The Absence of Television: Broadcasting and War in Britain, 1939–1945

This chapter asks what the response of the BBC to the beginning of the Second World War reveals about British broadcasting, regarded as what media theorist Raymond Williams (1974) called a technology and a cultural form. It investigates how the reasons for stopping television and reconfiguring radio were intertwined with ideas about the cultural role of broadcasting as a socially inclusive medium, the technological development of radio and television for military uses, and how the British deployed broadcasting in ways both similar to and different from those of other nations. Competition between individual inventors, nations and corporations was harnessed to rapidly advance technologies of transmission and reception, and the ideological character of the different warring powers produced radio and television cultures that were relatively distinct. The absence of television in Britain from 1939 to 1945 offers, paradoxically, an effective focus on the significance of broadcast media.