114-512: The Comic Strip are a group of British comedians who came to prominence in the 1980s. They are known for their television series The Comic Strip Presents... , which was labelled as a pioneering example of the alternative comedy scene. The core members are Adrian Edmondson , Dawn French , Rik Mayall , Nigel Planer , Peter Richardson and Jennifer Saunders , with appearances by Keith Allen , Robbie Coltrane , Alexei Sayle and others. Two double acts , Adrian Edmondson and Rik Mayall under
228-577: A Rastafarian police van driver), and several musical acts, particularly from the Bad News series which was also aided by Queen guitarist Brian May , such as Def Leppard and Marillion . In 1990, the series transferred to BBC2 . By now, all the regulars (with the exception of Peter Richardson) had become more famous for their own shows, and more recurring performers such as Gary Beadle , Phil Cornwell , Steve O'Donnell , Mark Caven, Sara Stockbridge , and Doon Mackichan were brought in. Rik Mayall
342-458: A patent interference suit against Farnsworth. The U.S. Patent Office examiner disagreed in a 1935 decision, finding priority of invention for Farnsworth against Zworykin. Farnsworth claimed that Zworykin's 1923 system could not produce an electrical image of the type to challenge his patent. Zworykin received a patent in 1928 for a color transmission version of his 1923 patent application. He also divided his original application in 1931. Zworykin
456-478: A resolution that is substantially higher. HDTV may be transmitted in different formats: 1080p , 1080i and 720p . Since 2010, with the invention of smart television , Internet television has increased the availability of television programs and movies via the Internet through streaming video services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video , iPlayer and Hulu . In 2013, 79% of the world's households owned
570-618: A transistor -based UHF tuner . The first fully transistorized color television in the United States was the Quasar television introduced in 1967. These developments made watching color television a more flexible and convenient proposition. In 1972, sales of color sets finally surpassed sales of black-and-white sets. Color broadcasting in Europe was not standardized on the PAL format until
684-467: A tuner for receiving and decoding broadcast signals. A visual display device that lacks a tuner is correctly called a video monitor rather than a television. The television broadcasts are mainly a simplex broadcast meaning that the transmitter cannot receive and the receiver cannot transmit. The word television comes from Ancient Greek τῆλε (tele) 'far' and Latin visio 'sight'. The first documented usage of
798-483: A 1925 demonstration, the image was dim, had low contrast and poor definition, and was stationary. Zworykin's imaging tube never got beyond the laboratory stage. However, RCA, which acquired the Westinghouse patent, asserted that the patent for Farnsworth's 1927 image dissector was written so broadly that it would exclude any other electronic imaging device. Thus, based on Zworykin's 1923 patent application, RCA filed
912-403: A 2-inch-wide by 2.5-inch-high screen (5 by 6 cm). The large receiver had a screen 24 inches wide by 30 inches high (60 by 75 cm). Both sets could reproduce reasonably accurate, monochromatic, moving images. Along with the pictures, the sets received synchronized sound. The system transmitted images over two paths: first, a copper wire link from Washington to New York City, then
1026-541: A Packet of Crisps ) and Tamer Hassan ( Layer Cake ) alongside several of the regular cast members. Four Men in a Car was notable for being the first broadcast, on either television or radio, to involve Rik Mayall since his quad bike accident. Permission was thus given by Mayall's family to show the special. Peter Richardson, who has built his career as a writer-director with the TV series Stella Street and films such as Churchill: The Hollywood Years , has not ruled out
1140-402: A TV system with a 40-line resolution that employed a CRT display. This was the first working example of a fully electronic television receiver and Takayanagi's team later made improvements to this system parallel to other television developments. Takayanagi did not apply for a patent. In the 1930s, Allen B. DuMont made the first CRTs to last 1,000 hours of use, one of the factors that led to
1254-524: A bomb labelled "Have a nice day", falling towards a map. In the early episodes the map was of a section of north Dorset and southern Wiltshire , centred on the town of Shaftesbury . The first episode was Five Go Mad in Dorset , a parody of the Famous Five . It was written by Peter Richardson and Pete Richens , who wrote most of the early episodes. Five Go Mad... drew anger from some viewers for
SECTION 10
#17327796967101368-683: A camera tube, using the CRT instead as a flying-spot scanner to scan slides and film. Ardenne achieved his first transmission of television pictures on 24 December 1933, followed by test runs for a public television service in 1934. The world's first electronically scanned television service then started in Berlin in 1935, the Fernsehsender Paul Nipkow , culminating in the live broadcast of the 1936 Summer Olympic Games from Berlin to public places all over Germany. Philo Farnsworth gave
1482-609: A color television combining a traditional black-and-white display with a rotating colored disk. This device was very "deep" but was later improved with a mirror folding the light path into an entirely practical device resembling a large conventional console. However, Baird was unhappy with the design, and, as early as 1944, had commented to a British government committee that a fully electronic device would be better. In 1939, Hungarian engineer Peter Carl Goldmark introduced an electro-mechanical system while at CBS , which contained an Iconoscope sensor. The CBS field-sequential color system
1596-409: A communal viewing experience to a solitary viewing experience. By 1960, Sony had sold over 4 million portable television sets worldwide. The basic idea of using three monochrome images to produce a color image had been experimented with almost as soon as black-and-white televisions had first been built. Although he gave no practical details, among the earliest published proposals for television
1710-819: A fellow of the Royal Society (UK), published a letter in the scientific journal Nature in which he described how "distant electric vision" could be achieved by using a cathode-ray tube, or Braun tube, as both a transmitting and receiving device, he expanded on his vision in a speech given in London in 1911 and reported in The Times and the Journal of the Röntgen Society. In a letter to Nature published in October 1926, Campbell-Swinton also announced
