{"id":558496,"date":"2026-08-04T07:18:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-04T07:18:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/558496\/"},"modified":"2026-08-04T07:18:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-04T07:18:09","slug":"alexandra-palace-to-celebrate-role-as-the-birthplace-of-bbc-tv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/558496\/","title":{"rendered":"Alexandra Palace to celebrate role as the birthplace of BBC TV"},"content":{"rendered":"

The BBC’s first television service will celebrate its 90th anniversary this year at its venue in north London.<\/p>\n

Alexandra Palace, affectionately known as Ally Pally, will host a series of events to mark the birth of British TV, launched in November 1936.<\/p>\n

A television heritage season will also run this autumn “for public engagement with interested groups and individuals” with an “overarching theme of innovation”.<\/p>\n

Visitors will have the chance to get “closer to the palace’s television heritage” through tours of the historic BBC studios and a behind-the-scenes look into the broadcaster’s archive collections.<\/p>\n

Organisers hope to use the anniversary to also mark “the significance of the site of the first television station”.<\/p>\n

On the BBC website<\/a>, David Hendy, professor in media and cultural history at the University of Sussex, said the world’s first regular, “high-definition” television service was broadcast from Ally Pally on Monday 2 November 1936.<\/p>\n

At the time, the BBC argued that “high-definition” meant pictures made up of 240 lines or more<\/a>. <\/p>\n

It was something Prof Hendy believes the broadcaster did to mark itself out against a German TV service that began the year before, but only used 180 lines to transmit its images.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The BBC’s first television service will celebrate its 90th anniversary this year at its venue in north London.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":558497,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[156,111,139,69,437],"class_list":["post-558496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=558496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558496\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/558497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=558496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=558496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=558496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}