They thought it wouldn't catch on . . . Veteran critic Richard Last on television's 60 astonishing years
AT SCHOOL my class was required to write an essay on recent inventions which could change the world. It was wartime and the brand-new marvel of television - born 60 years ago tomorrow - had been suspended for the duration, but even had it been up and running I don't think it would have featured in our teenage thinking. Not quite three years old when the axe fell in September 1939, the infant service was for most people an intriguing but expensive novelty which was never going to supplant radio. That was pretty much how the British establishment saw TV after its rebirth in 1946. Churchill and Attlee refused to appear on it; Macmillan recognised its potential with misgiving. Reith, founding father of the BBC, totally ignored the Alexandra Palace launch in his memoirs. Among the upper crust generally, television was considered a suitable distraction for the servants.
Nowhere was this attitude more firmly entrenched than at the top end of the BBC, where the restored service was regarded as a frivolous adjunct to the undying glory of radio. For almost a decade after the war, television news remained geared to the spoken word, with pictures (often stills) as afterthoughts. Politics on the box was all but banned. Neither BBC chairmen nor directors-general kept a set in their homes. The first DG to be appointed from a television background was the late Sir Ian Trethowan, in 1977.
Sixty years on, the ugly duckling of broadcasting has not so much changed the world as come close to conquering it. For hundreds of millions of people in developed and developing countries alike it is the prime source of information, entertainment and relaxation. It orders the fate of political parties and changes the conduct of wars. It has introduced the near-illiterate to great literature and taken the poorest citizens into the opera house. It has exerted more influence on the progress of the human race than any invention since moveable-type printing.
Linked to the computer, the television screen may bring about the greatest change in our working habits since the Industrial Revolution. There are more than a billion and a quarter television sets distributed round the world, one to every four human beings on earth. In Britain the average citizen watches for 25 hours a week.
Compared with other technical developments of the 20th century, television had an extraordinarily long gestation. Some of its basic principles go back well into the 19th century. The photo-electric cell, which led on to the cathode ray tube, was invented before the First World War. Even when all the bits and pieces had been put together by John Logie Baird, it took another 10 years before the world's first high-definition service was established by the BBC on November 2, 1936.
American TV started after ours but had a clear run through the war years. In Britain, it was the Coronation which gave the suspect new medium its kick-start. The fact that the monarch herself insisted that her crowning should be televised, against the advice of her ministers, helped to bring telly respectability as well as a brisk business in TV licences (from three-quarters of a million in 1951 to more than three million by 1954). The arrival of ITV in 1955 finally turned television into the "people's medium", forcing the BBC to come off its Reithian perch and compete in the cultural market-place. Paradoxically, the carefully balanced BBC-ITV duopoly also gave us the most upmarket commercial television on earth, until the 1990 Broadcasting Act wilfully overthrew it.
That was the story until the mid-1980s. For something like the last 10 of its 60 years, television has been plunged into crisis. Technology and the determination of very rich entrepreneurs like Rupert Murdoch and Silvio Berlusconi to become even richer have filled the sky with new channels, all hungry for programmes and money. But the audience is finite and so, eventually, when pay-per-view satellite has squeezed the last drop of cash from sports fanatics, is finance.
THE satellite and cable age, already a reality in a quarter of Britain's 23 million TV homes, is bad news for viewers who once got their football and boxing for the price of the licence. It presents an increasing challenge to the terrestrial broadcasters, who see their audience share being slowly eroded.
Most worrying of all is the advent of television's "fossil fuel" era. In the old days the TV organisations largely made their own programmes. Now whole channels are devoted to recycling the hits, and in many cases the misses, of the past. The BBC's commercial outlets are gearing themselves - and who shall blame them? - to making a killing from the Corporation's vast archive of comedy, drama and documentary programmes. The downside of this process is that no one, least of all the satellite stations, is in a position to replenish the production coffers at anything like consumption rate.
Most British viewers, reared on the comfortable certainties of regulated duopoly, have a vague perception that telly is not what it used to be. No one could be in serious doubt that the mid-Atlantic bluster of Rhodes, produced like 60 per cent of BBC drama by an independent company, is leagues away from the shining literacy of ITV's The Jewel in the Crown. Yet many standards hold up remarkably well.
Wildlife programmes, always internationally saleable, remain superb. The best documentaries on my screen are still varied and often trenchant; 1996 has produced a particularly notable crop.
It is in the crucial areas of drama and entertainment that constantly increasing pressures towards international blandness and easy ratings are leaving their worst mark. British television's reputation was built on the programmes it made for the domestic market, with foreign sales as a desirable extra. No one can afford any longer to think in such naive terms. Monty Python, a ratings dud for two series, would find few backers in the competitive age.
So should we be apprehensive, guardedly optimistic, or merely anxious about the future of the medium? The late Dennis Potter was not alone in believing that the Golden Age of television had already passed. But then an obituarist writing in 1616 might have concluded that the Golden Age of English literature had passed.
In the new free-for-all era, we shall have to learn to use television as we have long learned to use the printed word. Just as the discerning visitor to W H Smith must find his way past the Jeffrey Archer promotional shelves to discover the latest David Lodge, viewers will have to pick their way through the dross of hundreds of channels to discover the remaining gold. The remote control will become the most essential tool after the set itself.
All anyone can say with certainty about the future of TV is that there will be more of it, and that it will be a different shape. The BBC is due to start broadcasting in the new improved marvel of digital widescreen by the end of next year. As with the advent of colour, viewers will soon have a choice of investing in one of the new sets ( £1,400 a go but bound to come down), or becoming a fuddy-duddy.
My guess is that the future will lie increasingly with generic channels (those devoted to one strand of programming, such as sport or movies), and that the BBC licence will be replaced by voluntary subscription fairly early in the new century, whatever government is in power. The best news for viewers could be a decision by John Birt's successors to concentrate on quality programme production, for sale to all comers as well as for broadcasting on the Beeb's own channels.
Like the nuclear bomb, television cannot be uninvented. I for one would not want it to be. Nine years older than the box, I have absolutely no doubt that it has made me better informed, more aware of the world I inhabit, than my parents ever were. My children and grandchildren will no doubt be better informed still. I can only hope they will get as much benefit from the next 60 years as I've had from a lot of the past 60.
