The television control room at BBC Broadcasting Centre, Wembley for the1948 Olympic Games, held in London where pictures from the Empire Pool and Empire Stadium were switched before being transmitted to Alexandra Palace.

'May the weather be fine, the events well contested, and may records be broken.' With these words from Prime Minister Clement Atlee in 1948, Britain took on the hosting of the Olympics, launching the so-called 'Austerity Games'. Coming only three years after the end of World War II, they were run on a proverbial shoe string - no new venues built for the Games, athletes housed in existing accommodation, and competitors even bringing their own food along (as rationing was still in operation in UK).

However, these London Games were highly innovative - in broadcast terms. They saw the advent of the first ever Olympic television outside broadcast operation, with programmes going direct into domestic homes. A total of 64 hours of BBC programming created. Yes, the Berlin Games in 1936 had seen early TV in operation, but they had not transported them directly into people's living rooms.

Take a look at the short film the BBC released just before the 1948 Olympics, showing lots of young men with pipes enthusing over the new outside broadcast kit. The star performer was the CPS Emitron camera or Cathode Potential Stabilized (pictured below), which gave much better pictures and performed particularly well at the indoor swimming events. Only two surviving examples of this camera exist, and you can see one of them on display at Broadcasting House during this current Olympic season.

Since 1948, whichever events you look at almost every modern Olympic Games without exception have heralded broadcast innovation, as broadcasters around the world have sought to match sporting excellence with the next new technological wonder.

Up to 1956, TV pictures were still limited to the host country. The Winter Games at Cortina d'Ampezza changed all that, and saw television pictures relayed for the first time outside the host. By 1960, television crews were flying tapes of the Rome Games to New York to be broadcast, changing the way that the wider public interacted with the Olympics. In total, 21 countries received the feed from Rome. Thanks to broadcasting, the Games were really going global.

Four years later, and the Games pushed at the boundaries of broadcasting, when experimental colour arrived at the Tokyo Games - broadcast via satellite to the USA, with the results stored on a computer for the first time ever. Forty countries now tuned directly into the Games. By the next Games in Mexico, live colour broadcasting was watched by over 600 million viewers. The leaps were exponential.

Another big 'first' came in 1984, when Japanese broadcaster NHK trialled experimental high definition television at the Los Angeles Games, along with the first use of email.

You can see the very camera they used as part of a special free exhibition at Broadcasting House in London this summer, courtesy of our current broadcast partner NHK, who have shipped it over to the UK especially for us. A further twelve years would pass before the first ever Olympic Games website was launched, at the Atlanta Games, when it received an astonishing 189 million hits.

Working in partnership with Japanese broadcaster NHK the BBC has been experimenting with Super Hi-Vision in a dedicated studio in BBC Television Centre in London. This picture shows the SHV camera used during the 2010 trial. The image in the viewfinder is of a quarter-page from then in-house newspaper Ariel hanging on a board on the other side of the studio.

And so the wheel comes full circle, from London 1948 to London 2012, where the Olympic Games have really set a new standard in online delivery. These will be the first all-digital Games, with 2,500 hours of live sport coverage across multiple platforms. They will also see the advent of yet another new broadcast innovation - Super Hi-Vision (SHV). Developed once again by NHK in Japan, working in partnership with BBC and the Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS), SHV has 16 times the definition of current HDTV and offers 360 degree surround sound.

NHK cameramen make final adjustments to a super hi-vision camera used to gather material for special screenings in London, Glasgow and Bradford.

It won't be available for 20 years or so domestically, but you can get a taste of the future at three special screening venues in the UK: BBC Broadcasting House in London, BBC Pacific Quay in Glasgow, and at the National Media Museum in Bradford. Screenings are combined with a display featuring a giant timeline on the Olympics and broadcast innovation, plus some of those ground-breaking cameras (see above) in situ. Of course if you're lucky enough to be in Bradford, you'll get the whole story of TV in the museum's supporting gallery. My production colleagues tell me that SHV is just like being in the London stadium - so grab a (free) ticket and tell us what you think.