1824-436: A final six episodes in 1993. In 1998, the original team reunited and returned to Channel 4 for the first time since 1988, for a one-off special, Four Men in a Car . This was followed in 2000 by a sequel, Four Men in a Plane . After a five-and-a-half-year hiatus, another 60-minute one-off special, Sex Actually (a parody of the 2003 film Love Actually ), was made in 2005. It starred Sheridan Smith ( Two Pints of Lager and
1938-504: A host of others. As of 2009, the archive of Channel 4 episodes has been broadcast on UKTV's flagship channel, Gold . In May 2010, it was announced that Gold would broadcast a 30th-anniversary documentary, preceded by the next new scripted episode of the series, Five Go to Rehab , a sequel to Five Go Mad in Dorset which featured the entire original cast (Ade Edmondson, Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Peter Richardson, as well as Rik Mayall, Nigel Planer, Stephen Mangan and Robbie Coltrane) and
2052-423: A lensed disk scanner with a 48-line resolution. He was granted U.S. Patent No. 1,544,156 (Transmitting Pictures over Wireless) on 30 June 1925 (filed 13 March 1922). Herbert E. Ives and Frank Gray of Bell Telephone Laboratories gave a dramatic demonstration of mechanical television on 7 April 1927. Their reflected-light television system included both small and large viewing screens. The small receiver had
2166-463: A limited theatrical release. They included The Strike , which won the Golden Rose of Montreux ; More Bad News , a sequel to Bad News Tour showing the band reforming after five years to play at Castle Donington ; and Mr. Jolly Lives Next Door , written by Mayall and Edmondson in the violent style of their sitcoms Filthy Rich & Catflap and Bottom , which featured Peter Cook as
2280-690: A line of the image. Although he never built a working model of the system, variations of Nipkow's spinning-disk " image rasterizer " became exceedingly common. Constantin Perskyi had coined the word television in a paper read to the International Electricity Congress at the International World Fair in Paris on 24 August 1900. Perskyi's paper reviewed the existing electromechanical technologies, mentioning
2394-473: A medium" dates from 1927. The term telly is more common in the UK. The slang term "the tube" or the "boob tube" derives from the bulky cathode-ray tube used on most TVs until the advent of flat-screen TVs . Another slang term for the TV is "idiot box." Facsimile transmission systems for still photographs pioneered methods of mechanical scanning of images in the early 19th century. Alexander Bain introduced
SECTION 20
#17327796967102508-442: A phosphor plate. The phosphor was patterned so the electrons from the guns only fell on one side of the patterning or the other. Using cyan and magenta phosphors, a reasonable limited-color image could be obtained. He also demonstrated the same system using monochrome signals to produce a 3D image (called " stereoscopic " at the time). A demonstration on 16 August 1944 was the first example of a practical color television system. Work on
2622-471: A production model was halted by the SCAP after World War II . Because only a limited number of holes could be made in the disks, and disks beyond a certain diameter became impractical, image resolution on mechanical television broadcasts was relatively low, ranging from about 30 lines up to 120 or so. Nevertheless, the image quality of 30-line transmissions steadily improved with technical advances, and by 1933
2736-506: A projection screen at London's Dominion Theatre . Mechanically scanned color television was also demonstrated by Bell Laboratories in June 1929 using three complete systems of photoelectric cells , amplifiers, glow-tubes, and color filters, with a series of mirrors to superimpose the red, green, and blue images into one full-color image. The first practical hybrid system was again pioneered by John Logie Baird. In 1940 he publicly demonstrated
2850-661: A psychotic contract killer (the eponymous Mr. Jolly) and Nicholas Parsons . Peter Richardson and Pete Richens only contributed one episode to the third series, allowing cast members such as Planer and Sayle to get their ideas on screen. By then, the show had proved a hit, and some big names appeared in later productions, including Leslie Phillips , Miranda Richardson , Lionel Jeffries , Nicholas Parsons , Peter Capaldi , Hugh Cornwell , Kate Bush , Richard Vernon , Ruby Wax , Graham Crowden , Paul McCartney , Ozzy Osbourne , Lemmy , Elvis Costello , and Benjamin Zephaniah (as
2964-591: A radio link from Whippany, New Jersey . Comparing the two transmission methods, viewers noted no difference in quality. Subjects of the telecast included Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover . A flying-spot scanner beam illuminated these subjects. The scanner that produced the beam had a 50-aperture disk. The disc revolved at a rate of 18 frames per second, capturing one frame about every 56 milliseconds . (Today's systems typically transmit 30 or 60 frames per second, or one frame every 33.3 or 16.7 milliseconds, respectively.) Television historian Albert Abramson underscored
3078-616: A resolution that was not surpassed until May 1932 by RCA, with 120 lines. On 25 December 1926, Kenjiro Takayanagi demonstrated a television system with a 40-line resolution that employed a Nipkow disk scanner and CRT display at Hamamatsu Industrial High School in Japan. This prototype is still on display at the Takayanagi Memorial Museum in Shizuoka University , Hamamatsu Campus. His research in creating
3192-549: A sequel to the first episode, and the newly written Eddie Monsoon – A Life? , a spoof documentary on the life and times of the title character, an obscene, drunken television host (played by Adrian Edmondson). Michael White , the theatre impresario and Rocky Horror Show producer who had been brought in by Richardson as executive producer on the series, appeared in this episode as Monsoon's producer, who had been responsible for axing Eddie's television comeback show—called Back to Normal with Eddie Monsoon . The reasons given for
3306-641: A signal reportedly to the 60th power or better and showed great promise in all fields of electronics. Unfortunately, an issue with the multipactor was that it wore out at an unsatisfactory rate. At the Berlin Radio Show in August 1931 in Berlin , Manfred von Ardenne gave a public demonstration of a television system using a CRT for both transmission and reception, the first completely electronic television transmission. However, Ardenne had not developed
