Television Act (UK), 1954
that a public demonstration was made by the
National Broadcasting Company (NBC).
Th e BBC’s nascent TV service closed down
during the Second World War (1939–45), which
also hampered TV development in America,
though by 1949 there were a million receivers
in the US and by 1951, 10 million. In the UK,
TV transmission resumed in June 1946. Swiftly
TV became, in terms of reach, diversity and
popularity of content, the most infl uential and
most powerful form of mass communication.
Th e arrival of colour, transmission by cable and
satellite, the possibilities of video recording and
eventually digitization confi rmed and carried
forward the Age of Information while at the
same time turning it into the Age of the Image.
While TV has displaced, and sometimes
marginalized, other forms of communication, it
has also proved their willing customer, borrow-
ing and adapting forms from print, radio and
cinema, in turn proving for them a constant
source of material: how, for example, would
popular newspapers survive without ‘stories’
from TV dramas such as soaps? TV fact and
fiction have become so much a part of the
culture of the modern age that they have become
its benchmarks and its reality.
What’s real is what is on TV; who appears on
TV is deemed real. If an event does not appear
on TV it is argued (at a metaphysical level) that
the event has really not taken place. Because
of the nature of the medium, TV accentuates
the image over the word, the dramatic over the
analytical, and critics such as Neil Postman, in
Amusing Ourselves to Death (Methuen, 1986),
claim that TV transforms all things into pure
entertainment.
TV delivers audiences to advertisers; in turn
advertisers use TV to reinforce the dominance
of the image, in their case the image arising from
imperatives of consumerism. TV news is seen to
be a window on the world, a view attracting criti-
cal attention from media analyists, who see in
its underlying intentions frameworks essentially
Western in orientation, highly selective and thus
off ering a skewed vision of the world.
TV is where partnerships are forged, between
sport and business, fashion, food, health and
property and business. It is the venue of lifestyle,
the route to celebrity, and for these and many
other reasons it is a battleground between
those who are ambitious to control it, the axis
of the ongoing struggle being the tussle between
public and private ownership. The study of
the eff ects, infl uence, impact and power of the
media largely centres on TV and the questionsTelevision Act (UK), 1954 Gave birth to
commercial television in the UK; the Act set up
the Independent Television Authority (later to be
named the Independent Broadcasting Author-
ity with the advent of commercial radio). A
rigorous set of controlling rules was imposed on
the Authority, requiring ‘that nothing is included
in the programmes which off ends against good
taste or decency or is likely to encourage or incite
to crime or to lead to disorder or to be off ensive
to public feelings or which contains any off ensive
representation of or reference to a living person’.
Required were a proper balance in subject-
matter, a high general standard of quality and due
‘accuracy and impartiality’ in the presentation
of any news given in programmes, in whatever
form. Th ere were also to be ‘proper proportions’
in terms of British productions and performance
in order to safeguard against the dumping of
American material.
Of vital significance in the Act were the
elaborate precautions that were made to prevent
advertisers gaining control of programme
content. Th e governing body of ITV as set up by
the Act was similar in size and function to that of
the BBC, with seven to ten governors each serv-
ing for fi ve years and dismissible at the behest
of the Postmaster-General. Like the BBC, the
ITA was to have a limited period of existence,
followed by parliamentary review and renewal.
See sound broadcasting act (UK), 1972.
Television broadcasting Technical develop-
ments in the UK, the Soviet Union and the US
combined to make TV a feasibility by 1931, when
a research group was set up in Britain under
Isaac Shoenberg (1880–1963), who had had
considerable experience in radio transmission
technology in the Soviet Union. He furthered
the evolution of a practical system of TV
broadcasting based on a camera tube known as
the Emitrion and an improved cathode-ray tube
for the receiver. Shoenberg elected to develop a
system of electronic scanning which proved far
superior to the mechanical scanning method
pioneered by Scotsman John Logie Baird
(1889–1946), who had first demonstrated his
system publicly in 1926.
Th e BBC was authorized by government to
adopt Shoenberg’s standards (405 lines) for the
world’s fi rst high-defi nition service, which was
launched in 1936; a system that proved suffi-
ciently successful to continue in the UK until
1962, when the European continental 625-line
system was introduced. In the US, TV was
slower to develop. It was not until 30 April 1939,
at the opening of the New York World’s Fair,