At the night of January 26 1926, participants of the Royal Establishment and different visitors climbed 3 flights of draughty stairs to a tiny workshop in Soho’s Frith Boulevard. They have been there to witness the primary public presentation of what inventor John Logie Baird known as “true television”. 100 years later, we are actually marking the centenary of British tv.
Right through the next 13 years, till the second one international conflict imposed a seven-year hiatus, tv evolved hastily. From November 1936 onwards, a standard “high definition” provider was once transmitted from the BBC’s tv station at Alexandra Palace. Along numerous selection performances and outdoor pronounces of pageantry and sports activities, tv established a productively wealthy dating with the humanities of Nineteen Thirties Britain.
Greater than 300 performs have been broadcast in those years, together with productions of William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw and Noel Coward, with appearances via Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Valerie Hobson and Sybil Thorndike amongst many others. West Finish productions have been restaged within the studio and outdoor broadcast cameras relayed presentations akin to J.B. Priestley’s When We Are Married, and the Lupino Lane musical comedy Me and My Woman, to tens of 1000’s of audience throughout London.
This newsletter is a part of our State of the Arts sequence. Those articles take on the demanding situations of the humanities and heritage business – and rejoice the wins, too.
Artists and designers made common appearances, as did a standard collection of classical and recent works from London galleries. Different visible artists who featured incorporated Paul Nash, Laura Knight and Wyndham Lewis, along side architects Frank Lloyd Wright, Berthold Lubetkin and Serge Chermayeff. There have been a large number of performances of opera, together with excerpts of modern paintings like Albert Coates’ Pickwick and an bold staging of Act 2 of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.
Ballet as soon as seemed continuously at the BBC.
As soon as the transmissions may just provide a full-length determine at the tiny portrait-format displays of the primary receiving units, ballet loved a central presence in TV schedules. Prima ballerinas who carried out within the studios incorporated Alicia Markova, Lydia Sokolova and the younger Margot Fonteyn.
Traveling firms just like the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo and the Ballets Jooss made appearances. The troupes benefited from modest charges, publicity and affiliation with modernity’s newest wonder, whilst tv received reasonable get right of entry to to the most productive classical dancers of the day in addition to cultural credibility.
In such a lot of tactics the tip of tv as we have now recognized it – when YouTube has crowned the BBC in viewing percentage for the primary time – may just rarely be extra other from its pre-war beginnings. However there also are transparent continuities throughout greater than part a century, even supposing early ballroom dancing classes have morphed into Strictly, and EastEnders is the cleaning soap du jour reasonably than the sedate five-part romance Ann and Harold. Certainly one of tv’s left behinds, on the other hand, is an in depth dating with the humanities.
The actress Valerie Hobson, who seemed in early BBC performs.
Cinematic / Alamy
The humanities at the BBC these days
Writing in The Level in January 2026, critic Lyn Gardner lamented the constraints of tv’s protection of theatre, arguing that “the BBC remains more interested in Glastonbury than the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world’s biggest arts festival” and that the company is “more interested in sport rather than culture”.
She additionally recalled director normal Tim Davie’s phrases from a speech on the Royal Academy in autumn 2024: “The arts remain utterly central to the BBC’s mission. We want to send out a strong signal, that arts and culture matter, they matter for everyone, and they matter even more when times are tough.”
But there’s no sense that Davie’s phrases are borne out via the present tv schedules. There is not any common slot for imaginative and artistic arts documentaries, akin to Omnibus which lasted from 1967 to 2003, nor area for critiques and debate, like The Past due Display, a nightly arts mag display that ran during the early Nineties. Lately’s and the following day’s visible artists and performers have simplest probably the most minimum presence.
The vanishingly uncommon shows of degree paintings, whether or not dance, opera or theatre, are invariably acquisitions from cultural organisations that supplied many of the investment and all the manufacturing experience. Complexity and difficult recent creativity are virtually completely absent. Some distance from being “utterly central”, the humanities are these days totally marginal to BBC tv.
Tv within the pre-war years confronted a similar investment disaster, and but its manufacturers and bosses had self assurance and trust within the arts, and have been ready to paintings collaboratively in partnerships with the cultural establishments of the day. Lately, that imaginative and prescient is absent, with little sense of a deep dedication to, or pastime for, the humanities.
Remaining yr, the BBC sought the perspectives of its audiences with a web-based questionnaire, and in October a collated file of responses was once launched as Our BBC, Our Long term. In neither the questionnaire nor the file was once dialogue of the humanities “utterly central”.
The humanities had next-to-no presence, and as I famous on the time simplest deep into the file was once it stated that: “Among the bigger areas [for which respondents asked] for ‘more’ were: educational content, films and then science and technology, arts and culture and history.”
Thankfully, there’s these days a a lot more substantive and no more biased session underway. In December, the Division of Tradition, Media and Game printed Britain’s Tale: The Subsequent Bankruptcy – BBC Royal Constitution Evaluation, Inexperienced Paper and public session, which invitations us all to “begin the conversation about how to ensure [the BBC] remains the beating heart of our nation for decades to come”.
On this centenary yr for tv, that is the most important alternative to precise a need to peer the humanities returned to the “utterly central” position they occupied within the early years of BBC tv.