3420-410: A static photocell. The thallium sulfide (Thalofide) cell, developed by Theodore Case in the U.S., detected the light reflected from the subject and converted it into a proportional electrical signal. This was transmitted by AM radio waves to a receiver unit, where the video signal was applied to a neon light behind a second Nipkow disk rotating synchronized with the first. The brightness of the neon lamp
3534-464: A system that used a mechanical mirror-drum scanner to transmit, in Zworykin's words, "very crude images" over wires to the " Braun tube" ( cathode-ray tube or "CRT") in the receiver. Moving images were not possible because, in the scanner: "the sensitivity was not enough and the selenium cell was very laggy". In 1921, Édouard Belin sent the first image via radio waves with his belinograph . By
The Comic Strip - Misplaced Pages Continue
3648-521: A television set. The replacement of earlier cathode-ray tube (CRT) screen displays with compact, energy-efficient, flat-panel alternative technologies such as LCDs (both fluorescent-backlit and LED ), OLED displays, and plasma displays was a hardware revolution that began with computer monitors in the late 1990s. Most television sets sold in the 2000s they were still CRT , it was only in early 2010s that flat screen TVs have started to overtake CRT TVs once and for all. Major manufacturers announced
3762-484: A television system using fully electronic scanning and display elements and employing the principle of "charge storage" within the scanning (or "camera") tube. The problem of low sensitivity to light resulting in low electrical output from transmitting or "camera" tubes would be solved with the introduction of charge-storage technology by Kálmán Tihanyi beginning in 1924. His solution was a camera tube that accumulated and stored electrical charges ("photoelectrons") within
3876-560: A total of 42 television episodes, four feature films, and one short film. Television Television ( TV ) is a telecommunication medium for transmitting moving images and sound. Additionally, the term can refer to a physical television set rather than the medium of transmission . Television is a mass medium for advertising, entertainment, news, and sports. The medium is capable of more than " radio broadcasting ," which refers to an audio signal sent to radio receivers . Television became available in crude experimental forms in
3990-571: A tour of Australia. While the performers gained more exposure, actors such as Jack Nicholson and Robin Williams turned up to watch. A half-hour television documentary about the Comic Strip was broadcast in 1981. Richardson approached producer Mike Bolland, the newly appointed Channel 4 youth-and-entertainment commissioning editor to propose a series of Comic Strip films for the channel. Bolland agreed to his proposal, his first commission for
4104-520: The 1939 New York World's Fair . On the other hand, in 1934, Zworykin shared some patent rights with the German licensee company Telefunken. The "image iconoscope" ("Superikonoskop" in Germany) was produced as a result of the collaboration. This tube is essentially identical to the super-Emitron. The production and commercialization of the super-Emitron and image iconoscope in Europe were not affected by
4218-748: The EMI engineering team led by Isaac Shoenberg applied in 1932 for a patent for a new device they called "the Emitron", which formed the heart of the cameras they designed for the BBC. On 2 November 1936, a 405-line broadcasting service employing the Emitron began at studios in Alexandra Palace and transmitted from a specially built mast atop one of the Victorian building's towers. It alternated briefly with Baird's mechanical system in adjoining studios but
4332-479: The patent war between Zworykin and Farnsworth because Dieckmann and Hell had priority in Germany for the invention of the image dissector, having submitted a patent application for their Lichtelektrische Bildzerlegerröhre für Fernseher ( Photoelectric Image Dissector Tube for Television ) in Germany in 1925, two years before Farnsworth did the same in the United States. The image iconoscope (Superikonoskop) became
4446-404: The "Iconoscope" by Zworykin, the new tube had a light sensitivity of about 75,000 lux , and thus was claimed to be much more sensitive than Farnsworth's image dissector. However, Farnsworth had overcome his power issues with his Image Dissector through the invention of a completely unique " Multipactor " device that he began work on in 1930, and demonstrated in 1931. This small tube could amplify
4560-483: The 1920s, but only after several years of further development was the new technology marketed to consumers. After World War II , an improved form of black-and-white television broadcasting became popular in the United Kingdom and the United States, and television sets became commonplace in homes, businesses, and institutions. During the 1950s, television was the primary medium for influencing public opinion . In
4674-661: The 1920s, when amplification made television practical, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird employed the Nipkow disk in his prototype video systems. On 25 March 1925, Baird gave the first public demonstration of televised silhouette images in motion at Selfridges 's department store in London . Since human faces had inadequate contrast to show up on his primitive system, he televised a ventriloquist's dummy named "Stooky Bill," whose painted face had higher contrast, talking and moving. By 26 January 1926, he had demonstrated before members of
The Comic Strip - Misplaced Pages Continue
4788-421: The 1960s, and broadcasts did not start until 1967. By this point, many of the technical issues in the early sets had been worked out, and the spread of color sets in Europe was fairly rapid. By the mid-1970s, the only stations broadcasting in black-and-white were a few high-numbered UHF stations in small markets and a handful of low-power repeater stations in even smaller markets such as vacation spots. By 1979, even
