Apogeu e queda

“It was during the war and for the ten years or so after it that radio enjoyed its heyday, providing programmes of distinction in every genre to audiences of many millions. (Crisell, pág. 25)

Na Grã Bretanha dois acontecimentos despertaram a televisão da letargia em que se encontrava, em parte provocada pela falta de um modelo televisivo (a televisão reproduzia a rádio, dando-lhe apenas imagem). Em 1953 a coroação da Rainha Isabel II e 1955 o aparecimento de um canal comercial, independente do Estado e do monopólio da BBC. “Two major events of the 1950s were seen, accurately, as marking its arrival as the major mass medium and less accurately as portending the very extinction of radio, whose blindness was regarded by many as an unequivocal disadvantage” (Crisell, 26). (…) “Faced with competition from first one and then two television networks, radio went into a long decline that some thought would prove terminal. Between 1949 and 1958 the BBC’s average evening radio audience dropped from nearly 9 million to less than 3.5 million, three-quarters of whom were people without television sets” (Crisell, 27)