The television age

In 1936, the BBC launched its new TV service - and changed British broadcasting at a stroke. DAVID HENDY charts the technological innovations that produced the so-called "magic rays" - and explores the delights they offered the viewing public

- DAVID HENDY

For the first 14 years of its life, the BBC had been synonymous with radio. But on 2 November 1936, the corporation launched the world’s first regular “high-definition” television service. And although it would take more than two decades for this new medium to become a mass social phenomenon, the meaning of the term “broadcasting” changed almost overnight. The BBC was now on the path of becoming supplier to the nation not just of sound but of sound and vision.

Shortly after 3pm at the Alexandra Palace studios on the slopes of Muswell Hill, the BBC Television Orchestra began to play. The musical comedy star Adele Dixon then stepped out before the cameras to sing some freshly minted lines about “a mighty maze” of magic rays soaring through the sky. Soon after, the African-American song-and-dance duo Buck and Bubbles, plus Chinese plate- spinners the Lai Founs, also arrived at the studios for short turns before the cameras.

These performances were beamed out live from the 90-metre-high steel transmitter soaring from the building’s roof, and in several hundred living rooms across London and the home counties, the BBC’s “magic rays” served them up on strange-looking receivers around which were gathered the nation’s small but dedicated tribe of “lookers in”. There would be more entertainment later that evening, though not until the service had shut down for five hours: evening meals and children’s bedtimes were sacrosanct.