Chambers, D. (2016). Chapter 2 Early Television. Changing media, homes and households: Cultures, technologies and meanings. London; New York: Routledge.

EARLY TELEVISION

Introduction

From the beginning of broadcasting’s history, media have been a platform for public concerns and debates about the meanings and values associated with home, domesticity and family life. Powerful discourses about home, family and domestic culture accompanied the launch of broadcasting in the US and Europe during the early twenty-first century. Public and popular debates surrounding the emergence of broadcasting for home use were underscored by severe wartime disruption. Television’s (TV) development from the 1930s was interrupted across Europe by the Second World War and resumed thereafter, to become a routine part of domestic life by the 1950s. Early ideas about TV broadcasting were, then, marked by severe social and physical upheavals. This period of social turbulence brought into sharp focus changing meanings and values associated with family life, private and public spheres of society, the roles of women, and the nature of community and nation. Post-war initiatives to recover a sense of national and domestic stability shaped social responses to radio and TV, provoking public concerns about home, family and nation.

These social concerns about the effects of media on families and domestic life were articulated through and corresponded with utopian and dystopian media imaginaries about TV as a technology and cultural form. Traditional ideals of home and family projected an intrinsically white, middle-class nuclear unit structured by hierarchal gendered and generational relations. Home and households were conceived as domestic spaces and cultures through a web of economic and popular cultural discursive processes involved in the imagining and promotion of media technologies for the home. Utopian media imaginaries envisaged TV as a medium capable of fostering traditional, domestic ideals of family togetherness while dystopian visions of the technology stressed the medium’s power to fragment family relations and breach the boundaries between public and private spheres of life. As the following chapters indicate, these contradictory imaginaries have, to this day, remained central to debates about the roles and meanings of media technologies in the home.

This chapter explores how these public concerns and wider popular discourses about ‘home’ and ‘family’ values influenced the TV’s arrival into and colonisation of the home. Media technologies go through a process of enculturation or domestic ‘appropriation’ after entering the home, comprising micro-social processes which are focused on in Chapter 3. The cultural acceptance of early TV depended initially on its desirability to ensure its household adoption. Attempts to generate widespread consumer demand for this new, expensive and unfamiliar technology immediately after the war at a time of austerity posed a challenge for broadcasters, manufacturers and the government. Ensuring that families would welcome this bizarre object into the intimate surroundings of the home depended not only on the existing domestic circumstances and lifestyles of families and households. TV’s acceptance also depended on the material design, on commercial marketing and state promotion, and on wider popular meanings attributed to broadcasting before the technology’s entrance into the home.

With a focus on TV, this chapter charts the key ways in which media technology was popularised for home use between the late 1930s and 1970s. It asks how TV became a taken-for-granted homogenising force. The successful entrance of early radio and TV into the home relied on the public fantasies and aspirations projected on to these media technologies to encourage people to buy them as ‘domestic’ artefacts. The concept of ‘media imaginary’ addressed in Chapter 1 is employed in this chapter to cast light on the emergence and negotiations of various social ideals and to explain the processes through which the acceptance of media technology in the home depended. During its inception, TV technology was popularised in the public imagination to ensure its social acceptance, eventually leading to widespread adoption in the home. Powerful public and popular representations of both broadcasting and domestic media appliances were involved in the establishment of the medium. These media imaginaries were centred on the family and domestic life.

As well as media institutions such as the UK’s BBC and commercial broadcasting channels in the US, manufacturers of media technologies, advertisers and the government all had vested interests in the success of TV as a feature of home life. The chapter examines the complex roles played by design, marketing, advertising and popular media discourses at the stages before and during consumption in shaping images, meanings and values associated with radio and TV technology as well as programming. Media imaginaries that underpinned ideas about the home, families, public and private spheres are identified to indicate how they generated the desire for TV. This chapter is informed by and structured around an original study of the material form of the TV receiver between the 1930s and 1960s to show how the cultural process of designing and styling the TV set ensured its appeal to householders. The chapter indicates that TV sets were designed, promoted and publicised to become a part of domestic life yet also rapidly came to embody ideas of technological progress and imaginative mobility.

The social need for television

Early broadcasting became a key player in the history of social struggles about the meanings and changing organisation of public and private spheres of society. Critiquing earlier ideas of technology-driven social change, Raymond Williams emphasises that broadcasting technology was not just a symptom that determined wider social change. He argued that technologies are developed and used in direct response to perceived social needs and problems. Radio, and then TV, were media technologies designed to address a growing need for homes and households to be connected to the outside world. Williams (1974) developed the concept of ‘mobile privatisation’ to explain the rise of a social need for TV as a technology and cultural form. The social need for broadcasting emerged through two apparently contradictory yet interrelated trends in modern social life: ‘geographic mobility’, achieved through technologies of communication and transportation; and ‘privatisation’, realised through housing construction, domestic architecture and community planning.

By the 1920s and 1930s, the rise of smaller, nuclear families in western societies coincided with spatially and socially mobile lifestyles. A desire and need for information from beyond the home was generated by the fragmentation of traditional, tight-knit neighbourhoods into smaller, separate households, and the movement of people to housing estates and suburbs comprised of looser social ties. As Williams explains, broadcasting resolved this problem by bringing information from the outside world to this new kind of private home. The social motives for broadcasting in western societies such as the UK and USA evolved, then, as part of attempts to solve an underlying social problem of connectivity prompted by the mobility and privatisation of households. Not only did broadcasting address the practical problem of connecting isolated homesteads to a central communication source. It also solved an ideological problem of connecting the private sphere of home, domesticity and family with the public sphere of politics, the economy and news about national events.

