The Early Years of Television and the BBC

Confessions of a Monopoly: The Covert Decision Making of the Early BBC

“…As radio broadcasts gained popularity, a new market of broadcasting magazines sprang up around them, with some publishers absorbing radio into their existing portfolio as technical and scientific magazines, and others jumping, as it were, onto this attractive new bandwagon (Taylor 2013). When the BBC began life in 1922, 'broadcasting' meant radio broadcasting, although television was in fact also being developed during this period behind the scenes as early as 1926 (Cain 1992;Medhurst 2022). The magazines were able to fill in the gaps left by an aural medium and provide the photographs and stories about the radio stars that the audience craved (Taylor 2013).…”

“…Hendy's "People's History" of the BBC tackles the organisation's complex relationship with the public (Hendy 2022). Medhurst meticulously scrutinises the progress of the television service (Medhurst 2022), whilst Curran and Seaton's (2018) revised work is a core text for understanding the challenges of public service broadcasting and the complexities of the political undercurrents. Brigg's monumental and comprehensive multi-volume history of broadcasting is a dominant authority in this field, even if his BBC focus led him to over-look some important developments, such as the activities of the foreign transmitters and pirate stations, which were taking place beyond the BBC.…”

Book Review: Celebrity Chefs, Food Media and the Politics of Eating

“…Food and cooking on television have been connected since the very first television broadcasts gave viewers glimpses of food (see Medhurst, 2022), just as writing about television cooking programmes had been established early in television studies. In recent years, books such as Food and Cooking on Early Television in Europe (Tominc, 2022) have sought to deepen the discussions beyond a post-1990 focus on readily available examples of television programmes from recent decades; researchers have looked back to earlier days, raiding written and scant visual archives to reposition and re-write pioneering presenters and programmes back into history, while also seeking to make comparisons across different broadcasters, countries and perspectives.…”