November will bring the 80th anniversary of the first television broadcast. It did not arouse much enthusiasm among senior BBC managers at the time, as Alistair Lexden pointed out in a letter published in The Daily Telegraph on August 30. There are some who are unenthusiastic today. He himself does not have a television set.
SIR--It took a great deal of pressure to get John Reith and his senior BBC colleagues to approve the first television broadcast 80 years ago (“Britain’s very first night of television”, August 26). They were extremely reluctant to permit the public use of this new medium.
Seven years earlier one prominent journalist had thundered: “The attitude of the BBC in regard to this amazing British invention is absolutely incomprehensible”. Reith himself was one of the principal obstacles. He said “ he was afraid of television”. He believed that programme-makers would provide too much light entertainment and not enough serious education, endangering the elevated values which his creation should, above all, seek to imbue.
He was of course quite right. Radio is so much better.
Lord Lexden
London SW1