4902-1013: The BBC's GLC , ...Nervous Breakdown , or Channel 4's The Hunt for Tony Blair , these were the first time clips from these episodes were aired on the channel. In May 2018, a two-hour documentary history produced by Sean Doherty aired on Gold titled How the Young Ones Changed Comedy . It combined archive footage with revelations from many of the stars involved – such as Planer, Alexei Sayle, John Lloyd , Paul Jackson, and Lise Mayer – while later comedians discussed The Young Ones ' impact on British comedy generally. The Comic Strip Presents... originally ran for three series and one special on Channel 4 from 1982 to 1988. Two series and three specials subsequently aired on BBC Two between 1990 and 1993. Since then, specials have aired sporadically on Channel 4, beginning in 1998 and most recently in 2016. The collective also created four theatrical films between 1985 and 2004. There have been
5016-679: The Dutch company Philips produced and commercialized the image iconoscope and multicon from 1952 to 1958. U.S. television broadcasting, at the time, consisted of a variety of markets in a wide range of sizes, each competing for programming and dominance with separate technology until deals were made and standards agreed upon in 1941. RCA, for example, used only Iconoscopes in the New York area, but Farnsworth Image Dissectors in Philadelphia and San Francisco. In September 1939, RCA agreed to pay
5130-641: The Edge of a Nervous Breakdown , Bad News Tour / More Bad News , and The Hunt for Tony Blair . For A Fistful of Travellers' Cheques , a short sequel was made and broadcast in several parts, showing the two main characters reuniting, despite the ending of the original episode; unshown scenes of the original episode were also aired for the first time. For the Bad News aspect of the documentary, Planer and Richardson dressed up as their respective characters Den Dennis and Spider Webb, recalling their time as Bad News. Some of
5244-653: The Farnsworth Television and Radio Corporation royalties over the next ten years for access to Farnsworth's patents. With this historic agreement in place, RCA integrated much of what was best about the Farnsworth Technology into their systems. In 1941, the United States implemented 525-line television. Electrical engineer Benjamin Adler played a prominent role in the development of television. The world's first 625-line television standard
5358-470: The Royal Institution the transmission of an image of a face in motion by radio. This is widely regarded as the world's first true public television demonstration, exhibiting light, shade, and detail. Baird's system used the Nipkow disk for both scanning the image and displaying it. A brightly illuminated subject was placed in front of a spinning Nipkow disk set with lenses that swept images across
5472-560: The Science Museum, South Kensington. In 1928, Baird's company (Baird Television Development Company/Cinema Television) broadcast the first transatlantic television signal between London and New York and the first shore-to-ship transmission. In 1929, he became involved in the first experimental mechanical television service in Germany. In November of the same year, Baird and Bernard Natan of Pathé established France's first television company, Télévision- Baird -Natan. In 1931, he made
5586-465: The Telechrome continued, and plans were made to introduce a three-gun version for full color. However, Baird's untimely death in 1946 ended the development of the Telechrome system. Similar concepts were common through the 1940s and 1950s, differing primarily in the way they re-combined the colors generated by the three guns. The Geer tube was similar to Baird's concept but used small pyramids with
5700-569: The UK broadcasts using the Baird system were remarkably clear. A few systems ranging into the 200-line region also went on the air. Two of these were the 180-line system that Compagnie des Compteurs (CDC) installed in Paris in 1935 and the 180-line system that Peck Television Corp. started in 1935 at station VE9AK in Montreal . The advancement of all-electronic television (including image dissectors and other camera tubes and cathode-ray tubes for
5814-556: The United Kingdom, being made on location in and around San José , Andalusia , Spain , using some of the same locations as A Fistful of Dollars which it spoofs. Two one-off episodes were aired on Channel 4 over Christmas 1985, reflecting the tight schedules of the group. Consuela was a French and Saunders-led pastiche of the Alfred Hitchcock film Rebecca (1940), with French's eponymous crazed housekeeper taking centre stage. The second episode, Private Enterprise ,
SECTION 50
#17327796967105928-461: The analog and channel-separated signals used by analog television . Due to data compression , digital television can support more than one program in the same channel bandwidth. It is an innovative service that represents the most significant evolution in television broadcast technology since color television emerged in the 1950s. Digital television's roots have been tied very closely to the availability of inexpensive, high performance computers . It
6042-493: The cancellation (e.g. "the things you said about Burt Reynolds ") are presumably the same problems that led to the real Back to Normal... being dropped by Channel 4. (The name Eddie Monsoon—a corruption of "Edmondson"—was later used by Jennifer Saunders, core member and Adrian Edmondson's wife, for her character in Absolutely Fabulous .) A Fistful of Travellers' Cheques was the first episode to be filmed outside
6156-462: The convenience of remote retrieval, the storage of television and video programming now also occurs on the cloud (such as the video-on-demand service by Netflix ). At the beginning of the 2010s, digital television transmissions greatly increased in popularity. Another development was the move from standard-definition television (SDTV) ( 576i , with 576 interlaced lines of resolution and 480i ) to high-definition television (HDTV), which provides
6270-498: The design of RCA 's " iconoscope " in 1931, the U.S. patent for Tihanyi's transmitting tube would not be granted until May 1939. The patent for his receiving tube had been granted the previous October. Both patents had been purchased by RCA prior to their approval. Charge storage remains a basic principle in the design of imaging devices for television to the present day. On 25 December 1926, at Hamamatsu Industrial High School in Japan, Japanese inventor Kenjiro Takayanagi demonstrated
6384-525: The development of HDTV technology, the MUSE analog format proposed by NHK , a Japanese company, was seen as a pacesetter that threatened to eclipse U.S. electronics companies' technologies. Until June 1990, the Japanese MUSE standard, based on an analog system, was the front-runner among the more than 23 other technical concepts under consideration. Then, a U.S. company, General Instrument, demonstrated
