"On 14 April 1937, the BBC studios at Alexandra Palace played host to the first television demonstration of snooker, an exhibition of play by Horace Lindrum and Willie Smith. The programme lasted 10 minutes, whereupon it made way for Daffodils (“a display of various types of daffodils from the Daffodil Show” — Radio Times). Another couple of months down the line, and the BBC were off to Wimbledon for the first time. And then, on Thursday 16 September, it was the turn of football, and the world’s first live televised match. 

"The game had admittedly limited appeal — George Allison’s Arsenal were taking on Arsenal reserves at Highbury — but then only a few hundred houses close to Ally Pally in north London could receive BBC pictures anyway. Arsenal were the natural choice for the BBC’s experiment anyway: Highbury was the closest ground to Ally Pally and had a bespoke gantry for telly cameras in its fancy new East Stand."

Episode Eighty Seven of the Blizzard Podcast looks back at 'Football on TV' by Scott Murray, our Eight Bells feature from Issue Eight, originally published in June 2013. It looks back on 8 key moments in the history of televised football, from the first broadcasts in the 1930s to bigger nationwide changes in later decades, via pay-tv and a little bit of controversy along the way. 

Read the full article here: www.theblizzard.co.uk/article/football-tv

Issue Eight, like all issues of the Blizzard, is available for £12 plus postage on www.theblizzard.co.uk. Since we’ve relaunched the website, all our articles, including this one, are available to read for free. Non-subscribers get 3 free articles a month, while subscribers have unlimited advert-free browsing, as well as access to digital downloads of all our issues in eBook formats.

Those who want to buy one-off eBooks can still do so – from the Kindle and Google Play stores.

Football On TV

The Blizzard is a quarterly football publication put together by a cooperative of journalists and authors. These podcasts feature some of the best articles from our back catalogue, and recordings of live Q&A events we hold with our writers around the UK. 

Our main aim is to provide a platform for top-class writers from across the globe to enjoy the space and the freedom to write what they like about the football stories that matter to them.

For more details – www.theblizzard.co.uk