The BBC begins

“For the hardy few who tuned in, the first thing they heard through the hiss and crackle was a news bulletin and a weather forecast”

At six o’clock in the evening on Tuesday 14 November 1922, the BBC took to the airwaves for the first time. Nearly a century later, we might think of this as a defining moment in cultural history but, at the time, it made almost no impact on the world. Newspaper coverage of the launch was virtually non-existent. Only The Times mentioned it briefly on one of its inside pages; the fact that inverted commas were placed around the word “broadcasting” was ample proof of just how unknown the term was judged to be.

Nor was the broadcast itself especially exciting. For the hardy