6498-535: The discontinuation of CRT, Digital Light Processing (DLP), plasma, and even fluorescent-backlit LCDs by the mid-2010s. LEDs are being gradually replaced by OLEDs. Also, major manufacturers have started increasingly producing smart TVs in the mid-2010s. Smart TVs with integrated Internet and Web 2.0 functions became the dominant form of television by the late 2010s. Television signals were initially distributed only as terrestrial television using high-powered radio-frequency television transmitters to broadcast
6612-421: The extra information in the signal and produce a limited-resolution color display. The higher-resolution black-and-white and lower-resolution color images combine in the brain to produce a seemingly high-resolution color image. The NTSC standard represented a significant technical achievement. The first color broadcast (the first episode of the live program The Marriage ) occurred on 8 July 1954. However, during
6726-472: The facsimile machine between 1843 and 1846. Frederick Bakewell demonstrated a working laboratory version in 1851. Willoughby Smith discovered the photoconductivity of the element selenium in 1873. As a 23-year-old German university student, Paul Julius Gottlieb Nipkow proposed and patented the Nipkow disk in 1884 in Berlin . This was a spinning disk with a spiral pattern of holes, so each hole scanned
6840-440: The first outdoor remote broadcast of The Derby . In 1932, he demonstrated ultra-short wave television. Baird's mechanical system reached a peak of 240 lines of resolution on BBC telecasts in 1936, though the mechanical system did not scan the televised scene directly. Instead, a 17.5 mm film was shot, rapidly developed, and then scanned while the film was still wet. A U.S. inventor, Charles Francis Jenkins , also pioneered
6954-431: The following ten years, most network broadcasts and nearly all local programming continued to be black-and-white. It was not until the mid-1960s that color sets started selling in large numbers, due in part to the color transition of 1965, in which it was announced that over half of all network prime-time programming would be broadcast in color that fall. The first all-color prime-time season came just one year later. In 1972,
SECTION 60
#17327796967107068-417: The iconoscope (or Emitron) produced an electronic signal and concluded that its real efficiency was only about 5% of the theoretical maximum. They solved this problem by developing and patenting in 1934 two new camera tubes dubbed super-Emitron and CPS Emitron . The super-Emitron was between ten and fifteen times more sensitive than the original Emitron and iconoscope tubes, and, in some cases, this ratio
7182-693: The industrial standard for public broadcasting in Europe from 1936 until 1960, when it was replaced by the vidicon and plumbicon tubes. Indeed, it represented the European tradition in electronic tubes competing against the American tradition represented by the image orthicon. The German company Heimann produced the Superikonoskop for the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, later Heimann also produced and commercialized it from 1940 to 1955; finally
7296-437: The invention of the first working transistor at Bell Labs , Sony founder Masaru Ibuka predicted in 1952 that the transition to electronic circuits made of transistors would lead to smaller and more portable television sets. The first fully transistorized, portable solid-state television set was the 8-inch Sony TV8-301 , developed in 1959 and released in 1960. This began the transformation of television viewership from
7410-401: The last holdout among daytime network programs converted to color, resulting in the first completely all-color network season. Early color sets were either floor-standing console models or tabletop versions nearly as bulky and heavy, so in practice they remained firmly anchored in one place. GE 's relatively compact and lightweight Porta-Color set was introduced in the spring of 1966. It used
7524-464: The last of these had converted to color. By the early 1980s, B&W sets had been pushed into niche markets, notably low-power uses, small portable sets, or for use as video monitor screens in lower-cost consumer equipment. By the late 1980s, even these last holdout niche B&W environments had inevitably shifted to color sets. Digital television (DTV) is the transmission of audio and video by digitally processed and multiplexed signals, in contrast to
7638-486: The mid-1960s, color broadcasting was introduced in the U.S. and most other developed countries. The availability of various types of archival storage media such as Betamax and VHS tapes, LaserDiscs , high-capacity hard disk drives , CDs , DVDs , flash drives , high-definition HD DVDs and Blu-ray Discs , and cloud digital video recorders has enabled viewers to watch pre-recorded material—such as movies—at home on their own time schedule. For many reasons, especially
7752-480: The name 20th Century Coyote and Nigel Planer and Peter Richardson as The Outer Limits, started performing at the newly opened Comedy Store in London in 1980, alongside compere Alexei Sayle who had been resident there since the Comedy Store opened in 1979. Concurrently Richardson searched for a venue to mount a play he had produced with Michael White . He planned to run the Comic Strip late at night after
7866-466: The original Campbell-Swinton's selenium-coated plate. Although others had experimented with using a cathode-ray tube as a receiver, the concept of using one as a transmitter was novel. The first cathode-ray tube to use a hot cathode was developed by John B. Johnson (who gave his name to the term Johnson noise ) and Harry Weiner Weinhart of Western Electric , and became a commercial product in 1922. In 1926, Hungarian engineer Kálmán Tihanyi designed
7980-456: The phosphors deposited on their outside faces instead of Baird's 3D patterning on a flat surface. The Penetron used three layers of phosphor on top of each other and increased the power of the beam to reach the upper layers when drawing those colors. The Chromatron used a set of focusing wires to select the colored phosphors arranged in vertical stripes on the tube. One of the great technical challenges of introducing color broadcast television
8094-587: The play's performances. He sourced the Raymond Revuebar in Soho , but realising it was unsuitable for a theatrical production and running out of enthusiasm for the play, he decided to continue with the idea of a cabaret night. He persuaded the double acts and Sayle to move from the Comedy Store along with Arnold Brown , an older stand-up comic who did not fit so obviously into the alternative comedy scene. Sayle again resumed his compere duties and decided
