INTRODUCTION

       There is no holding down the modern inventor. He rides the waves of the ether with the conquering skill of a master in a celestial rodeo. Give him a valve and there is no holding him. It is almost certain that within a few years we shall have all our entertainment available within our own four walls. Press but the button and a stereoscopic talking film will happen over the mantelpiece.

      ‘Seen and Heard’, Manchester Guardian, 1 April 1930

      IT HAD AN AURA about it, a presence. By today’s standards it was tiny, but it dominated the room in a way its technically superior descendants never quite manage. It catered directly for two of the senses, but in operation it affected them all. The flicker and the glare of the bulbous, grey-green screen. The hum and whine of the tube heating up. The crackle of static when it turned off, the tang of burnt dust in the air when it was repaired. For decades the television set was the most advanced piece of technology to be found in any house. How it worked was a mystery, but it was literally part of the furniture.

      It was also an instant portal to a cavalcade of smart, witty house guests with inexhaustible supplies of information, anecdotes, opinions and vibrant sweaters. Miraculous and commonplace at the same time, television occupied a unique position in the national imagination. Detractors claimed it hijacked the national imagination – formerly a cultural Arcadia of chamber music and well-made plays – for its own base ends, but at its best it brought classes and cultures into each other’s homes without prejudice. By the late 1960s even the press admitted that TV, coming from nowhere, was beating them at their own game and several new ones of its own invention.

      The birth of television in the mid-1920s garnered more fuss than a royal baby. The race to perfect a workable system was matched by the rush to predict imminent social catastrophe. Newspapers, radio, theatre and even the motor car (why drive somewhere you can see at the flick of a switch?) were pronounced doomed many times. Rumour and misconception abounded. Professor A. M. Low worried about the effect on international relations if Americans could use the new device to view their British neighbours engaged in ‘frightful’ activities, such as drinking cocktails.1 Meanwhile, R. H. Hill of Oxford University demanded, ‘How could one have a bath in comfort if all the neighbours could look in?’2 Noted physicist Sir Oliver Lodge fretted that broadcasting’s electromagnetic waves might make planes fall out of the sky, though he didn’t expect TV to become a working reality ‘for a good many years yet, perhaps not for a century’.3

      More usefully, Lodge worried about content, noting that the majority of messages sent by another recent scientific triumph