Yet it was only ten years ago, on the re-opening day in 1946, that the BBC Television Service was announcing that television producers could now ‘cut’ from one camera to another without the laborious business of a slow ‘mix’. It was only ten years ago, on the same occasion, that the then Postmaster General looked forward to the day when history in the making would be seen by ‘more than a handful of the population’. The next day, 8 June 1946, the Victory Parade was televised. But who in those days could have forecast that television cameras would be present at a Coronation ceremony and that twenty million people would see the crowning of the Queen? Only the heavens have been seen by more people at any one time.
Anybody who comes of age in 1957 has always lived in the television era. But to the men of BBC Television it has seemed a short road. They can recall without taxing the memory their dreams of television from the air, from ships at sea, and of television spanning continents. The dreams were father to the fact. Looking back from 1956 there is little that BBC Television has not done. In the years between, the picture has improved, the hours have increased, and the technical marvels have come one after the other. As with the Coronation, who in those earlier days would have thought of a camera unit or a commentator operating without the hindrance of cables? Yet the self-contained Roving Eye and the lapel microphone were invented to bring greater freedom to production.
And though the visionaries saw the development of television to embrace all aspects of our national life, did they see it advance so quickly in so many fields? The viewer who used to see a play a week might well reflect that now he sees more than 150 a year, that in fact the BBC Television Service puts on more new plays than the West End theatres. The viewer to whom his television set was a diversion in earlier days might well reflect on the growth of its importance in bringing Prime Ministers, the leading figures of the arts, sciences, and the theatre, the sportsmen and the celebrities to the screen. Each viewer, depending on when he joined the vast army now looking in, will have his own memories of the ‘old days’. There is a legion of viewers who know nothing but the new days.
To both categories we offer this backward glance over the years of the television revolution. In these pictorial pages will be found a record of the past and a promise for the future. For the BBC Television Service never stands still. The march of its progress is not halted by its past achievements. It has its eye firmly fixed on the things to come.