Williams’ concept of ‘mobile privatisation’ also invokes the idea of media as a form of ‘travel’ from the home. Referring to early TV in the US, Lynn Spigel explains: ‘It gives people a sense of travelling to distant places and having access to information and entertainment in the public sphere, even as they receive this in the confines of their own domestic interiors’ (2001: 391). In contrast to the earlier publicly situated mediums of cinema and theatre, radio and TV allowed family households to travel the world from the privacy of their living rooms by linking the outside world to the domestic context of the home. By broadcasting a flow of entertainment and education, the entrance of radio and TV in the home radically changed families’ experiences of domesticity (Spigel 1992; 2001). This sense of travel has been ingrained not only in popular discourses about broadcasting and in programming, but also in the very shape of media equipment for home use.

After the Second World War, opponents of TV regularly drew on gendered discourses in their criticism of the medium. As a ‘window on the world’ beyond the home, TV was thought likely to breach time-honoured boundaries between the domestic and public spheres by offering women a taste and yearning for public life. It was feared that housewives might neglect their domestic duties by becoming distracted or ‘passive viewers’, or even restless seekers of adventure beyond the home (Andrews 2012; Spigel 1992; 2001). Likewise, it was feared that children might generate unruly behaviour in the home as distracted viewers. These cultural tensions coincided with social unease about changes in the relationship between the home and public spheres of life. In the early twentieth century, notions of ‘domesticity’ were underpinned by the ideological distinction between a feminine private sphere and masculine public sphere. Known as the ‘separation of spheres’, this gendered division of social spheres was characterised by the association of men with the public sphere and women with the private sphere. Men were traditionally engaged in paid work, politics and masculine leisure pursuits beyond the home while women were expected to be occupied in the home via housework, childcare, and feminine hobbies and pastimes (Vickery 1993).

Family togetherness and the changing nature of mediated household interaction formed key concerns since the very inception of broadcasting. Women’s new civic status following universal suffrage challenged the traditional values anchored within separate spheres. However, the ensuing pressure placed on patriarchal principles was eased by boosting the Victorian idealisations of women: by locating women in the private sphere and referring to them as ‘wives’, ‘mothers’ and ‘housewives’ (Bailey 2009: 53). The ideological boundaries between public and private spheres were ruptured during the Second World War by the recruitment of women into full-time paid work. An explosion of popular and public discourses surrounded the role of the housewife in the immediate post-war period through broadcast programmes on both TV and radio, within a patriarchal drive to coax women back into the home.

TV was configured by reproducing powerful, traditional ideals of family life based on gendered and generational hierarchies. To combat public anxieties that TV might destabilise gender and generational relations, the emergent medium was promoted as a ‘new hearth’ that would bind the family together. Spigel (1992) emphasises the role of cultural fantasy that steered TV’s integration into everyday family life. Captivating advertisements for TV and images in lifestyle magazines promoted family togetherness, depicting the ‘family circle’ gathered round the TV set, to convey the idea that the medium could reunite traditional families after the upheaval of war. The figure of the housewife and her domestic work in the home was also heavily endorsed in these popular discourses. Significantly, the post-war familial ideal was an image of an exclusively white, middle-class and nuclear model, evoking a traditional middle-class lifestyle that, for women, centred on the home. The design and marketing of the TV set as a domestic item was an important discursive site that presented a particular vision of the media home.

Designing media for the home

Against a backdrop of suspicion about TV’s potentially disruptive effects on family life, the technology had to be carefully designed to fit into particular standards of home décor. Even though the medium was acclaimed as a ‘window on the world’ that could generate family togetherness, during the initial years of TV broadcasting TV receivers were regarded as inherently unattractive. While the ‘window on the world’ function was welcomed by many, the intrusion of the ‘one-eyed monster’ in the living room was not. How, then, did this bulky piece of equipment become a routine part of everyday life in the home? Ambivalent public and private responses to TV technology form part of a longer history. Although industrial capitalism was driven by an ability to invent and sell new products, western cultures of consumption showed a resistance to the ‘newness’ of technologies that stretched back to the eighteenth and nineteenth century (Forty 1986: 11). Until the 1920s, the living room was designated an intimate space for formal leisure and entertainment. Machinery such as sewing machines and electric lamps were decoratively styled to embody meanings associated with that sphere. New forms of electrical communications entering the home, such as telephone and radio, were viewed with a mixture of doubt and approval, prompting a questioning and re-evaluation of the private nature of that space (Spigel 1992; Marvin 1988; Susman 1984; Hirsch 1992; Morley 2007). This styling requirement was even more pertinent in the case of TV’s entrance into the intimate space of the living room.

The reception of radio in the home provides a backdrop to the arrival of TV. In the 1920s, radio was initially perceived as a novel medium for technically proficient men who approached the ‘crystal set’ as a ‘gadget’ (Moores 1993). Comprising a rudimentary assortment of resistors, wires and valves, the first wireless sets to enter the home were viewed, particularly by women, as alien objects that looked incongruous in a domestic setting. And, as ‘listening’ required the use of individual headsets, early radio divided rather than united the family in the shared space of the living room. During this early phase, radio generally appealed to men, who viewed the equipment in terms of its technological qualities rather than the media content. As a ‘masculine’ technology involving technical skill to operate it, the wireless was often banned from the living room and consigned to the workshop or shed (see Boddy 2004; Moores 1993). Several technologies such as home cinema (Klinger 2006) and computers (Lally 2002; Ward 2006) have subsequently proceeded through this ‘gadgeteer’ phase before being domesticated. For instance, when the first personal computers (PCs) were bought, usually by men, they were mainly used for programming, motivated by the question: ‘What can this thing do?’ In the case of radio and then TV, the equipment had to be carefully designed for domestic use as a significant preceding stage of domestic adoption.

