Did You Know… Life In 1960s/70s Britain: You Could Only Watch Three Television Channels?

 

BBC1, BBC2 and ITV — and sometimes nothing at all.

In 1960s and ’70s Britain, television was a very different experience. Today, there are hundreds of channels to choose from, with satellite, cable, and the internet giving options from around the world. It’s now possible to spend more time scrolling endlessly looking for something to watch than actually watching.

There was a time when the choice was simple.

In the early 1960s, there were just three television channels: BBC1, BBC2, and ITV. And BBC2 didn’t arrive until 1964.

And that was it.

A Nation Watching the Same Family Favourites

With so few options, television became a shared national experience in a way that’s hard to imagine today. Families across the country watched the same programmes at the same time.

Favourite programmes were watched by millions. When the weekly stats came out showing what we had watched, the top programmes would often have viewing figures of ten to twenty million.

And there were times when everyone did seem to be watching at the same time.

England’s world cup win over West Germany in 1966, shown live by both BBC and ITV, was watched by 32.3 million people.

The Apollo 13 splashdown was watched by 28.6 million.

I was too young for England’s win, but I do remember watching a number of Apollo splashdowns. Thirteen must have been one of them.

The next day, conversations at work or school often began with:

“Did you see that last night?”

And most people had.

Big moments on television felt bigger because everyone experienced them together.

BBC1, BBC2 and ITV

Each channel had its own identity.

BBC1 was the main channel. The BBC had been around for years. The first radio and then television broadcaster in Britain. It was why we had a television licence. Because of the licence, it was also advertisement free.

ITV was the commercial alternative. Each region had its own ITV channel, like Thames TV, Anglia and Grenada. It had many popular shows, but as soon as those advertisements came on, someone would shout out, “Not another one.” The steady flow of breaks for commercials were never popular.

I never came across anyone who ever said they bought something because they saw an ad “on the telly”.

BBC2 was launched in 1964, and was considered a little more experimental, highbrow, and initially not available across the whole of the country. I seem to remember that it was the home of anything a little different, not seen as mainstream.

Even Fawlty Towers was originally broadcast on BBC 2, in 1975 and 79.

No Daytime TV

And television didn’t run all day.

For much of the 60s and 70s, daytime broadcasting was limited.

There were programmes for schools, and also the Open University. Mostly on the BBC. The average OU lecture was presented by someone with long hair, a beard and wearing corduroy trousers. They might have a blackboard behind them covered in diagrams of thermodynamics, or of the vote share of parties during the Weimar Republic in Germany.

If you turned over to ITV, you might be presented with a hiss and a blank screen, nothing to watch there during the day. Screens for all channels were often blank for hours at a time, until the official start time of the days programmes.

Morning and afternoon television as we know it today, simply didn’t exist.

For children, this meant that if you were home during the day, there was nothing to watch — other than those programmes for schools. Television was something that happened in the evening, not something you dipped into throughout the day.

The lack of daytime television was in part due to government restrictions on the number of hours that television could be shown each day. The law was changed in 1972 when the Conservative government lifted all broadcasting hours restrictions.

ITV were the first to take advantage of the new law. In 1972, they introduced an afternoon schedule. The BBC didn't change. Their daytime schedule might gave us a selection of pages of Ceefax teletext, rather than the testcard, but, daytime television didn't arrive on the BBC until October 1986.

Closedown

Perhaps the most striking difference of all between then and now was what happened at night. There was no 24/7 television. No late-night scrolling. No “just one more episode to watch” of binge viewing. When the television for the night stopped, it stopped. At night, it closed down.

Except, in a way, it typically didn’t.

A few things happened to end our day.

Did You Know… Life in 1960s/70s Britain: A Time When Missing a Programme Could Mean Missing Out Forever

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.

My First Television. The Big Box in the Corner

The big box in the corner.

That’s what our first television was called.

It's the early 1960s, and I have a memory of a rather big box that stood in the corner of our rented home.

It had a very small screen.

In fact, the screen was so small that at times a pair of binoculars would have been useful. The room was small, but it seemed to be so far away.

But there was an answer to that — we just moved the sofa and chairs closer to the television.

It was mostly a box, but it had to be.

One day the television stopped working. When that happened, the main way of getting it to work again seemed to be to hit the top of the box. Dad tried that, but it did nothing to solve the issue. The picture remained blank.

He then called in the local repairman, who in due course arrived with his handyman bag of tools.

His first job was to take the back off the big box with a screwdriver. It only took a few minutes for him to decide that one of the valves needed to be replaced. While he was doing that, I had a quick look at what was in the back. Considering the actual screen was so small, I was surprised to see all the valves, transistors and a massive tube.

It surprised me that putting all that stuff together only produced such a small picture.

Looking into the back did show me one thing, though. I had been told by my granddad that all the people who appeared on television actually lived in the back of the television set. Of course, being very young and not knowing anything about how that was possible, I just accepted his expertise on the matter. It never occurred to me that while the box may have been big, it wasn’t that big. They must have been very small people.

The handyman, having changed the valve, then turned the television on. There then followed a wait of several minutes for the set to “warm up” and a picture to appear.

It was like magic.

The Twelve Posts of Christmas - Day Four: Andy Pandy is Coming to Play.

Amazingly, this is my most viewed tweet on Twitter X in 2023 and for a brief period, a few weeks after posting, it was trending.  

It has 7200 views. Go figure.

Andy Pandy. pic.twitter.com/xeZTauSFc6

— Lost In Words (@LostInWords2023) November 9, 2023

Andy Pandy (1950)

Each episode began:

Andy Pandy is coming to play, la, la-la, la, la-la,
Andy Pandy’s here today, la, la-la, la-la.

And ended:

Time to stop play, just for today,
Andy and Teddy must now go away.
Time to stop play, just for today
Andy is waving goodbye …, goodbye …, goodbye.

If you grew up in the 1950s or 1960s, this was most likely part of your childhood. Not that there was much to watch on television. 

Andy Pandy is coming to play. Don't have nightmares.

The Twelve Posts of Christmas - Day One: The Christmas Radio Times - A History Measured In Inflation

Well, this will be ambitious. I came up with this idea, a blog variation on the twelve days of Christmas, ambitiously called the twelve posts of Christmas. Ambitious because so far the most number of posts that I have done in any month is five. I will have to see how it goes.

So, here's the first one.

Buying a copy of the Christmas Radio Times has become a tradition for many households. It is still bought even if no one reads it. 

Here is a selection over the years.

1940. 

With Hitler planning his invasion of Britain, which thankfully never happened, The BBC offered its Christmas Radio Times for two old pence. And in 1940, Radio Times actually meant radio, because hardly anyone had a television set. 

And during the war, the BBC suspended its television service.

1957.

Seventeen years later, and the price had increased by a penny.