"On 14 April 1937, the BBC studios at Alexandra Palace played host to the first television demonstration of snooker, an exhibition of play by Horace Lindrum and Willie Smith. The programme lasted 10 minutes, whereupon it made way for Daffodils (“a display of various types of daffodils from the Daffodil Show” — Radio Times). Another couple of months down the line, and the BBC were off to Wimbledon for the first time. And then, on Thursday 16 September, it was the turn of football, and the world’s first live televised match.
"The game had admittedly limited appeal — George Allison’s Arsenal were taking on Arsenal reserves at Highbury — but then only a few hundred houses close to Ally Pally in north London could receive BBC pictures anyway. Arsenal were the natural choice for the BBC’s experiment anyway: Highbury was the closest ground to Ally Pally and had a bespoke gantry for telly cameras in its fancy new East Stand."
Episode Eighty Seven of the Blizzard Podcast looks back at ‘Football on TV’ by Scott Murray, our Eight Bells feature from Issue Eight, originally published in June 2013. It looks back on 8 key moments in the history of televised football, from the first broadcasts in the 1930s to bigger nationwide changes in later decades, via pay-tv and a little bit of controversy along the way.
