Television turns 100: the forgotten history of Britain’s earliest TV shows

On Tuesday 26 January 1926 the entrepreneurial inventor John Logie Baird invited distinguished guests, many of them members of the Royal Institution, to a demonstration in his workshop in London’s Soho. Among those present in rooms above what is now Bar Italia in Frith Street was a Times correspondent whose three-paragraph report, headed ‘The “Televisor” – successful test of new apparatus’, was relegated to two-thirds of the way down a page 9 column.

Nonetheless, this was the first public showing of what Baird characterised as ‘true television’. Grey-scale moving images transmitted down a wire could be recognised by those peering into a cardboard tube as a hand, a pipe and a notebook being flipped through. Which is why Monday 26 January 2026 marks the 100th anniversary of television in Britain.

Across the following 13 years, television would develop rapidly, with the first broadcasts by Baird’s 30-line mechanical system in November 1928 being followed by regular transmissions, first from the Scotsman’s company and then the BBC through to September 1935. After just over a year’s hiatus, the BBC’s London television station at Alexandra Palace provided a ‘high definition’ service from 2 November 1936 to the eve of the war.

Only tiny fragments of the many hundreds of hours of live broadcasts during these years have been preserved. There was no technology to capture live transmissions, and the few minutes that we have are almost accidental traces caught by newsreels and home movies. Largely because of this absence, pre-war television has resisted extensive study and scholarship.

All kinds of other archival materials are available, however, including scripts, production memos, listings, reviews, photographs and a number of recorded recollections with those who made the programmes. And these reveal remarkably extensive, varied and innovative schedules packed with singers and comics, with ballet and opera, with a popular precursor of The One Show called Picture Page, with talks about art and politics, with parlour games like quizzes and bridge, with fashion shows, with the first television dramas, the first outside broadcasts of pageantry and sport, the first sitcom and the first ‘soap’.

Notable figures who appeared on television in these years include Gracie Fields and Josephine Baker, George Bernard Shaw and J.B. Priestley, Alfred Hitchcock and Frank Lloyd Wright, Laurence Olivier, Peggy Ashcroft and Sybil Thorndike, James Mason, Greer Garson and Valerie Hobson.

Television across both its 30-line form and as the service from Alexandra Palace presented well over 300 plays, starting with the comic sketch Box and Cox in December 1928 and embracing a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar set in a contemporary middle European state, the science fiction parable R.U.R. (or Rossum’s Universal Robots) by the Czech writer Karel Čapek, and a version of the Jewish folk tale The Dybbuk played in Yiddish – without subtitles. Less exalted drama featured too, including thrillers by Edgar Wallace.

Television in the 1930s was intimately entwined with the other cultural forms of the decade. Numerous West End plays and revues were rapidly repurposed for presentation in the Alexandra Palace studios. Ambitious stagings of opera dotted the schedule, including a presentation of Act 2 of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. From autumn 1938, outside broadcast cameras presented full-length dramas and musicals from the London stage, including Lupino Lane’s hit Me and My Girl, which was so popular on its first outing that a second was arranged only weeks later.

From the very beginning of television the emerging British ballet world partnered on a host of broadcasts, with performances by prima ballerinas including Alicia Markova, Lydia Sokolova and Margot Fonteyn. The young Vic-Wells ballet company, which in the 1950s would transform into The Royal Ballet, and Marie Rambert’s rival group, both appeared frequently. And painters and architects, such as John Piper, Myfanwy Evans, Paul Nash, Berthold Lubetkin and Serge Chermayeff spoke about their modernist visions. 

Although the major distributors, fearing competition from the upstart medium, refused to sell feature films to television, and even stopped the showing of trailers, the film industry entered into all kinds of relationships with television. Ambitious outside broadcasts, each spread across a week of programmes, were mounted in autumn 1937 from the film studios at Pinewood, Denham and Elstree. Gaumont British, which after 1932 held a controlling interest in the Baird company, ran an experimental rival television service from Crystal Palace until the catastrophic fire there in November 1936.

Just before the war Gaumont British also made a serious commitment to a projection technology for showing live television on cinema screens, which was first used with great success in February 1939 in three cinemas to show a championship boxing match.

The packed houses and enthusiastic responses convinced Gaumont British, as well as the Odeon cinema chain, to invest heavily in what was called ‘cinema television’. Trooping the Colour, the Derby and Test cricket were all shown in cinemas in the final pre-war summer. The BBC, meanwhile, was torn between concern about protecting their broadcast monopoly and cautious embrace of possible partners for financing the cash-starved television operation.

‘Cinema television’ would only become a reality in the early 2000s, when satellite distribution and digital projection facilitated the presentation in arthouses and multiplexes of live theatre, dance and opera. By this point, so much else that had been pioneered before the war, including presenters, schedules and all kinds of programme forms, had been standard for the way television worked for decades.

John Wyver is a writer and producer, and Professor of the Arts on Screen, University of Westminster. His book Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain is published by Bloomsbury/BFI.

An accompanying season, Magic Rays of Light: Early Television, is currently at BFI Southbank.