Keen to sell radios to families for use in the living room, by the late 1920s and early 1930s, manufacturers and broadcasters devised sophisticated solutions to market the product. As new objects, radio and then TV had to be adapted in terms of their physical, visual and audible presence. In the case of early radio, design formed a vital process in its mass acceptance in the home by transforming it from a ‘gadget’ for male enthusiasts to an entertainment unit for the family (Silverstone and Haddon 1996: 47). The cabinet in which the radio was housed took on visual features relating to other domestic objects so that they could look ‘at home’ in the living room by resembling a piece of furniture: a wooden or Bakelite cabinet to replicate antique or contemporary furniture (Forty 1986). By the late 1930s, radio was no longer viewed as an intrusive masculine gadget but as a medium and object that enhanced the attractiveness of a feminised living room. Radio shifted its status from that of an unwelcome visitor to become part of the family through design and via programming aimed at ‘family audiences’ (Moore 1993; Hollows 2008).

During the early years of radio up to the 1950s, the female listener and her perceived interests influenced the nature of broadcasting by dictating the tone and subject matter of the medium (Andrews 2012). This focus on the housewife underpinned the following media preoccupation with domesticity. For example, radio programmes during the 1920s and 1930s were aimed at women as home-makers by promoting and reflecting particular ideas about the female audience and about the domestic setting. Daily domestic advice programmes depicted women as dependent on radio for companionship and domestic guidance. In the UK, programmes such as Common Sense in Household Work (1929), Household Talks (1929), Family Budgets (1931), How I Keep House (1934), Farmhouse Cookery (1935) and Housewives’ Choice (1946) categorised feminine interests with of those of home and family (Andrews 2012).

In the case of TV, the receiver did not pass through a gadgeteer phase. It was conceived, right from the start, as a commodity for mass consumption and domestic use. Broadcasting and domesticity reflected the rising consumerism of the 1950s in the US and UK, despite the continuing poverty and economic hardship experienced in post-war Britain. Fitting neatly into the economic framework of capitalism, it was designed as a ‘mass-produced’ commodity with standardised components for domestic consumption. Although Britain took the lead in TV manufacture in the 1930s, the sale of TV receivers to individual homes was inevitably slow. In 1936, less than 400 sets were available to receive the new service transmitted for only 30 miles from Alexandra Palace. A TV set cost £60, half the price of a small car (Bussey 1980). Limited transmission and the high price held back sales. By the start of the Second World War in 1939, the number of sets in use in Britain grew to around 23,000 (Scrine 1976). This was significantly higher than in the US and Germany, the two main rival countries involved in establishing TV broadcasting at the same time. But the manufacture of TV sets was halted by the British Government during the war. Wireless and TV factories were directed to produce communication machines for the war effort. This allowed the US to take a lead in TV cabinet design and manufacture.

Manufacturers recognised that the acceptance of this novel but unattractive technology in the home meant hiding the bulky valves and cathode ray tube in a cabinet. TV engineers, manufacturers and industrial designers, also known as product stylists in the US, led the process of its pre-domestication. The taming of this troubling yet desirable artefact was achieved by camouflaging the machine as furniture. Earlier radio cabinet makers and industrial designers performed a vital role in the media imagining of the TV’s future place in the home by concealing the monster eye in a crafted wooden cabinet. Some sets even came with closing doors to conceal the gaping eye of the screen when not in use. This visual embellishment of the set as furniture, suited to the standards of décor of the living room, facilitated and stabilised the concept of ‘family’ viewing (Spigel 1992). Starting life as a piece of furniture for home use, the TV set gradually replaced the radio as the living room’s central media apparatus in the post-war period. It even replaced the role of the hearth around which the family gathered. One particular design, the TV console, simulated a conventional hearth with a TV set placed inside a traditional fireplace frame (Chambers 2011).

At the time of writing, today’s homes boast not only wall-mounted TV sets but even interactive wall-sized ‘wallpaper screens’ for what is advertised as a ‘truly immersive experience’. But in the post-war period, manufacturers’ industrial design departments initially served to express the idea of a tamed, domesticated machine to offer consumers a sense of control over what was a novel and alien technological experience. The use of wood to style the console was crucial in signifying aspirational domesticity. In the UK, contrasting surfaces of wood in natural colours and handicraft skills reminiscent of the British Arts and Craft Revival were used. Interior décor, furniture and architecture of early twentieth-century Britain was gradually influenced by the European Modern Movement. Famous and experienced designers were recruited by British manufactures to dress these machines in plastic moulding as well as wood and Bakelite, including Wells Coates for E.K. Cole Ltd., Victor Taylor for Ace Radio Ltd. and Richard D. Russell for Murphy Radio. When the project of modernism finally took hold in Britain in the interwar years, clean lines became synonymous with clean lives (Chambers 2011).

For example, as a pioneer of the Modern Movement in 1930s British architecture and design, Wells Coates worked with the radio manufacturing company, E.K. Cole Ltd. Coates addressed the popular demands for conventional, decorative craft styles in furniture by blending them with the more austere functionalism of the Modern movement through plastic moulding. In America, one of the most influential designers of TV sets was John Vassos who worked on the design of the first mass-produced TV set for RCA Corporation, debuted at the 1939 New York World Fair (Schwartz 2006). He designed RCA’s 12-inch TRK-12 receiver for the Fair and even a ‘phantom’ version housed in a transparent Lucite plastic case. Vassos’ design philosophy was unique in fusing the harsh Bauhaus functionalism and softer style of American streamlining with rich patinas and generous forms of classic case furniture in handcrafted, highly polished wood cabinets. These sets were aimed at the wealthy, inferred by advertisements depicting TV viewers dressed in evening suits and ball gowns. The luxury status of these TV sets was also signified by high prices from US$199.50 to $600 and also by sales in New York’s luxury department stores: Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s and Wanamaker’s (Schwartz 2006).

