The Early Years of Television and the BBC

by Jamie Medhurst

Overview

The British journalist C. P. Scott once said of television, ‘Not a nice word. Greek and Latin mixed. Clumsy.’ From its earliest days, when people began to discover ways of ‘seeing at a distance’ through to the multi-platform media environment of today, television has shown itself to be a resilient and adaptable method of communication.
Based on detailed archival research, The Early Years of Television and the BBC explores the relationship between the BBC and television from the mid-1920s through to the outbreak of the Second World War. Jamie Medhurst provides an account of the oft-forgotten 30-line television service (1932–5) and re-evaluates the belief that Sir John Reith, the Corporation’s Director-General until 1938, would have nothing to do with television.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399504119
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	02/12/2024
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Jamie Medhurst is Professor of Media and Communication at Aberystwyth University

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Early Television Developments
3. Enter the BBC
4. From Experiment to Service: 1929-1932
5. A Service and Two Rivals: 1932-1935
6. Preparing for the High-Definition Service
7. The BBC Television Service: 1936-1939
8. Conclusions

Editorial Reviews

This important book has been more than 10 years in the making [...] I recommend Professor Medhurst’s book to the serious researcher on the history of broadcasting.

Television - Malcolm Baird

In 1938, the journalist Garry Allighan made a scathing comment about the BBC hierarchy’s lack of enthusiasm for television. It was, he stated, a ‘new limb that had been forcibly engrafted’ upon it (169). It is this premise that Jamie Medhurst sets out to challenge in his hugely engaging and compellingly written new book on the history of the BBC and early television.

Journal of British Cinema and Television - Kate Murphy

In a meticulously fine analysis of historical sources, Medhurst reconstructs television’s freakish take-off in the interwar years. Medhurst’s is a fascinating story of how technological innovation and political considerations maintained the monopoly of the BBC in broadcasting.

Journal for Media History - Huub Wijfjes

This book tells the fascinating story of the BBC’s ambivalence towards early experimental television, a theme surprisingly overlooked in previous research. With its colorful personalities and chronological sensitivity, it is rich in detail while never losing track of important broader contexts of politics, business, technology and visions of public service.

Marie Cronqvist

[The Early Years of Television and the BBC] is intensively researched and hugely detailed; Medhurst has mined the archives to great effect, and his work stands in part as a comprehensive finding aid to vital sources. Though thick with detail, the writing is clear and engaging, featuring many lively quotations and also including some well-chosen photographs. Readability is helped by the near-total absence of arcane BBC abbreviations and terminology. Through this book, [Medhurst] offers nuance and detail that will inform scholarly and public debates as we approach the beginning of a long and gradual centenary of British television. It is an admirable early curtain-raiser for those celebrations.

Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies - Nick Hall

This is a deeply-researched and utterly absorbing account of a crucial phase in television history. Medhurst succeeds brilliantly in bringing to life the tangled story of the birth of a brand new medium as well as all the hopes – and failures - of television’s extraordinary, talented, and sometimes rather strange band of pioneers. It’s a book that firmly establishes Medhurst as an outstanding scholar in the field of broadcasting history.

David Hendy

The Early Years of Television and the BBC represents a well researched and skilfully put together account of the evolution of a piece of technology which has, in the intervening century, evolved into a dominant social and cultural force. Medhurst’s painstaking research demonstrates how riven this development was on social, cultural, political and economic levels, bringing these areas together into an engaging account of a time during which the pace of change, as the book relates, must have been breathtaking.

Early Popular Visual Culture - James Shelton

This book demonstrates Briggs’ point. Through the careful selection, analysis, and synthesis of wide-ranging archival material, Medhurst constructs a comprehensive history of the early years of television in Britain—one that is braided with histories of politics, culture, and society. The book, therefore, will prove to be essential reading for students and researchers in the fields of television and media history but also offers a valuable contribution to a variety of other scholarly contexts.

Twentieth Century British History - Richard Dhillon