Robert Seatter is the Head of BBC History

To attend a Super Hi-Vision screening, visit the BBC Shows and Tours website or book via the National Media Museum.

The BBC's Research and Development Blog have two videos from the 2010 experiments in Super Hi-Vision and Full 3D including sequences from the Charlatans' performance and a Tae Kwon-Do demonstration. BBC Click presenter Spencer Kelly also reported from the trial.

Read more about the BBC's television coverage of the 1948 Olympics on the History of the BBC website.

Listen to a broadcast by then Prime Minister Clement Attlee welcome Olympic athletes in a special broadcast on BBC Radio in 1948 on the BBC Archive website. A collection of archive material from the 1948 Olympics curated by the BBC is also available.

For more updates, follow About the BBC on Twitter.

Harry H.Corbett (left) and Wilfrid Brambell playing the lead roles of Steptoe and Son.

The dysfunctional family is a constant dramatic theme, from Greek classical theatre (where usually they end up dead) to Ayckbourn's comic assemblies in the family home and garden. TV took up the family drama with an idiosyncratic twist when it launched the father/son duo of Steptoe & Son half a century ago.

It began as a one off drama called 'The Offer', piloted in the launch pad for many great BBC comedies that was Comedy Playhouse. Written by Alan Simpson and Ray Galton, the duo was fresh from their triumph of Hancock's Half Hour. Never one to repeat themselves, they were sitting in a Shepherds Bush 'caff' eavesdropping on the conversation of local rag and bone men, and decided that there was the topic for their next comedy TV show. Apparently, they never quite expected the overwhelming hit they got.

Harry H. Corbett

The show is unusual in many ways. I remember watching it as a child of the 60s, and never being quite sure if I should laugh or cry. That uncertainty is part of its deliberate comic effect, I realise now.

Unusually, Steptoe & Son cast actors not comedians in its lead roles, eschewed gags and slapstick for gritty realism, and used real earthy language - almost to the limits of the BBC watershed - rather than comic hyperbole. 'You dirty old man' became the recognised catchphrase of the series, but it felt like real dirt not TV make up.

It's also of its time and eternal. Poor Harold's constant attempts to better himself -via literary erudition, classical music, amateur theatre - are always belittled by a sneer from father Albert who puts him right back in his 1950s working class. One episode, I remember, has father and son held hostage by a desperate prisoner on the run (Leonard Rossiter actually!). So desperate is Harold to escape his father that he begs the prisoner 'Take me with you'.

Harry H. Corbett and Wilfrid Brambell on set filming Steptoe and Son.

But no, they are bound together. That's the nature of their personal hell (other people, or in this case, family ties). Plus the show was so relentlessly popular - lasting on and off till 1974, spawning two feature films and a radio version, as well as various international versions (Albert & Herbert in Swedish) - that the two actors found it difficult to get back to the world of 'serious' drama they had come from.

Ironically, Wilfrid Brambell who played the old father actually outlived his on air son Harry H Corbett by three years, even though Brambell was 13 years older. Even at the end, there was no liberation for poor Harold.

Robert Seatter, Head of BBC History

Find about more BBC anniversaries on the History of the BBC website.

You can see more pictures taken during the construction phase and some showing how the building was initially used in an About the BBC Flickr slideshow here.

Eighty years ago a quiet revolution took place in Regent Street, central London.

The first ever purpose-built broadcast centre in the UK (and almost in Europe - Germany just pipped us to the post) was officially opened for business. The splash of royal pageantry had to wait until July that year, when King George V and Queen Mary formally opened the building, unveiling the plaque which is still there in the entry porch of Broadcasting House.

BBC Broadcasting House under construction in 1930.

Director-General John Reith had bid a sad adieu to Savoy Hill, the BBC's first borrowed HQ, which had seen the fledgling company mushroom from four employees to a couple of hundred in the space of ten years.

It's 'the new Tower of London' trumpeted the Architectural Review, others likened it to the brain centre of the modern civilization, a new Babel tower, and a resplendent cruise liner cresting the wave of Regent Street.