In the UK, exhibitions such as the 1936 Olympia and 1939 Radiolympia were major spectacles that dramatised and venerated the introduction of TV for home use. At the 1939 Radiolympia exhibition, every major radio manufacturer exhibited TV sets or combined radio and TV sets (On the Air1). However, the New York World Fair was staged on an altogether grander scale, reflecting Vassos’ flamboyant designs. While war was waging in Europe, exhibition space for the new medium in the US nearly doubled at the 1940 New York World’s Fair. The display featured Vassos’ ‘Television Suites’, showcasing new models in ten different American home settings including receivers housed in stylish bleached mahogany modular furniture. During this period, major American designers such as Donald Deskey and Russell Wright, as well as Vassos, styled multi-unit display cabinets for the 1940 New York Fair’s ‘America at Home’ pavilion, thereby confirming America’s international lead in TV set manufacture and sales.

Family, nation and visions of progress

After a five-year break in TV broadcasting during the Second World War (1939–1945), a TV service was resumed in the UK in 1946. At this stage, less than two-thirds of its adult population had ever laid eyes on a working TV set (Hopkins 1961). It was not until 1952 that the signal could be received by 81 per cent of UK homes. By now, the US posed a serious threat to British TV manufacturing, being five years ahead in domestic product development. American TVs were marketed as multi-console sets with radio, TV and phonographs combined in luxurious and expensive wood cabinets for around $500 and also as cheaper table receivers for less than half that price (Kosareff 2005). Despite being weakened by war, progress in the UK was rapid. More than 93 per cent transmission coverage was achieved by 1957 (Hopkins 1961). At a cultural level, the state rebuilding of Britain’s infrastructure entailed a new, positive vision of nation and family to be promoted through the medium of TV (Scannell 2000; Briggs 2000). TV was conceived as a medium to be consumed by families to be linked to the idea of ‘a nation of families’ (Morley 2002: 108).

For example, at national exhibitions of the early to mid twentieth century, the model home played a major role in promoting the family as the heart of the nation. Audiences were invited to sign up as members of this new nation as consumers of new products (Sparke 2004). In the 1950s, the institutions that promoted ideas about ‘good design’, the ‘ideal home’ and ‘good living’ in the US and UK, presented TV broadcasting and good design as moral vehicles of national improvement, framed within a growing commodity culture. In these ways, the physical presence and domestic design of the TV receiver became a national issue, proffering a moral good by revering the nuclear family home. In the UK, this national vision of good design and good living was fostered through an alliance between manufactures and government-sponsored organisations such as the Council of Industrial Design (COID). The COID’s role was to advance British manufacturing and foster national pride through good design during a critical period of national reconstruction. ‘Good design’ was conceived as a patriotic endeavour (Jones 2003). National broadcasting formed part of domestic media imaginaries, summoning ideas of domestic cultures as family cultures, thereby marginalising and discounting those who were not part of traditional families (Hollows 2008: 108). The establishment of broadcasting helped to domesticate the nation and embrace a nation of families (Morley 2002: 107).

The popular media were paramount in domesticating the TV set, in alliance with industrial design, by associating the medium with middle-class ideals of family leisure and domestic technology innovation. Extensive marketing efforts were made to confirm TV as vital to the family’s gaze. In magazines such as the Readers Digest advertisements promoted TV sets not only as cosy family-centred objects but also as symbols of luxury, leisure and sophistication. Advertisements of couples dressed in ball gowns and tuxedos were, incongruously, depicted in comfortable living rooms gathered round luxurious, quality wooden veneered sets (Chambers 2011). British and American advertisements managed to appeal to traditional family values at the same time as emphasising design features that signified TV as the pinnacle of progress and modernity. Advertisements also invoked the idea of immediate access to the public sphere from home (Morley 2007). For example, the UK’s 1949 Baird Townsman console TV receiver with 12-inch cathode ray tube was dressed in a cabinet of polished walnut, with controls arranged at the sides of the unit. An advertisement for the product comprised a large aerial photograph of London showing the curve of the River Thames with views of the Houses of Parliament, Whitehall and Westminster Abbey displayed next to the TV set’s specifications. The image signified direct communication between home and Parliament, the very heart of the public sphere. In small print, the advertisement claimed:

The Townsman is a console of exceptionally dignified appearance . . . Designed with all the craftsmanship and finish that goes to the making of a piece of quality furniture, the Townsman will make an imposing and dignified addition to any room as well as a superlative example of television technique.2

(Chambers 2011)

Women’s lifestyle magazines of the 1950s conveyed TV as a technology of the hearth: as the focal point of family space (Spigel 1990). Affluent nuclear families were pictured gathered around the console, gazing into the glowing TV set reminiscent of the glowing hearth as an emblem of familial intimacy and harmony. Handbooks on interior décor of the late 1940s and 1950s advised readers how to position the appliance in the home and how to develop TV-viewing conventions. In the UK, the design of the TV set was highlighted in COID publications and in the displays of furnished rooms designed for the ‘Britain Can Make It’ exhibition (Jones 2003; Maguire and Woodham 1997). Thus, on both sides of the Atlantic, the home came to represent a stage on which good taste in design and wholesome family values were played out (Spigel 1992). In time, TV overtook the radio’s commanding position in the living room. It became the ‘must have’ appliance: the commodity that characterised the home. Ethnographies of families’ uses of TV confirm that families negotiated their use of this novel equipment in the home both by incorporating it into domestic life and making home adjustments to suit the new medium (see Morley 2002; Morse 1990; Silverstone 1994; Fachel Leal 1990). By the late 1950s, the act of owning a TV set signified ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’ (O’Sullivan 1991).

Metaphors of ‘home theatre’ and ‘window on the world’ were drawn on by industry, advertisers, policy-makers, artists, critics, social scientists and engineers as well as in popular literature such as women’s magazines to convey the idea of viewers being imaginatively transported across the world. The middle-class home had been imagined as a theatre since Victorian times and was subsequently articulated through modern housing design. US post-war housing design reflected earlier modernist homes that accentuated theatricality and visual features as key organising principles. TV was represented as a socially healthy version of theatre that could be enjoyed within the privacy of the home without the discomfort of mixing with the masses (Spigel 1992).

