commercial television which defined the split between content and advertising and the subject and content of the advertisements themselves.

Commercial television grew and new channels began to appear, whilst the BBC was funded by a license fee and thus acted to serve in the best interests of the public who funded it, new commercial television had no such obligations. They were driven by profit and profit came by advertisements, advertisers of course only being attracted to a large viewership, the larger the audience, the greater number of people an advertisement will reach. Thus began the importation of specifically American culture, and to a great extent what was popular there became quickly popular in the UK though in similar fashion the rights to a show may be bought so that a more culturally relevant show might be created to have a greater appeal to the home audience whilst losing none of the inherent attractiveness of the show itself. 

Commercial television occupied a niche that Radio and newspapers had been unable to fill, the youth demographic. Women were also a key demographic and one largely contested between all three mediums. It is youths and women however who possessed the most in the way of disposable income and thus were the key demographics for advertisers and consequently commercial television in general.