The day the television switched off
The world's first regular television service began in November 1936, broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation from Alexandra Palace in north London. Only a few thousand homes around the city had a set, and programmes ran for just a couple of hours a day. On 1 September 1939, with war about to begin, the service shut down without warning in the middle of a Mickey Mouse cartoon, because the signal could have helped enemy bombers find London. When television came back in June 1946, one of the first things shown was the same cartoon.
The coronation of 1953, covered on our The Crown page, persuaded millions of British families to buy their first set, and a second CHANNEL, paid for by adverts, arrived in 1955. For decades after that, a whole country watched the same PREMIERE on the same night and talked about it at school the next day.
Series or season?
In Britain, a run of episodes is called a series; in America it is a SEASON, and the difference goes further than the word. An American NETWORK traditionally ordered around twenty-two EPISODES a year from a hit show, written by a big team, while British comedies and dramas often run for six, or even three: SHERLOCK made just three per series, each ninety minutes long.
Every new show starts with a PILOT, a trial episode, and each year American networks pay for dozens of pilots, most of which are never shown. A SPINOFF borrows a character from an existing show: FRASIER began as a psychiatrist who was a regular at the Boston bar in CHEERS, and SMALLVILLE, about Superman as a teenager, ran for ten seasons.
Who shot J.R.?
A cliffhanger at the FINALE of a series keeps viewers waiting for months. The most famous came in March 1980, when the American soap opera Dallas ended with its villain, J.R. Ewing, shot by an unseen attacker. All summer people argued about who did it, British bookmakers took bets on the answer, and the episode that finally revealed it that November was watched by about eighty-three million Americans.
RATINGS like these are measured by boxes attached to the televisions of a few thousand sample homes, and the figures decide which shows survive. COLUMBO turned the usual mystery upside down: viewers see the crime at the very start, and the fun is watching the rumpled detective, in a raincoat the actor Peter Falk bought himself, slowly work out what the audience already knows.
The binge
In February 2013 Netflix released all thirteen episodes of a big new drama at once, instead of one a week, and viewers began watching whole series in a weekend. Collins Dictionary chose binge-watch as its word of the year in 2015. Streaming also gave old shows a second life: SUITS, a legal drama that had ended in 2019, became the most streamed show in America in 2023 after arriving on Netflix, and FUTURAMA has been cancelled twice and brought back twice.
The REMOTE, whose old nickname our gadgets page explains, is now used as much for choosing between services as channels, and most streaming apps skip past the closing CREDITS and start the next episode before anyone has decided whether to BINGE.