8208-530: The possibility of a digital television signal. This breakthrough was of such significance that the FCC was persuaded to delay its decision on an ATV standard until a digitally-based standard could be developed. Pete Richens Peter Richens was a British screenwriter . Richens is perhaps best known as the writing partner of Peter Richardson , writer/director/star of the long-running TV series The Comic Strip Presents . In Richens's own words, Richardson
8322-528: The possibility of a whole new series of The Comic Strip Presents... featuring younger cast members. In June 2011, a casting call went out for a new hour-long episode, starring most of the original team. This was followed by an announcement that the Comic Strip was to produce a one-off special entitled The Hunt for Tony Blair , starring Stephen Mangan as Blair and Robbie Coltrane as Inspector Hutton. The one-off show included Jennifer Saunders (as Margaret Thatcher ), as well as Harry Enfield , Rik Mayall, and
8436-507: The public at this time, viewing of the color field tests was restricted to RCA and CBS engineers and the invited press. The War Production Board halted the manufacture of television and radio equipment for civilian use from 22 April 1942 to 20 August 1945, limiting any opportunity to introduce color television to the general public. As early as 1940, Baird had started work on a fully electronic system he called Telechrome . Early Telechrome devices used two electron guns aimed at either side of
8550-512: The receiver, a type of Kerr cell modulated the light, and a series of differently angled mirrors attached to the edge of a rotating disc scanned the modulated beam onto the display screen. A separate circuit regulated synchronization. The 8x8 pixel resolution in this proof-of-concept demonstration was just sufficient to clearly transmit individual letters of the alphabet. An updated image was transmitted "several times" each second. In 1911, Boris Rosing and his student Vladimir Zworykin created
8664-415: The reproducer) marked the start of the end for mechanical systems as the dominant form of television. Mechanical television, despite its inferior image quality and generally smaller picture, would remain the primary television technology until the 1930s. The last mechanical telecasts ended in 1939 at stations run by a lot of public universities in the United States. In 1897, English physicist J. J. Thomson
8778-564: The resolution of the color information to conserve bandwidth. As black-and-white televisions could receive the same transmission and display it in black-and-white, the color system adopted is [backwards] "compatible." ("Compatible Color," featured in RCA advertisements of the period, is mentioned in the song " America ," of West Side Story , 1957.) The brightness image remained compatible with existing black-and-white television sets at slightly reduced resolution. In contrast, color televisions could decode
8892-558: The results of some "not very successful experiments" he had conducted with G. M. Minchin and J. C. M. Stanton. They had attempted to generate an electrical signal by projecting an image onto a selenium-coated metal plate that was simultaneously scanned by a cathode ray beam. These experiments were conducted before March 1914, when Minchin died, but they were later repeated by two different teams in 1937, by H. Miller and J. W. Strange from EMI , and by H. Iams and A. Rose from RCA . Both teams successfully transmitted "very faint" images with
9006-467: The role of Mike (ultimately given to Christopher Ryan ), but did not, the result of differences with the show's producer, Paul Jackson . The Comic Strip Presents... debuted on 2 November 1982, the opening night of Channel 4. Each episode was prefixed by an animated lead-in consisting of the words "The Comic Strip Presents" accompanied by a soundtrack consisting of a drum machine and a Farfisa organ rendition of " Quando quando quando ", together with
9120-457: The running order, with Richardson having behind-the-scenes control. Richardson put out an advert for female performers which was answered by French and Saunders . Richardson prompted members to sign a contract to signify their attachment to the group. The Comic Strip opened at the Revuebar's Boulevard Theatre on 7 October 1980 and ran until 1981, when the troupe went on a national tour and then
9234-449: The signal to individual television receivers. Alternatively, television signals are distributed by coaxial cable or optical fiber , satellite systems, and, since the 2000s, via the Internet. Until the early 2000s, these were transmitted as analog signals, but a transition to digital television was expected to be completed worldwide by the late 2010s. A standard television set consists of multiple internal electronic circuits , including
9348-595: The significance of the Bell Labs demonstration: "It was, in fact, the best demonstration of a mechanical television system ever made to this time. It would be several years before any other system could even begin to compare with it in picture quality." In 1928, WRGB , then W2XB, was started as the world's first television station. It broadcast from the General Electric facility in Schenectady, NY . It
9462-647: The spectrum of colors at the transmitting end and could not have worked as he described it. Another inventor, Hovannes Adamian , also experimented with color television as early as 1907. The first color television project is claimed by him, and was patented in Germany on 31 March 1908, patent No. 197183, then in Britain, on 1 April 1908, patent No. 7219, in France (patent No. 390326) and in Russia in 1910 (patent No. 17912). Scottish inventor John Logie Baird demonstrated
9576-520: The station and Jeremy Isaacs quickly approved the budget. Richardson negotiated a deal with the channel for six self-contained half-hour films , using the group as actors rather than standup performers. Almost simultaneously, the BBC signed Edmondson, Mayall, Planer, and Sayle to star in The Young Ones , a sitcom in the same anarchic style as the Comic Strip. Richardson was initially to have played
9690-546: The system was improved further by eliminating a motor generator so that his television system had no mechanical parts. That year, Farnsworth transmitted the first live human images with his system, including a three and a half-inch image of his wife Elma ("Pem") with her eyes closed (possibly due to the bright lighting required). Meanwhile, Vladimir Zworykin also experimented with the cathode-ray tube to create and show images. While working for Westinghouse Electric in 1923, he began to develop an electronic camera tube. However, in
