📺 Telly

1950s 1950

Listen With Mother

Fifteen minutes of stories and nursery rhymes on the Home Service at quarter to two, aimed at under-fives and the mothers who needed a sit down.

📺 Telly✏️ School

1950s 1953

The Coronation Television

More than two million television sets were bought or rented for the 1953 Coronation, and most of them had twenty people sitting in front of them.

📺 Telly🛋️ Around The House

1950s 1956

The Test Card And Closedown

Broadcasting stopped. An announcer said goodnight, the anthem played, and the screen went to a dot.

📺 Telly

1960s 1960

Sooty And The XYLOPHONE

Harry Corbett's glove puppet, bought on Blackpool pier, who became one of the longest-running acts in British television.

📺 Telly🧸 Toys & Games

1960s 1963

Blue Peter Badges

Send in something good enough and a shield-shaped badge arrived in the post. Nothing else at that age came close.

📺 Telly✏️ School

1960s 1964

Top Of The Pops

The chart show that decided what was in your ears for the following seven days, whether you liked it or not.

📺 Telly🎵 Music

1960s 1969

Watching The Moon Landing On A Rented Telly

Britain stayed up for Apollo 11, most of it in front of a set that had been rented specially for the occasion.

📺 Telly📟 Tech & Gadgets

1970s 1970

Test Card F

The BBC's colour test card: Carole Hersee playing noughts and crosses with a toy clown called Bubbles, broadcast for decades.

📺 Telly

1970s 1974

Bagpuss

Thirteen episodes. That is all there ever were, and it is one of the best-loved British programmes ever made.

📺 Telly

1970s 1974

Ceefax

Text pages broadcast in the gaps of the TV signal: news, football scores, and page 302 for the weather.

📺 Telly📟 Tech & Gadgets

1970s 1974

Watching The Wheeltappers And Shunters Social Club

Granada recreated a working men's club in a studio: singers, comics, a gavel and a bar.

📺 Telly🎵 Music

1970s 1978

Grange Hill

Phil Redmond's series about a London comprehensive, with bullying, truancy and a sausage on a fork in the title sequence.

📺 Telly✏️ School

1980s 1980

Ski Sunday And The Theme Tune

A BBC Sunday afternoon fixture with a theme tune more famous than the sport it introduced.

⚽ Sport📺 Telly

1980s 1988

The Ceefax Football Vidiprinter Saturday

The vidiprinter on Grandstand, spelling out scores slowly enough that you could feel the result arriving.

⚽ Sport📺 Telly

1980s 1989

Teletext Holidays On Page 260

A generation booked its holidays off the telly, writing phone numbers down as the pages rotated.

📺 Telly📟 Tech & Gadgets

1990s 1992

Gladiators

Lycra, foam pugil sticks, and the Eliminator. Saturday night ITV at its absolute peak.

📺 Telly⚽ Sport

1990s 1993

Ceefax Page 302 For The Football Scores

Saturday afternoon spent hitting the reveal button and waiting for a score to change.

⚽ Sport📺 Telly

1990s 1993

Mr Blobby

A character from Noel's House Party who became a genuine Christmas number one and then a theme park.

📺 Telly🎵 Music

1990s 1994

Saturday Morning Telly: Live & Kicking

The BBC's Saturday morning block, with games, bands, cartoons and a competition where somebody got gunged.

📺 Telly

1990s 1994

The National Lottery Launch

Saturday night television stopped for the draw, presented live, with Noel Edmonds and a machine called Guinevere.

📺 Telly

2000s 2000

Big Brother Launch Night

Channel 4 put strangers in a house and ran it 24 hours a day, and Britain could not look away.

📺 Telly

2010s 2012

Analogue Television Switch-Off

Britain completed digital switchover in October 2012, ending analogue transmission and taking teletext with it.

📺 Telly📟 Tech & Gadgets

2010s 2014

The Great British Bake Off On The BBC

A gentle competitive baking show that became the most watched programme on British television.

📺 Telly🍽️ Food & Drink