The theatre became an organising metaphor for the middle-class home, reflecting the performative dynamics of everyday life. Architects, plan-book writers, religious leaders, domestic engineers, women’s magazines and books on interior décor were variously describing the home as a ‘stage’ on which conventional social roles are played out by family members. To avoid the risk of entering potentially infected public spaces outside the home, family audiences could stage this home theatre in an ‘antiseptic electrical space’ (Spigel 1992). While advertisements showing glamorously dressed couples conveyed an imaginary night out in town, the idea of the home theatre and images of families gathered together round the TV ‘hearth’ evoked a reinstatement of leisurely family values. Advertisers managed to imply that TV could reconcile the paired yet contradictory aspirations for engagement in the public and the private world of traditional family life. TV presented imaginary travel to urban spaces at the same time as allowing families to stay together in the safety of the suburban home. However, later sociological studies uncovered the isolation that women often felt in their new suburban TV homes (Freidan 1963).

TV rapidly became the main leisure activity for children who, by the late 1950s, were watching an average of almost two hours of TV a day (Himmelweit et al. 1958). This generated public anxieties that TV was likely to replace cinema going and socialising with friends. Women’s magazines alerted parents about the dangers that TV might present for children in the form of passive addiction or unruly behaviour. In this respect, the idea of the home theatre was tied to both utopian fantasies and dystopian anxieties about the prospects of family life and of gender and generational relationships in the home.

The domestication of television programming

TV was not only rendered familiar and habitual through its styling to match the furniture of the home. It was also a receiver of programmes that reflected and reinforced the normality and inevitability of domestic family life and suburban living. Despite opportunities to discover the outside world from the privacy of the living room, TV programming was, like radio before it, preoccupied with everyday domestic life. This medium played a vital role in media imaginaries of domestic space (as well as of travel away from home, addressed below). In the US, TV network advertisements offered women advice on how to juggle TV viewing with housework. Daytime TV was built around the imagined domestic routines and appropriate pastimes of housewives (Spigel 1992). Programmes such as soap operas comprised a series of short segments so that women could watch TV in a distracted manner while going about their household chores. Ideas about women’s interests were promoted via variety and magazine TV programme formats centred on domestic life and providing advice to women about how to perform their housewife roles.

Daytime soap operas were initially introduced on US commercial TV to support and slot in between advertisements for soap. Together with situation comedies, these genres produced narratives involving family life that contributed to the domestication and normalising of TV within domestic routines (Spigel 1992). These programmes included series such as I Love Lucy (1951–1960, CBS), Leave It to Beaver (1957–1963, CBS/ABC), The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952–1966, ABC) and Father Knows Best (1954–1960, CBS). The scheduling of programmes around domestic daily routines in the home also promoted ideas of a ‘family audience’. Spigel’s reference to the theatricalisation of the home front suggests that, through both the promotion of family TV viewing and TV programmes, families themselves were conceived as a new and desirable spectacle. Hollywood stars were transported from the public movie screen to the sphere of the home through TV. This facilitated the negotiation of Hollywood’s involvement in TV and consolidated its assimilation into the routine, everyday life of the housewife (Mann 1992).

When TV broadcasting was resumed in 1946 after the Second World War in the UK, it consisted only of public service broadcasting via the BBC. Unlike the US, no commercial TV was allowed until 1955. Initially, the BBC offered a series of specialist afternoon magazine programmes for women, with titles focusing on home and family life including Designed for Women (1947), For the Housewife (1948), Leisure and Pleasure (1951), About the Home (1951) and Women’s Viewpoint (1951). These programmes were broadcast in an early-afternoon slot to attract female audiences. The content of these programmes played a major part in circumscribing women’s roles and responsibilities in the home. From the mid twentieth century, national exhibitions were overtaken by TV programmes that influenced the institutions that promoted ideas about ‘good design’, the ‘ideal home’ and ‘good living’. Model homes were now presented to audiences via TV programmes in their living rooms (Sparke 2004). Programmes such as Designed for Women and Leisure and Pleasure were typically located in cosy, feminised TV studio settings set up as comfortable, middle-class living rooms to present a traditional middle-class lifestyle centred on the home (Irwin 2015: 165). In 1953, the BBC appointed a dedicated head of TV programmes ‘for women’ (Irwin 2015; Andrews 2012). Exemplifying media imaginaries of early TV, the normalisation of the housewife role and the universalising of middle-class values as ideal lifestyles was a recurring theme throughout the early history of domestic media.

Women’s magazines corresponded with TV programmes to cultivate domestic and consumer identities. As part of the early process of mediatising the home, TV formed the backcloth for a flood of popular discourses about the home, set within an explicit consumerist framework. In the UK, House and Garden displayed pictures of opulent home interiors while Woman magazine depicted the lifestyles of celebrities including Princess Margaret and famous actors (Irwin 2015: 166). Contrasting with women’s lifestyle magazines of the period, certain TV programmes such as the BBC’s Wednesday Magazine (1958–1963) conceived a female audience as perceptive and discriminating with an interest in the public world of the arts. These programmes addressed their female audiences not only as housewives and consumers but also as citizens and voters (Leman 1987; Irwin 2015). Topics such as architecture were repositioned within a domestic framework to provide cultural signifiers of the ‘ideal’ house and home. For example, Irwin (2015) provides an analysis of a specific episode of the Wednesday Magazine programme on the design and building of the new modernist house, Edritt House, in Mill Hill, North London. The programme moved between the domestic/private and cultural/public divide but, significantly, kept returning the topic to domesticity. Irwin explains that:

This is a transitional stage in the process of establishing a style of cultural television for a female audience. The house offers a look at a very aspirational and affluent lifestyle, especially so in a late 1950s Britain just emerging from a period of scarcity and austerity.

