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And Now, the Mating Dance of the Puffin

118
ipsos1/23/2020 8:11:00 am PST

re: #113 lizardofid

When I was there I think there were three. BBC 1, 2, and IVT?

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ITV was the third (well, actually second).

BBC came first, of course, with regular scheduled TV broadcasts as early as 1936. They were significantly ahead of the US, in fact.

Commercial TV arrived in 1955. “ITV” was actually a loose alliance of local/regional channels covering the UK. It wasn’t until the 1990s that they all came under common ownership and began branding just as “ITV.” Before that, you watched Thames TV and London Weekend TV if you were in London, Yorkshire TV if you were in Yorkshire, HTV if you were in Wales, etc.

The BBC added a second channel, BBC2, in the early 1960s.

Channel 4 arrived, as noted earlier, in 1984.

Everything’s exploded since then; you can turn on satellite TV or cable or over-the-air TV anywhere in the UK and watch the same couple of hundred channels that you get here.