Any others thinking the same I wonder?

[Evans Electric]

I grew up with radio only in the house ,   remember my Dad saving up to by their first TV   , a Regentone  with a tuning  dial  for obtaining  multi channels although there was only one broadcasting .    It was an expensive item to buy  then.           The morning until about 1.00 pm it showed the test card to enable engineers to tune in new sets .    

        Then it showed horse racing , possibly the most boring sport to watch ,  then a half hour action series such as Fabian of the Yard , then Children's hour .  etc .  Each programme was announced  by someone sitting at a desk . 

The government finally  allowed a  licence  for commercial TV   which was more down to earth ,  the commercials were a novelty , quiz shows offered £1000 prizes  etc    all in Black & White  remember. 

Now I have  3 TVs in the house , bright colour,    uncountable channels  with endless hours of advertisements ...........and ....getting to the point ...... hardly anything I'd make sure of being home  to watch .     

Is it just me ? 

 

[Doc Hudson]

I think we can easily forget that although BBC TV started 1936, (ITV 1955),  BBC2 didn't start broadcasting until 1964, Colour TV wasn't until 1967, Satellite & Digital TV didn't start until 1998, and the Digital TV changeover didn't complete until 2012,. so those early years of television were quite often a learning curve of artists and broadcasters who were all working out how this TV thing actually works,  and what sort of programs the general public actually wanted to watch. Plus the country had experienced the hardships and limitations of war. 

There were a lot of new formats and ideas being tried without knowing if they would work or be acceptable to the general public, but amongst those various new formats were some absolute classics.  probably the only two new type formats that exist today are the general public-phone-in type events, or some sort of fly-on-the wall "reality"/documentary film recording. Whereas nowadays everyone is fighting for advertising revenue and/or viewing figure statistics. So if one channel has a successful format every other channel does their own equivalent version of that program,  So most stuff is old tried & tested programming formats, that you can watch on catch-up later if you miss the original transmission.

Doc H.