9804-641: The television. He published an article on "Motion Pictures by Wireless" in 1913, transmitted moving silhouette images for witnesses in December 1923, and on 13 June 1925, publicly demonstrated synchronized transmission of silhouette pictures. In 1925, Jenkins used the Nipkow disk and transmitted the silhouette image of a toy windmill in motion over a distance of 5 miles (8 km), from a naval radio station in Maryland to his laboratory in Washington, D.C., using
9918-421: The telling of the Bad News story was real, due to their real-life signing to EMI; and some fictional, such as the scenes from More Bad News detailing the recording of their debut album . A lot of the original cast were interviewed for the documentary, alongside other people involved with the series at some point such as James Buckley and Stephen Mangan. As Gold, in its current format at least, has never screened
10032-546: The term dates back to 1900, when the Russian scientist Constantin Perskyi used it in a paper that he presented in French at the first International Congress of Electricity, which ran from 18 to 25 August 1900 during the International World Fair in Paris. The anglicized version of the term is first attested in 1907, when it was still "...a theoretical system to transmit moving images over telegraph or telephone wires ". It
10146-577: The tube throughout each scanning cycle. The device was first described in a patent application he filed in Hungary in March 1926 for a television system he called "Radioskop". After further refinements included in a 1928 patent application, Tihanyi's patent was declared void in Great Britain in 1930, so he applied for patents in the United States. Although his breakthrough would be incorporated into
10260-522: The use of a CRT as a display device. The Braun tube became the foundation of 20th century television. In 1906 the Germans Max Dieckmann and Gustav Glage produced raster images for the first time in a CRT. In 1907, Russian scientist Boris Rosing used a CRT in the receiving end of an experimental video signal to form a picture. He managed to display simple geometric shapes onto the screen. In 1908, Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton ,
10374-478: The way it mercilessly satirised a children's classic, although the Enid Blyton estate had given permission for the broadcast. A meeting was called to discuss the group's future with Channel 4, after complaints from viewers. The final episode of the first series was to have been a spoof chat show called Back to Normal with Eddie Monsoon (referred to as An Evening with Eddie Monsoon by some sources). It
10488-494: The widespread adoption of television. On 7 September 1927, U.S. inventor Philo Farnsworth 's image dissector camera tube transmitted its first image, a simple straight line, at his laboratory at 202 Green Street in San Francisco. By 3 September 1928, Farnsworth had developed the system sufficiently to hold a demonstration for the press. This is widely regarded as the first electronic television demonstration. In 1929,
10602-430: The work of Nipkow and others. However, it was not until 1907 that developments in amplification tube technology by Lee de Forest and Arthur Korn , among others, made the design practical. The first demonstration of the live transmission of images was by Georges Rignoux and A. Fournier in Paris in 1909. A matrix of 64 selenium cells, individually wired to a mechanical commutator , served as an electronic retina . In
10716-457: The world's first color transmission on 3 July 1928, using scanning discs at the transmitting and receiving ends with three spirals of apertures, each spiral with filters of a different primary color, and three light sources at the receiving end, with a commutator to alternate their illumination. Baird also made the world's first color broadcast on 4 February 1938, sending a mechanically scanned 120-line image from Baird's Crystal Palace studios to
10830-549: The world's first public demonstration of an all-electronic television system, using a live camera, at the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia on 25 August 1934 and for ten days afterward. Mexican inventor Guillermo González Camarena also played an important role in early television. His experiments with television (known as telectroescopía at first) began in 1931 and led to a patent for the "trichromatic field sequential system" color television in 1940. In Britain,
10944-463: Was "...formed in English or borrowed from French télévision ." In the 19th century and early 20th century, other "...proposals for the name of a then-hypothetical technology for sending pictures over distance were telephote (1880) and televista (1904)." The abbreviation TV is from 1948. The use of the term to mean "a television set " dates from 1941. The use of the term to mean "television as
11058-433: Was "the boss" of the script, with Richens acting as a "mechanic" who was "paid to make these ideas work." His talent for shaping a script was honed in the early days of The Comic Strip stage performances, where he would transcribe the best of the performer's improvisations and create a coherent narrative from them. He also acted as associate director on Comic Strip productions, and enjoyed the occasional cameo role, notably as
11172-459: Was able, in his three well-known experiments, to deflect cathode rays, a fundamental function of the modern cathode-ray tube (CRT). The earliest version of the CRT was invented by the German physicist Ferdinand Braun in 1897 and is also known as the "Braun" tube. It was a cold-cathode diode , a modification of the Crookes tube , with a phosphor -coated screen. Braun was the first to conceive
11286-518: Was considerably greater. It was used for outside broadcasting by the BBC, for the first time, on Armistice Day 1937, when the general public could watch on a television set as the King laid a wreath at the Cenotaph. This was the first time that anyone had broadcast a live street scene from cameras installed on the roof of neighboring buildings because neither Farnsworth nor RCA would do the same until
11400-495: Was contracted to ITV 's The New Statesman , and was only able to appear in two of the BBC productions ( GLC , and the Comic Relief special Red Nose of Courage ). Richardson and Richens took over the bulk of the writing again, and Richardson also took over as director , having previously directed the two feature films, as well as The Strike . The six-part 1990 series was followed by three individual specials in 1992, and