(Irwin 2015: 168)

A whole discourse was created through TV programming to frame domesticity, femininity and aspirational home living, as Irwin (2015) confirms. Today, programmes such as Grand Designs (Channel 4, 1999–) that feature unusual and often elaborate architectural projects and series about house-hunting, such as Location, Location, Location (Channel 4, 2000–), are described as ‘property porn’,3 providing a continuing focus on home to articulate consumerism and aspirational living in contemporary TV (also see Chapter 8).

David Morley (1992) emphasises the power of media texts to bring public life into domestic cultures and to actually shape those domestic cultures as national cultures. In the case of early TV, the experience of a ‘public’ realm was fostered in the context of private, domestic life by conveying a sense of belonging to a nation. For example, in the early 1950s the UK TV industry needed something more than product styling and persuasive magazine features to boost sales. It came in the form of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, a major public event that won millions of households over to the new medium. Although there were only about two and a half million sets in use in the UK at the time, an estimated 20 million people watched at least part of the Coronation on TV on sets of friends, neighbours and in shop windows (Bussey 1980; Briggs 2000). Through scheduling and by broadcasting national events, the content of media are centrally involved in creating and communicating powerful ideas of the nation, of distant ‘homelands’ and of domestic space, thereby evoking both traditional and new imaginings of ‘home’ (Morley 1992; Hollows 2008; also see Chapter 7).

Benedict Anderson (1991) advanced the influential idea of the modern nation-state as an ‘imagined community’ to explain the need for a common understanding between the citizens in order to engage in a national consciousness. Despite not knowing their fellow citizens, members of a community form an idea of a communion with these strangers through the ritual of newspaper reading, listening to radio and watching TV to generate a sense of collective experience. Explaining that the development of the national newspaper laid the foundations for this imagined nation, Anderson states:

It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.

(Anderson 1991: 6)

In the same way, the establishment of a national system of early broadcasting nurtured a sense of collective experience with other anonymous listeners and viewers, evoked through the content of broadcasting and by the weaving of TV schedules into households’ daily routines. The programming of key items such as the news and soap operas at specific times of the day creates a sense of a common nation by collectively structuring the daily schedules of individual households across the country. However, this imagined community represents a particular version of family and nation: mainly white, middle class and heteronormative. Households and social groups that do not conform to these types of families and identities can become marginalised or excluded through these powerful media imaginaries (Hollows 2008). In terms of broadcasting schedules, the term ‘dayliness’ developed by Paddy Scannel (2000) describes how broadcasting contributes to the shaping of everyday routines. Radio and TV schedules slot into and shape daily routines in such a way as to confirm the ordinariness and inevitability of broadcasting and of those domestic routines. These schedules become so natural that audiences come to structure the temporal patterns of the day, week and year in a way that connect these domestic temporal rhythms with practices that traverse the nation (Scannel 2000: 19–21; Gauntlett and Hill 1999). As a feature of the early stages of the mediatisation of the home, this form of assimilation can be identified as a ‘normalisation of social practice’ (Jansson 2013; see Chapter 1).

Domesticity, progress and portable TV

TV viewing was gradually integrated into family routines and into the spatial geography of the home, with the TV set rapidly becoming a mundane, ‘tamed’ item (Barthes 1977). But by the end of the 1950s, a new set of metaphors emerged to describe home as a place for travel. During this period of the 1950s and 1960s when TV gradually became a taken-for-granted medium, the TV console began to embody the social tensions associated with two apparently conflicting ideas: domesticity and progress. Spigel (1992) explains that the framework of ‘theatricality’ was connected with and gradually fed into the idea of ‘mobility’. She refers to these new ideas about mediated travel away from home through the term ‘mobile home’ to suggest that watching TV encouraged audiences to cultivate a preoccupation with the potential of space travel and satellite technologies. The idea of TV as ‘travel’ was expressed through programmes about far away places and voyages of adventure and by its new material design as a portable set (Spigel 2001). This preoccupation corresponded with the introduction of cheaper, portable radios and second TV sets from the late 1950s and early 1960s. From an early stage, TV receiver design had signified the contradictions between a craft aesthetic and newly emerging styles associated with mass production, between styles of craftsmanship and the artistic principles of modernism. The arrival of portable TV promised something more exciting. Allowing more flexibility in styling, slimmer TV cabinets offered manufacturers a major opportunity to reconfigure the meanings of the TV set and increase sales through lower prices.

The TV set was liberated from its permanent place in the living room to convey an imaginative mobility. The TV set entered new imaginative territory by moving beyond the living room into kitchens, studies and bedrooms. This new item could now be positioned almost anywhere around the home, leading to the weakening of communal viewing habits. Yet, as Morley (2002: 92) reminds us, in terms of family household dynamics, communal family viewing was never an activity that occurred ‘naturally’. Family-oriented viewing had to be carefully negotiated as part of family life, with evening meals often planned to coincide with regular TV programmes (Gauntlett and Hill 1999). Communal family viewing in the living room was therefore short-lived. Yet this idea has lingered as a powerful fantasy to this day (Morley 2002).