BBC Broadcasting House in London, complete in 1932.

Some years later, writer George Orwell was less complimentary, defining Broadcasting House as a cross between a lunatic asylum and a girls' public school!

It was primarily a monument to the exponential rise in radio's popularity. 'Listening in' had become the craze of the 1920s, and the building had a wonderful metaphorical richness about it, as the BBC's architects and designers struggled to capture this new pervasive magic. They plundered the Bible and Shakespeare, and on the front of BH (as it is often known in shorthand) is Eric Gill's naked statue of Ariel, from The Tempest, being propelled into the air by the magician Prospero. Shocking in its day - there were complaining letters in the Houses of Parliament about the naked boy, and the BBC myth is told that the notoriously puritanical Reith told Gill to reduce the size of the boy's penis - it is now one of Gill's best loved sculptures.

A BBC bespoke-designed mixing desk, created for the then new Broadcasting House in the 1930s.

But let's not forget that BH was also an architectural and technical triumph. There were 800 doors, 6500 electrical lamps, 98 clocks (all synchronized to the new control room), 22 studios, 142 miles of broadcast circuit wiring. Oh, and 840 radiators and some rather nifty hydraulic lifts! Even more impressively, this new temple had been completed in less than three and a half years. A feat indeed.

That the building was uncared for in later decades (especially the 60s and 70s when TV was on the ascendant), and actually considered 'moribund and obsolete' by the Royal Insitute of British Architects at the time, makes its current transformation as the creative hub of the BBC, even more astounding.

BBC Broadcasting House reception in 1932.

The building has been completely reinvented, while maintaining the important historical elements. Recently staff from the BBC World Service began moving into the new wing of Broadcasting House. And within a year or so, teams from Radio, News and Television (known as Vision inside the BBC), along with BBC London, will all be co-sited in the newly extended Broadcasting House.

I wonder what Mr Orwell would make of it now?

Robert Seatter is the the Head of BBC History

• See more pictures of Broadcasting House under construction on Flickr
• Watch a video tour of Broadcasting House presented by Robert Seatter.
• More BBC anniversaries in May can be found on the History of the BBC website.

Hello Muffin! Annette Mills and Muffin The Mule wave at their loyal audience.

It's hard to believe that it's already ten years since the children's channels, CBeebies and CBBC launched: the first for pre-school, the second aimed at 6-13 year-olds. In marked contrast to other digital children's channels, they were free of advertising and largely British in content (90% and 70% respectively).

A useful moment perhaps to reflect back - to the first ever children's broadcast on the BBC, which came right at the very start of broadcasting itself. Just under 90 years on 5 December 1922, engineer A E Thompson (later called 'Uncle Thompson') made broadcast history when he presented a few minutes' entertainment 'just for children'. He told a story of Spick and Span, two dwarfs, and played a gramophone record called Dance of the Goblins. From that moment on, children's programming never left the BBC...

It's easy of course now to laugh at the many BBC 'Uncles' and 'Aunties' who popped up on air in the 20s/30s - they had great names such as Uncle Mac, Uncle Rex, Uncle Caractacus, Aunt Sophie - and their patrician tone. Easy too to mock the safe world the early radio programmes conjured up, with those memorable opening words: Are you sitting comfortably?

Children watching Andy Pandy

Later, TV gave us Muffin the Mule, and the unforgettable cast of Watch with Mother: Andy Pandy, Bill & Ben, The Woodentops etc. But all these programmes were based on a real desire to talk directly to its child audience, and to give them a small, safe broadcast island. In essence, no different to Children's broadcast aims today.

But behind the scenes in radio and later on TV, it was a bitter battle for children's airtime and funding. The current digital channels come at the end of that. Valiant champions - invariably women producers - fought for the importance of children's broadcasting both inside and outside the organisation. Many traditional voices castigated it: even as recently as 1991, Schools Minister Michael Fallon called BBC Children's programmes 'wicked, brazen and sinister'. To and fro went children's programmes in the 1950s and 60s: to Adult Programmes, to a Family Unit, and back to Children's TV again. And finally to where it is now, in one creative centre, defined, safeguarded and globally successful. Spick and Span, Muffin, Andy Pandy, Bill & Ben, would all, I think, be pleased and proud.

