No repeats, no recording — and the pain of missing an episode.
In 1960s and 70s Britain, television was often an event, but it was also unforgiving and fleeting. If you weren’t at home when a programme was broadcast, you simply didn’t see it. There were no streaming services or catch-up options, and until video recorders arrived in the seventies, once a programme was broadcast, that was it. There wasn’t even a reliable repeat. Miss it, and it was gone.
Sometimes, it was gone forever.
In the early days of television, many programmes were not recorded. It was broadcast, often live, and no record remained, as there was no copy. There were many reasons for this, including cost, but at the time, the idea of building an archive for future reference and reuse was a low priority. A big event might be recorded, but most were not.
In the home, television schedules were rigid, and families planned around them. Evening routines might be changed to fit the broadcast times of favourite programmes. Meals were hurried or delayed. A raised voice from the living room would annouce, “It’s starting!” This sent everyone racing for a seat.
The television would be in the main room of the house, known as the living room, and most homes only had one ‘telly’. In the sixties, the television looked like a large wooden box with a small screen. Turn it on, and it could take several minutes to warm up and produce a picture, which was in black and white.
By the seventies, sleeker television sets, offering a bigger picture, arrived, as well as colour. But there was still one thing that you had to do, and that was to get up to turn the set on or off, change channels, or the volume. The remote control was still a few years away.
The TV Schedule
The Radio Times and TV Times weren’t just magazines; they were essential guides, unless you were happy to rely on a newspaper. There was something else about these two magazines, in that they only gave details of their own programmes. The BBC had the Radio Times, while commercial television had the TV Times. You had to buy both to get the complete picture of what was on for the week ahead.
My parents didn’t buy them, except at Christmas, so we relied on the local paper and memory. I suppose that it helped that there were only three television channels, BBC 1 and 2, and a commercial station that showed adverts, which, in the region that I lived, was ATV.
One Chance Only
Most programmes were shown once, and once only. Popular shows might be repeated months, sometimes years, later, but that was never guaranteed. As a child, if you missed an episode of your favourite programme because you were out, ill, or late home from school, you had to rely on friends to tell you what happened. Sometimes, they would make it up, especially football results.
Once you had missed a programme, there was no way to catch up. You either saw it, or you didn’t. This made television, and your favourite programmes, something to be remembered. Each episode carried weight. Cliffhangers mattered, because if you missed it, you might never find out how they were resolved.
A visit from relatives, an overlong tea, or being sent to bed early could cost you an episode you’d been looking forward to all week. And because everyone watched at the same time, you’d know about it. The next day at school, everyone else would be talking about the moment you missed.
No Recording, No Second Chances
Before video recorders became more common in the late 1970s and early 80s, recording television simply wasn’t an option for most households. If you had to go out, you had a choice: miss the programme or don’t go out.
When the video recorder finally arrived, it was liberating. You could go out and set the video to record for you. It did depend on the reliability of whoever was tasked to set it, though. Occasionally, mistakes were made; sometimes we would get home looking forward to watching a film, only to be presented with the Open University, or two hours of the Test Card.
Occasionally, I would attempt to record using a tape recorder placed near the TV speaker, but the results were terrible. It would pick up all manner of background noise, from dogs outside (and inside), the occasional argument, and the relation with the wind problem. I also found that listening to recorded television programmes left lots of silent gaps where you wondered what was happening. It wasn’t the same without the picture, but I suppose that’s the point of television.
But the arrival of home video recording slowly transformed everything. At first they were expensive and temperamental, but the idea that you could tape and save any programme forever felt revolutionary. Programmes were no longer a moment in time. They could be kept, replayed and shared.
But something was lost too.
Shared Moments
The urgency disappeared. The sense that you had to be there, at that moment, with everyone else, slowly faded away. Television became flexible, convenient, and less a family event. Later, when it became more common to have more than one television in the home, watching ‘telly’ became less communal and more individual. I remember when I bought my first television, a small portable; I could watch what I wanted.
The upside of what went before was that television became a shared national experience. When something big happened on screen, everyone saw it at the same time. The downside was that missing a major moment felt unfair. It might never be shown again.
Looking back, the idea that you could miss a television programme forever seems almost unimaginable now. Today, everything is available on demand, often forever archived online, or in the cloud. But that convenience has changed our relationship with what we now watch. Today, we have hundreds of channels, endless choice, and more options than ever. Traditional television, and how it is consumed, is under more pressure than ever before.
In the 60s and 70s, television was limited and demanded our attention. It required you to be there at a specific time and date. It rewarded your punctuality.
And it punished not being there.
Photo by Yle Archives on Unsplash
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