6/17/2023 0 Comments Old broadcast end of night screenBy 1960, the figure had risen to almost three-quarters of homes. In 1950, only 350,000 homes in the UK had televisions. There was a children’s TV segment called Watch With Mother, the implicit message being that good mothers stayed at home while fathers went out and worked.īut by the mid-50s, in spite of the prevailing conservatism of the age, the toddlers’ truce was under threat, thanks to the booming popularity of TV as a medium. LP Hartley famously opened his novel The Go-Between with the line: “The past is a foreign country they do things differently there.” That was true nowhere more than television in the 1950s, and, viewed through the prism of modern sensibilities, some of the programming appears positively antediluvian. Try getting your kid off TikTok to go and read Deuteronomy this weekend and see what happens. And on Sundays, no children’s programmes were permitted between 2pm and 4pm, lest it prevent youngsters from studying the Bible. Only eight hours of broadcasting was permitted on Saturdays, and only seven and three-quarter hours on Sundays. The rules were even more draconian at weekends. The rules, laid out by the postmaster general as the post office oversaw telecommunications and broadcasting, stated that the BBC (and later ITV) could broadcast between 9am and 11pm, but with only two hours shown before 1pm.Ĭhildhood favourites … The Woodentops on Watch With Mother. The TV stopped broadcasting at six o’clock, and that was my cue to have a bath and get into my jammies.”Īdmittedly, this was against a backdrop of TV that was broadcast for less than 12 hours every day. “We didn’t think about it really,” says Norma. But in the early 1950s, it was simply accepted as part of life. To modern parents, struggling to combat their children’s unfettered access to social media at 11pm on a school night, the idea of the toddlers’ truce might seem a trifle quaint. It was also in place to ensure that children didn’t accidentally stray into the dangerous world of adult television, where their fragile minds could be corrupted by the unutterable filth of Dixon of Dock Green or This Is Your Life. This paternalistic approach to broadcasting was seen at the time as being socially responsible, with the idea being that a TV-free hour would, as Time magazine put it, allow parents to “wring out their moppets and put them to bed”. Most readers under the age of 70 will probably never have heard of this peculiar artefact, but those of Norma’s vintage certainly remember it. It was the responsibility of parents, not the state, to put their children to bed at the right time Charles Hill, former postmaster general
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