BBC launches regular television service

On November 2, 1936, the BBC opened the world's first regular public high-definition television service from Alexandra Palace in north London. The opening show included the singer Adele Dixon performing a song called Television. For its first months the service alternated between two rival systems: John Logie Baird's older mechanical 240-line system and the all-electronic 405-line system of Marconi-EMI. In February 1937 the BBC chose the Marconi-EMI system, which became the British standard.¹²³

Electronic television had been demonstrated in the late 1920s by Philo Farnsworth and others, and the BBC already had a national radio service on which to build, including a model of public funding through the licence fee. Britain's government set up a committee in 1934 that recommended starting a high-definition service. Germany had begun a service in 1935 with fewer lines of resolution, so the claim to be first depends on what counts as regular and high-definition. The signal reached only the London area, and sets were expensive, so audiences were small.⁴

The coronation of George VI in May 1937 was the first major outside broadcast. The BBC suspended service on September 1, 1939, at the outbreak of war, partly because its transmissions could guide German bombers, and resumed in June 1946. The coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953 drew an audience of more than 20 million in Britain, and the great expansion of television came after 1950 in Britain, the United States and then everywhere. Within two decades it displaced radio and cinema as the most widely used entertainment and news medium.¹