I’VE FALLEN IN LOVE WITH BRITISH TELEVISION ALL OVER AGAIN.

Specifically, with the parts of British television most Americans haven’t seen, not even on BBC America.

The source of this newfound fascination: Transdiffusion, a website (or rather, a network of individually-maintained sites) dedicated to UK TV ephemera.

That means, as one of the network’s sites describes it, “Everything but the programmes:” Station ID logos, test-pattern cards, jingles, on-camera (“in vision”) and off-camera (“in sound”) announcer bits, sign-on (“startup”) and sign-off (“closedown”) routines, technical-difficulties apologies, promos, and the “interval” music that would be played during long breaks (up to an hour or more!) between programs.

It’s led by one Kif Bowden-Smith, who started in 1964 (at age 12) to collect off-air audio tapes and still photos from across Britain, particularly the station-ID jingles and logos of the various local commercial stations. He kept this archive all these years, and it forms the basis of the Transdiffusion Project.

Reading the Transdiffusion sites, and the similar sites listed on their links pages, provides a perfect evocation of seven decades in British social history. Their story starts in the George V reign of the ’30s, as EMI (part of a patent pool with RCA and US inventor Philo Farnsworth) battled with Scottish inventor John Logie Baird to create a working TV system. The BBC politely tried Baird’s mechanical system for a few weeks in 1936, then dropped it in favor of EMI’s electronic TV. The reason became clear three years later, when WWII began, the experimental BBC TV station in London immediately ceased operations, and its engineering team went to work developing a similar technology, radar. TV had been the British establishment’s way of jump-starting radar R&D.

In 1946, a year after the war, the BBC started a regular program schedule. It was, and still is, funded by annual “license fees” on every TV set in the country (sort of like mandatory HBO). It was extremely stoic and paternalistic (it even shut down from 6 to 7 p.m. so parents could put young children to bed!). It was quiet and respectable, befitting a nation still worn down by postwar recessions and shortages, but lacked in showbiz pizzazz.

In the mid-’50s, Parlaiment finally agreed to allow commercial telecasters, under very heavy regulation. A government agency would build the transmitters and rent out the airtime on them to a different company in every region. In the London, Midlands, and North regions (with more than half the country’s population between them), one company would broadcast on weekdays, another on weekends. “Adverts” were limited to six minutes per hour; total airtime was limited to 70 hours a week (spread out over a broadcast day from 9:30 a.m. to midnight); and a quarter of those hours had to be used for educational and public-service shows.

Despite these hardships, the member companies of what would be known as the ITV network created shows that have lasted the ages (Thunderbirds, The Prisoner, Ready Steady Go, The Avengers, Coronation Street), plus many that were never shown Stateside and live on in stills and audio files on the Transdiffusion websites (The Tingha and Tucker Club, A Show Called Fred, The Wibbledy Wobbley Way, Join Us For Bridge, Bootsie and Snudge, Criss Cross Quiz, Blackpool Night Out)–shows never intended for reruns or export, and therefore wonderful examples of what the British public in the pre-Beatle years was expected to like.

But, as noted above, Transdiffusion’s principal emphasis isn’t cult-classic series nostalgia but a more generalized remembrance of the entire viewing experience, particulary the “presentation and continuity” that branded each station.

From the BBC’s original “bat wing” logo, to the bold-as-brass identities of early ITV members, into color and computer graphics, one can track the evolving nature of a medium and its surrounding national culture–from patrician authority to welfare-state compromise, to Swinging ’60s sass, to corporate consolidation and obsession with the Almighty Stock Price.

Now play those old Thames Television horns one more time, won’t you?

NEXT: Remembering the allegedly good old days of 1998.

ELSEWHERE:

• I love Japanese English ads and slogans. I’m not particularly fond of this site’s name for it, “Engrish”….