TELEVISION.

Appropriately for a medium that has transcended national boundaries, television owes its genesis to research in multiple countries, including several European nations. In January 1926 Scotland's John Logie Baird (1888–1946) became the first to publicly demonstrate transmission of a live moving image, however the principle of television had been outlined as early as the 1880s by Germany's Paul Gottlieb Nipkow (1860–1940), while in 1911 Russia's Boris Rosing (1869–1933) and Vladimir Zworykin (1889–1982) built a device capable of transmitting still images. Zworykin later moved the United States and pioneered the television technology at RCA. These early European designs all used mechanical principles, including cumbersome spinning disks, and were superseded by American-made electronic technology in the 1930s. In August 1929 the BBC began experimental mechanical television broadcasts using the Baird system. A high definition service began in 1936.

TELEVISION AND POLITICS

The first major political use of television was in 1935 when the Nazi regime in Germany unveiled a system of broadcasts that were received by mechanical sets located in special television theaters initially in the Berlin area only. The system was used to televise the Berlin Olympics of 1936. Switching to a high definition format, broadcasts continued into the war years when they were used to boost the morale of wounded soldiers. The impact of these transmissions was more in their prestige value for the regime than their content. Denmark experimented with TV in 1932. France began experimental television transmissions in 1938, and Germany broadcast to its army in France following the invasion of 1940. World War II interrupted the spread of television in Europe. Britain suspended its television service on the outbreak of war, while limited German activity continued. In October 1944 the Free French began broadcasting using German technology from liberated Paris.

The postwar years saw a further diffusion of television across Europe. France continued broadcasting, launching its own system (using 819 lines on the screen) in 1948. The BBC recommenced its television service in June 1946. Regular Danish and Dutch television broadcasts began in 1951. Belgian TV began in 1953. Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Poland began regular TV services in 1954. Television came to Austria in 1955. Sweden and Spain launched state channels in 1956, Finland and Hungary in 1957, and Switzerland in 1958. The last in the field was Ireland's Radio Telefís É ireann (RTÉ), which began programs only in 1961. Commercial television was pioneered by Radio Luxembourg, whose television broadcasts began in 1955. The associated company RTL has grown into the largest commercial television broadcaster, owning twenty-six television and twenty-four radio stations in nine countries. As the 1950s progressed a number of other European countries added second commercial channels, including Britain in 1955. Finland was another early entrant in the commercial field while Italy held off until the 1970s, fearing a deluge of poor quality programing. Denmark did not get a second channel until 1988 and then only with strict regulation on its advertising. Europeans formed a European Broadcast Union, with a television arm known as Eurovision created in 1954. Its best known activity has been the annual Eurovision Song Contest, which began in 1956, though the organization also created a raucus game show called Jeux Sans Frontiers (Games without frontiers), which ran from 1965 to 1999.

REGULATION

The role of European states in regulating and controlling television had obvious political and social implications. The dictatorships in Spain and Portugal maintained rigid censorship until the 1970s. Many other states sought to shape their national broadcasting on "public service" lines, seeing the medium as a means to educate their citizens. Britain initially restricted the ability of television news to report on politics for fear that it might challenge the supremacy of Parliament, but the associated rules crumbled in the wake of the Suez Crisis of 1956. In France state control was such that during the period of growing French counterinsurgency operations in Algeria (1956–1959) not one program about the issue aired. In recognition of the need for a less rigid system, French broadcasting was restructured in 1964 with the creation of an Office de Radiodiffusion et de Télévision Française. The political power of television was felt when in January 1960 General Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970) addressed the nation and appealed for unity and thereby defused a military coup. Twenty years later television images of coup leaders storming into the Spanish parliament and a moving address by King Juan Carlos (b. 1938) served to undermine a military plot in that country. The best example of a politician using television to gain power is in Italy, where station-owner Silvio Berlusconi (b. 1936) used his media empire as the springboard to the office of prime minister.

West German television, which began in 1953, developed along decentralized lines—a legacy of postwar Allied occupation—with each lande (province) operating its own channels. In East Germany the system, which was launched in 1952, was highly centralized, and television became a key element of state propaganda. Content included attacks on the corrupt West and politicized historical dramas. From 1960 to 1989 the state screened a program called Der schwarze Kanal (the black channel), a weekly compilation of West German current affairs programs that were energetically dissected to show their bias. Following in the tradition of dictatorships seeking to distract the population, the DDR also broadcast plenty of sports (an estimated 10 percent of all content).

As with the rise of cinema early in the twentieth century, the coming of television sparked sustained debate across the Continent over the social impact of the medium. Concern over possible damage to youth loomed large. Responses included the 1991 decision by Sweden to ban all advertising to children. Debates reflected widespread fears of Americanization, as most European channels relied to a greater or lesser extent on the importation of programs and films from the United States. While television undeniably extended the cultural reach of the United States, it also had the effect of preserving certain subnational identities through the creation of minority language channels.