In 1956, a new portable set launched in the UK was advertised in the Wireless and Electrical Trader magazine with a clumsy but intriguing caption: ‘ANNOUNCING CARRY-IT-AROUND TV’.4 The 9-inch Ekco portable with FM radio sold for 66 guineas. It was placed in a moulded plastic box designed by E.K. Cole Ltd., operated by mains or 12-volt car battery, with built-in collapsible aerial (Chambers 2011). The handle on the top of the console resembled a suitcase handle. A mobile ‘personal TV’ was born, designed to be carried around like a piece of luggage. Recommendations for use were listed to help customers decide what to do with the gadget: ‘IN THE HOME; AS A SECOND SET; IN SICKROOMS OR HOSPITALS; IN THE OFFICE OR BOARDROOM; IN HOTELS OR GUESTHOUSES; ON PICNICS; IN CARAVANS; ON HOLIDAYS AND MOTOR TOURS’. Householders were enticed, through design and lowered prices, to purchase second and third sets for use around the home. Yet the impulse to push the technology outdoors and mobilise it was striking. Two years later, in 1958, a 17-inch Ferguson portable TV set was named ‘Flight 546’ to emphasise its mobility. The advert displayed a picture of a portable TV set with a passenger aeroplane on its screen. Costing 58 guineas, the portable boasted a gold-plated telescopic aerial, and an ‘ELEGANT CABINET, ONLY 14” DEEP OVERALL, COVERED WITH SIMULATED PIGSKIN, WEIGHT 31 ½ lbs ONLY’ (Chambers 2011).

Needless to say, portable TV sets were seldom moved around the house, let alone outside the home. Awkward and heavy, these machines either had to be plugged into the mains or weighed down with heavy batteries. And outdoor reception quality was very poor. Nevertheless, portable TV in the 1960s captured the public imagination by triggering new metaphors of home and travel. The naming of these new portable designs was pure fantasy. In the US, by now the vanguard of portable TV engineering design, Philco launched a transistorised and battery powered portable set called the ‘Safari’ model, evoking images of embarking on an African hunting expedition, accompanied by the portable TV. The naming of these models was as crucial as the styling, capturing the idea of mobility and exotic outdoor adventure. General Electric produced the ‘Adventurer’, Zenith created the ‘Jetliner’ and RCA the ‘Globe Trotter’ with their stress on imaginary travel away from the home. Later, more practical mini portables were advertised in the US, using metaphors of transport. The idea of mobility and adventure associated with TV symbolised positive notions of portable culture (Spigel 2001). Portables designed with sun shields were advertised positioned beside swimming pools and at picnic sites to evoke an indoor–outdoor aesthetic.

During this period, futuristic designs associated with portability were inspired by the dawning of space travel in the US. A mobile notion of domesticity was conveyed via 1960s images that even depicted the home as a rocket. Spigel (2001) argues that the portable TV set expressed a ‘privatised mobility’. The imagery of space-age domesticity signalled a break with the past, corresponding with ideas of the New Frontier promoted by President Kennedy’s emphasis on space travel as a supreme sign of national progress. The high-tech world of telecommunications transformed ideas about private and public space: the metaphor of home as ‘theatre’ was overtaken by the idea of the home launched ‘in orbit’ (Baudrillard 1985; Spigel 2001). Inverting Williams’ (1974) concept of mobile privatisation that described the reconnection of the privatised home with the public sphere, Spigel emphasises the aspirations of progressive family lifestyles and glamour of escape or travel away from the home conveyed in the popular media.

Shifting from feminine to masculine aspirations and identities, portable TVs implied a move away from ideas of home as a decorative feminine space for the pursuit of trivial pastimes in favour of a masculine, scientific space associated with elevated goals of national supremacy and citizenship (Spigel 2001: 390). The TV set now signified technological progress, mobility, modernity and adventure rather than cosy domesticity and family togetherness. The fantasies of portability in both design and in advertisements of the 1960s conveyed, then, an emergent set of gender and generational relations. A masculinisation of the technology was effected via associations with mobility and scientific progress.

In addition to masculine images of mobility and progress, the portable TV signified social class distinctions. In the UK, portable TVs often replaced large-screened sets in middle-class homes. Public debates about the potentially harmful effects of TV viewing in the 1960s, such as Mary Whitehouse’s ‘Clean-up Campaign’,5 coincided with widening accessibility to TV to influence class attitudes to the technology. Kudos was now attached to ‘low’ viewing. The middle classes expressed themselves as ‘selective viewers’. A gradual switch occurred in terms of the relationship between social status, size of set and its prominence as an object in the living room. By the early 1970s, working-class homes were seen to possess the largest sets with the middle classes hiding portables discreetly among bookshelves.

Class distinctions in taste were also found by Ondina Fachel Leal (1995) in her study of the meaning of TV in Brazil. Like the British experience, the TV set in upper-class Brazilian homes was positioned more discretely, away from public view. Among the urban working classes, the TV set was regarded as a treasured possession with the set’s status reflected by its prominent positioning in the lounge to show off the owners’ successful ‘modern life’. The TV set in working-class homes was surrounded by other meaningful ornaments to encourage the ‘watching’ of TV not only by members of the household but also by passers-by on the street, whether the set was switched on or off (Fachel Leal 1995). A contrasting trend was observable in the US, where large-sized sets were universally esteemed in living room settings. And, among large-screened sets in the UK, the concealment of the screen in a wooden cabinet, often with closing doors, persisted as a design theme right up to the 1980s alongside futuristic portable designs. Advertisements mirrored these contradictory images of craft tradition and scientific progress by mixing futuristic ideals of progress with highly sentimental images of home and nature (Kosareff 2005). This brings to mind Bruno Latour’s observation, that ‘modernity’ represents the construction of systems that, incongruently, fuse together technology and nature (Latour 1993).

From communal to individual viewing

Portable designs not only reflected ideas about travel and adventure. They also corresponded with new TV-viewing habits during a period when, on both sides of the Atlantic, the home’s ‘aura of sharing and communality’ was wearing thin (Cieraad 2006). As mentioned earlier, the position of receivers in the home branched out from the lounge to kitchens and bedrooms along with the growth in viewing, improvements in programmes, reliability of sets and, importantly, the introduction of domestic central heating. By the early 1960s, open-plan kitchens and living rooms were featuring in modern home architecture and design. The opening up of communal living space allowed housewives to supervise children, chat with husbands and watch TV while preparing meals (Cieraad 2006; Morley 2007). Yet open-plan architecture and family TV viewing began to clash with the individual projects of household members. It sparked domestic tensions about programme preferences and multiple uses of these communal spaces.