• CBBC and CBeebies have announced their new season of programmes for their 10th anniversary year. Read more on the BBC Media Centre website.
• There are more clips, photographs and BBC history on the BBC Story website.
• Watch an archive clip from Blue Peter in 1986 in which Janet Ellis and Phillip Schofield explain how a broken stopwatch caused mayhem for the CBBC 'Broom Cupboard'
• To mark the anniversary of CBBC and CBeebies, there's a collection of signature tunes will be published available to fathom out on the About the BBC AudioBoo account. Test your knowledge with the first clip.

On 3 November on top of a hill in North London, an American singer called Adele Dixon, with a diction far away from our contemporary chart-topping Adele, sang these words: 'A mighty maze of mystic magic rays is all about us in the blue...' The rather headily alliterative lyric was attempting its own bit of propaganda: to explain to an unsuspecting British public what TV was all about.

Of course audiences had seen films in the cinema, but this was different. It was personal! In its own grumpy corner, the press sniffed at the new arrival... The Times was particularly unimpressed, intoning that man was basically a social animal, and would not forsake the gregarious pleasures of theatre and restaurants for 'the lonely pleasures of TV at home'. How very wrong they were.

Today it is 75 years since the BBC launched the world's first continuous television service - and how foreign a world without TV would be to us now. What of its early days? Every schoolboy/girl used to know that John Logie Baird invented television. Answer: no he didn't. He invented the idea of it, as he was the most passionate of propagandists for the new medium. But in fact, in the race for television in 1936, his 'mechanical' system of television proved to be completely untenable - inflexible cameras, uncomfortable 'spotlight studios', dangerous vats of chemicals (cyanide!), and a slow system of picture delivery. No, Marcon-EMI, with their 'electronic' system - slicker, more flexible, better quality, triumphed, and even though we might have wanted the plucky mad inventor Scot to win against the moneyed forces of EMI, it was not to be.

So that was the technical side, but what was there actually to watch in the mid 1930s? Well, when you step inside the lofty but narrow studio at Alexandra Palace (open specially the weekend of 5/6 Nov this year for the anniversary!), it is quite amazing when you discover what was made there - ballet troupes, opera companies, classic dramas, variety shows and cabaret, dance bands and performing animals all squeezed their way into its limited confines. The most popular programme was a show called Picture Page, the first interactive TV experience, when viewers phoned in their requests of what they'd like to see on air - and the BBC obligingly delivered, everything from tennis stars to everyday folk with sometimes extraordinary occupations. Miles of careful cable were also threaded out of the studio to capture the first outside broadcasts: the TV gardener in situ (the famous Mr Middleton of 'Dig for Victory' fame), the latest sporting triumphs on land and water, the Coronation of the King. A pell mell of experimentation and innovation. How dull life must have become when they knew how to do it!

So don't miss the opportunity to step inside the famous studio in Alexandra Palace, where it all began. The iconic tower mast on top of its corner wing is still there, the long black box of a studio still exerts an atmospheric pull, and there'll be a 1930s dance band and tea room to get you in the mood, as well as some futuristic TV too.

As we prepare for the switch off terrestrial TV, the launch of internet-enabled TV and experiment with HD and Super hi-Viz, it is clear that TV production has developed a long way since those early days. And how fitting and salutary it is to remember some of those first BBC pioneers who paved the way for everything that was to come. Those fools on the hill.

Robert Seatter is the the Head of BBC History

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I took some News trainees round Broadcasting House in central London the other day. I was trying to get them to imagine how new and utterly undefined broadcasting was in the early days. How did you know how to build a new broadcasting centre, when hardly anyone else had ever done it? Colonel Val Myer (the architect of Broadcasting House) did of course look across the Atlantic to the US model when he made his first stab at the so-called ‘Top Hat’ design for the building, but otherwise, he was moving largely into unknown territory.