11514-654: Was designed in the Soviet Union in 1944 and became a national standard in 1946. The first broadcast in 625-line standard occurred in Moscow in 1948. The concept of 625 lines per frame was subsequently implemented in the European CCIR standard. In 1936, Kálmán Tihanyi described the principle of plasma display , the first flat-panel display system. Early electronic television sets were large and bulky, with analog circuits made of vacuum tubes . Following
11628-566: Was filmed in the first weeks of July 2012, in and around Totnes ; Richardson wrote and directed the film. The film showcased the characters thirty years on trying to recapture their youth. The film broadcast on Gold 7 November 2012. In addition, a documentary broadcast 3 November 2012, 30 Years of Comic Strip , detailed the filming and reception of several Comic Strip episodes including both original Five Go Mad episodes, The Strike and its semi-sequel GLC: The Carnage Continues , A Fistful of Travellers' Cheques , The Bullshitters / Detectives on
11742-411: Was more reliable and visibly superior. This was the world's first regular "high-definition" television service. The original U.S. iconoscope was noisy, had a high ratio of interference to signal, and ultimately gave disappointing results, especially compared to the high-definition mechanical scanning systems that became available. The EMI team, under the supervision of Isaac Shoenberg , analyzed how
11856-405: Was never produced, as it was considered too vulgar even for the "alternative" Channel 4, and contained material that was possibly libellous. The script—which, uniquely for the Comic Strip, was written as a collaboration by the entire cast—was later published, along with the rest of the series, in book form. A second series of seven episodes followed in 1983–84, including Five Go Mad on Mescalin ,
11970-452: Was not broadcast under the Comic Strip name, partly because of the original group only Richardson appears (he is the only performer to appear in every single episode), and partly because co-star and co-writer Keith Allen did not want to be so closely associated with the group. The third series was broadcast in 1988, and some episodes had longer running times, mostly around 50 minutes. Five of the six episodes (all except Funseekers ) were given
12084-408: Was not until the 1990s that digital television became possible. Digital television was previously not practically possible due to the impractically high bandwidth requirements of uncompressed digital video , requiring around 200 Mbit/s for a standard-definition television (SDTV) signal, and over 1 Gbit/s for high-definition television (HDTV). A digital television service
12198-410: Was one by Maurice Le Blanc in 1880 for a color system, including the first mentions in television literature of line and frame scanning. Polish inventor Jan Szczepanik patented a color television system in 1897, using a selenium photoelectric cell at the transmitter and an electromagnet controlling an oscillating mirror and a moving prism at the receiver. But his system contained no means of analyzing
12312-855: Was partly mechanical, with a disc made of red, blue, and green filters spinning inside the television camera at 1,200 rpm and a similar disc spinning in synchronization in front of the cathode-ray tube inside the receiver set. The system was first demonstrated to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on 29 August 1940 and shown to the press on 4 September. CBS began experimental color field tests using film as early as 28 August 1940 and live cameras by 12 November. NBC (owned by RCA) made its first field test of color television on 20 February 1941. CBS began daily color field tests on 1 June 1941. These color systems were not compatible with existing black-and-white television sets , and, as no color television sets were available to
12426-524: Was popularly known as " WGY Television." Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union , Leon Theremin had been developing a mirror drum-based television, starting with 16 lines resolution in 1925, then 32 lines, and eventually 64 using interlacing in 1926. As part of his thesis, on 7 May 1926, he electrically transmitted and then projected near-simultaneous moving images on a 5-square-foot (0.46 m ) screen. By 1927 Theremin had achieved an image of 100 lines,
12540-517: Was proposed in 1986 by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) and the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunication (MPT) in Japan, where there were plans to develop an "Integrated Network System" service. However, it was not possible to implement such a digital television service practically until the adoption of DCT video compression technology made it possible in the early 1990s. In the mid-1980s, as Japanese consumer electronics firms forged ahead with
12654-515: Was the desire to conserve bandwidth , potentially three times that of the existing black-and-white standards, and not use an excessive amount of radio spectrum . In the United States, after considerable research, the National Television Systems Committee approved an all-electronic system developed by RCA , which encoded the color information separately from the brightness information and significantly reduced
12768-531: Was the tale of a music business rip-off , where Peter Richardson steals a studio recording session tape and passes the results off as his own work. The group made two feature films— The Supergrass (1985) and Eat the Rich (1987) as well as three one-off Comic Strip Presents... episodes which were the next to be screened on Channel 4. The first of these, The Bullshitters , was a parody of television spy and detective shows such as The Professionals . It
12882-500: Was unable or unwilling to introduce evidence of a working model of his tube that was based on his 1923 patent application. In September 1939, after losing an appeal in the courts and being determined to go forward with the commercial manufacturing of television equipment, RCA agreed to pay Farnsworth US$ 1 million over ten years, in addition to license payments, to use his patents. In 1933, RCA introduced an improved camera tube that relied on Tihanyi's charge storage principle. Called
12996-419: Was varied in proportion to the brightness of each spot on the image. As each hole in the disk passed by, one scan line of the image was reproduced. Baird's disk had 30 holes, producing an image with only 30 scan lines, just enough to recognize a human face. In 1927, Baird transmitted a signal over 438 miles (705 km) of telephone line between London and Glasgow . Baird's original 'televisor' now resides in
#709290