Andrew Emmerson explores the British heritage of the black-and-white era of television, and the first years of colour up to the early 1980s and the launch of Channel 4.

Old television embraces more than eighty years of progress, from the crude experiments of John Logie Baird in 1925, through the pioneering 405-line days at Alexandra Palace just before the Second World War, to the era when television entered most homes in the 1950s, and the growing sophistication of the 1960s, with the introduction of 625-line colour transmissions.