The arrival of a range of electronic products in the home from the 1960s onwards fostered home-based but separate, individualised tasks and undermined the ideals of shared use of space (Hirsch 1992; Silverstone 1991). Imaginative media mobilities that embraced the social tensions associated with domesticity and progress corresponded with a shift in emphasis from familialism to individualisation (Giddens 1992; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995). As a feature of individualisation, family members’ understanding of their social position and their interactions with other people is guided less by traditional duties and more by active personal choice and negotiation between individuals. The portable set was gradually designed to signify sole use through the production of more individualised devices with the addition of remote controls, headphones and muting switches. The device was marketed as a remedy for family fights over programme choice (Cieraad 2006). Advances in cable, satellite and video confirmed the demise of family-centred viewing and rise of more private, individualised viewing (Hirsch 1992). By the 1980s, children were regularly watching TV in their bedrooms and parents watched in the living room, with 80 per cent of British household TV viewing becoming dispersed (Gauntlet and Hill 1999). Portability and mobility came to symbolise the contradictions between passive, individualised ‘bedroom viewing’ and active, mobile viewing (see Chapter 4). Following the rise of portable TV, more personalised, communication technologies came to represent the tensions and pressures involved in managing the familiar binaries of personal/private and public/outdoors. This occurred during a period when traditional family values were being re-evaluated in relation to aspirations towards a democratisation of intimacy (Chambers 2012).

Initial representations of TV in advertisements and magazines as a ‘harmonising’ force were gradually overtaken by alternative visions of individuals being entertained separately, as isolated audiences. Families were depicted at home together yet apart: watching their chosen programmes on separate TV sets around the home. Spigel explains that these contradictory discourses about domestic media reflected the ideological tensions of the era. Critics and commentators maintained that TV might pose a danger to family life and did not belong in the family home (Spigel 1992). To promote family togetherness, TV was often conveyed as an ideal form of family leisure and useful medium to draw children into the home and spend more time in the company of the family. Yet, at the same time, children were depicted as potential prey to the power of TV. Such contradictory discourses and anxieties have also been triggered in connection with later technologies such as video games, mobile phones and computer tablets, as indicated in the following chapters.

Conclusion

This chapter indicates that early domestic technology broadcasting was propelled by a combination of commercial and idealistic impulses. The chapter has also identified some of the principle ways in which radio and TV are distinguished from other kinds of objects by chronicling the history of the design and styling of the technology for home use in relation to wider popular discourses that comprised media imaginaries of the time. With a focus on TV, the chapter indicates that early twentieth-century domestic media technologies comprised a vital stage of interpretative flexibility during which a range of media imaginaries were generated, deliberated and projected about their uses and adaptation to the home. The TV set’s placement in the home in the 1950s comprised the beginning of the mediatisation of the home as an evolving process (Peil and Röser 2014: 237). TV manufacturers, designers, advertisers and popular media played a vital role alongside programming in this cultural process by presenting early versions of the apparatus as a device for embellishing the décor of the family home, elevating domestic femininity and fostering family togetherness. Characterised by ambivalent social attitudes towards newer media technologies, negative social responses posed challenges for the government, manufactures, designers and advertisers of TV receivers whose aim was to persuade households to embrace the equipment as both a domestic commodity and a moral worth.

The chapter has identified the key ways in which early television was distinguished from other kinds of objects by examining the intersecting roles of industrial design, marketing and programming in shaping the social meanings of TV sets during its early adoption. The expression of post-war national and familial values of good design and good living associated with the advancement of television technology in the UK was signified through a combination of TV content and console design. The medium was venerated via the aesthetic and material symbolism of the TV set, from craft-styled wooden consoles to 1960s’ portable designs and also displays of these products at national exhibitions to promote ‘good design’. Positioned within a domestic framework, British 1950s programmes on architecture and home design endorsed the object’s status by providing cultural signifiers of the ‘ideal’ home and by conflating ideas about ‘audience’, ‘consumer’ and ‘nation’. Portable TV designs invoked a sense of travel and personalised use, undermining notions of family togetherness associated with earlier notions of TV as the family ‘hearth’. Through a focus on the relationship between design, programming and wider popular discourses, the chapter builds on the seminal work of scholars such as Morley, Spigel, Scannel, Moores and Hollows who have advanced understandings of the role of domestic media in communicating powerful ideas of nation, family and ‘home’.

Social concerns about mobile forms of domestic leisure embodied in portable TV are indicative of more recent changes in work and leisure (Spigel 2001). The ideals of mobility, freedom and progress remain central themes in contemporary imaginaries of new digital technologies and domesticity, reflecting anxieties about individualisation and changing family life. Today, these concerns are conveyed through ideas about the movement of information between homes and work, exemplified by the introduction of the computer and then the rise of the digitally connected contemporary home explored in later chapters.

Notes

  1. On the Air, the online radio and TV history centre, available at: http://www.vintageradio.co.uk/htm/tvhistory.htm, accessed 5 December 2015.

  2. Available at: www.thevalvepage.com/tv/baird/townsman/brochure.htm, accessed 25 May 2010.

  3. For an example of debates in the press about property porn, see London, B., ‘Property Porn: The UK’s Favourite New Guilty Pleasure’, The Daily Mail, 10 September 2012, available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2200949/Property-porn-The-UKs-favourite-new-guilty-pleasure.html, accessed 25 May 2010.

  4. Wireless and Electrical Trader 1956, available at http://www.rewindmuseum.com/vintagetv.htm, accessed 15 September 2010.

  5. See Thompson (2012) for a study of Mary Whitehouse’s campaigning activities.

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