Early cinema, modernity and visual culture: the imaginary of the Balkans

conflicts underlying the development of the service and the springing up of rivals. The competition from Electrical and Musical Industries Ltd (EMI) – later Marconi-EMI – for example, added questions of national pride to the situation. The sixth chapter, ‘Preparing for the High-Definition Service’, offers an overview of the wider context of the development of television, particularly within Germany and the USA. In relation to Germany, Medhurst notes that the development of television should be viewed in ‘the context of notions of national pride and international standing’ (110), which required great consideration in terms of the sites of broadcast, staff hiring and the level of ceremony desired for the launch of the regular television service. Medhurst conveys a seemingly palpable sense of excitement in the run up to this launch, after which the attitudes to television as a service, they note, began to change towards more positive ideals. Following this, the seventh chapter – ‘The BBC Television Service: 1936–1939’ – covers the ‘trial period’ of broadcasting for television programmes, with a focus on the technological issues, specifically in relation to live television, for which the Baird system was seen by John Reith, the BBC’s Managing Director, to offer ‘very variable’ and ‘most unsatisfactory’ results (137). The chapter goes on to provide specific case studies in relation to the broadcast of Drama, Outside Broadcasts, Sport, Variety and other programmes, concluding with a detailed summary of the myriad issues both television and the BBC faced in the years before the onset of the Second World War in 1939. To conclude the book, Medhurst stresses the four key issues that it has addressed, notably the influence of a number of wider factors on the conditions under which television was involved, the need to shift away from a narrative that ‘John Reith was the stumbling block in the development of television in Great Britain’ (177), an understanding of the practical reasons for the BBC’s reluctance and the inevitability that the responsibility for developing a television service would, one way or another, fall on the shoulders of the BBC. The Early Years of Television and the BBC represents a well researched and skilfully put together account of the evolution of a piece of technology which has, in the intervening century, evolved into a dominant social and cultural force. Medhurst’s painstaking research demonstrates how riven this development was on social, cultural, political and economic levels, bringing these areas together into an engaging account of a time during which the pace of change, as the book relates, must have been breathtaking.