The development of color television reflected the familiar fault lines of European politics. Because of the technical standards adopted by European broadcasters they could not immediately adopt the American color television system known as NTSC (National Television Standard Committee). In the 1950s the French developed a rival called SECAM (Séquentiel couleur avec mémoire or "sequential color with memory"). Broadcasts began in 1967. In the same year German manufacturers launched PAL (Phase Alternating Line), which borrowed ideas from SECAM and NTSC. National pride was invested in these competing formats. The Soviet Union and Eastern European countries adopted the French system.

THE MODERN PERIOD

The 1980s saw a revolution in European television. Many markets—including Germany—deregulated television. The relative wealth of Europe made it an ideal territory for the rapid diffusion of new television technologies. Britain embraced the video cassette recorder. The French state invested heavily in cable technologies, while cable penetration in Belgium and the Netherlands reached an astonishing 98 percent of households. Elsewhere in Europe, in countries with less concentrated populations than the Low Countries, satellite television dominated.

The launch of the Astra satellite A1 in 1989 gave northern Europeans easy access to each other's television channels and made it possible for audiences in one country to watch programs made to their taste in more liberal neighboring countries. British audiences notoriously tuned into a pornographic channel called Red Hot Dutch. In October 1989 (with an extension in 1995) the European Union formally adopted the Television without Frontiers declaration to facilitate the free movement of television broadcasts within the EU. Subsections in this declaration included a commitment to ban programming that might "impair the development of minors" and to support a right of reply in public affairs programming.

By the early 1980s television had become a major social force in Eastern Europe. News images such as those of the massive crowds during the visit of Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) to Poland in 1979 or protests in the Gdansk shipyards in 1985 emboldened dissenters. In West Berlin in 1987, the U.S. government–funded Radio in the American Sector (RIAS) launched a TV station aimed at undermining the East German regime. Content mixed news with music videos and it soon grabbed a massive market share of both East and West Berliners. In the autumn of 1989 viewers aroundEastern Europe watched mounting dissent and the withering will of the Communist Party to repress it, often learning of developments in their own country from neighboring stations. The opening of the Berlin Wall on the night of 9 November 1989 produced perhaps the most memorable television images in the history of European broadcasting. More controversially, exaggerated news on Hungarian television of an apparent massacre in Romania triggered revolution in that country.

In the 1990s Eastern European television evolved quickly into something more closely resembling its Western counterpart. In 1995 the Polish presidential election included a presidential debate between incumbent Lech Wa??sa (b. 1943) and the challenger Aleksander Kwa?niewski (b. 1954). Wa??sa lost ground not only by being much shorter that Kwa?niewski but also when he refused to shake his rival's hand. He was widely considered to have lost the election because of this one, ill-judged TV moment.

The general opening of European markets prompted several producers to attempt pan-European programing. The BBC lost millions when it launched Eldorado (1992–1993), a soap opera set in Spain. While programing has tended to remain nation-specific, formats have jumped from one country to another with great facility. European production companies have been especially associated with the development of reality TV formats including the Dutch company Endemol, which first presented the Big Brother show in 1999. A number of European countries launched television services explicitly for international consumption. The BBC's satellite news service BBC World—launched in 1991—successfully challenged the dominance of America's Cable News Network (CNN). By 2002 its overseas channels BBC World, BBC Prime, and BBC America reached an estimated 450 million homes.

The crisis and war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s was fought—in part—on the Continent's television screens as rival factions strove to display outrages perpetrated by their rivals. In Serbia the regime of Slobodan Miloševi? (1941–2006) succeeding in securing a monopoly over the images reaching its own population and that of the breakaway Bosnian territory of Republika Srbska; however, it lost the wider image war. By 1999 Serbia was effectively a pariah state throughout Western Europe. During the NATO war launched in 1999 to prevent Serb ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, the alliance declared that Belgrade's television would be a military target. In the early hours of 22 April a U.S. cruise missile struck the headquarters of Radio Televizija Srbija, killing sixteen members of its staff. Later investigations revealed that personnel had been compelled to remain in the building in order to manufacture an outrage.

By the early years of the twenty-first century, the old gap between European and American television culture had closed considerably. Europe had become a multi-channel and increasingly a digital television environment. Television image making had become a necessary dimension of elections, and the quest for audiences seemed everywhere to be producing alleged "dumbing down" of content. As broadcasters aimed for niche markets, channels became ever more narrowly targeted, and the old experience of an entire nation tuning in to a particular television moment became a thing of the past.

As in the realm of cinema, the highest quality documentary and drama series necessitated international cooperation—Europe-wide and trans-Atlantic partnerships became a necessity. Issues for the future included the viability of continued public funding, the challenge from alternative technologies such as the Internet, and the possibility that with the proliferation of channels at some point audiences might simply lose interest and switch off.

See alsoCinema; Computer Revolution; Popular Culture.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Burns, R. W. Television: An International History of the Formative Years. London, 1998.

Cull, Nicholas J., David Culbert, and David Welch, eds. Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encylopedia, 1500 to the Present. Santa Barbara, Calif., 2003.

Dizard, Wilson P. Television: A World View. Syracuse, N.Y., 1966.

Humphreys, Peter J. Mass Media and Media Policy in Western Europe. Manchester, U.K., 1996.

Smith, Anthony, ed. Television: An International History. Oxford, U.K., 1995.

Nicholas J. Cull