After that, broadcasting went in leaps and bounds. What created the biggest impact? the trainees asked me. War I answered. WW2 utterly changed the face of the BBC, defining its objective journalistic role with sharp clarity and turning it to face the wider world with a very different focus. When war broke out in September 1940, there were eight BBC foreign language services; at the end of the war, there were 48. It’s also hard to believe in our times of 24-hour, global news that on one day in 1924, I think, the BBC was able to report that there was no news to announce today!

And so to other milestone moments. This year sees the 75th anniversary of BBC’s first hi-definition TV service in November. Before that date, there had been experimental attempts, the struggle from a low-definition snowstorm on a screen towards something more watchable, and all this activity against the backdrop of an international race to be the first across the viable TV line. Preparations are now underway for different ways of bringing that big anniversary TV story to life, working especially with our wider UK partners such as the National Media Museum and BFI.

Of course our storytelling will feature some of those ‘’TV Greats’ moments – the creation of Television Centre, the first ever purpose-built TV building in the world; the advent of colour that caused temerity in some viewers – would it adversely affect their eyes?!; Doctor Who, the longest running sc-fi series in the world, and always in a state of constant reinvention; Morecambe & Wise with its record-breaking Christmas audience of 28 million viewers; Live Aid, the first global pop/charity phenomenon; right up to the present moment and its connecting, global technologies.

When the BBC began broadcasting, it searched for a metaphor for this new airborne magic… the broadcasting powers-that-be raided Shakespeare and the Bible, to give us the statue of Ariel (from The Tempest) on the front of Broadcasting House, and inside the Art Deco foyer, the parable-inspired figure of The Sower, casting his seed democratically into the listening air. What, I wonder, will be the metaphor for the next ‘brave new world’ of broadcasting?

Robert Seatter is Head of BBC History

• The BBC Story 

Elizabeth R hit the BBC airwaves 40 years ago on 17 Feb 1971. It followed of course the huge success of The Six Wives of Henry VIII a year earlier, and adopted the same prize-winning formula: six different screenwriters each taking a different slice of the monarch’s life and each writing a 90-minute drama. It capitalised on the new arrival of glorious colour TV, and it was of course graced at its centre by the towering performance of Glenda Jackson as The Virgin Queen (hear her talk about preparing for the role here).

In retrospect, her subsequent career in politics does not seem strange at all. She had after all learnt her script from one of its greatest exponents!

Elizabeth R consolidated too Britain’s enduring love affair with the Tudors: on TV, film, in museums and galleries, at the heart of the school curriculum. As if our nation history blazed only in a few moments of memorability: The Tudors, The Civil War, Victoria and the Empire, and WW2. The rest is a vague fog.

Surprising therefore that in a recent survey of TV costume drama by BBC History Magazine, readers voted the Tudors (in all its varied dramatic manifestations) surprisingly low in its poll.  Top of the tree was Pride & Prejudice – Colin Firth (the non-stuttering version) bending out of surly Darcy pride to woo the independently spirited Lizzie Bennett (Jennifer Ehle) was a predictable number one (though not strictly historical drama). The Tudors (2007 version) came in at number 15, with Elizabeth R and Six Wives of Henry VIII at 18 and 17 respectively.

Ahead of them was the early 20th century cohort: Downton Abbey and Upstairs Downstairs, and the late 19th century depiction of village life, Cranford. As if, faced by austerity Britain, we prefer to flee to a more ordered world of social hierarchy and bonnet dress codes. You know where you are in a good bonnet!

Not that the real world of costume drama is necessarily easy. In 1971 Glenda Jackson endured physical agonies with costumes that were so heavily padded she had trouble breathing and was unable to bend her arms. Some were also so heavy that she had to remain seated, others so big she had trouble walking through doors.  And that was after she had already spent six hours in make up and prosthetics ageing herself up for the later programmes.

It makes a life in politics seem positively pain-free!

Robert Seatter is Head of BBC History

• The BBC Story

Almost three quarters of a century ago on 11 December 1936, another annus horribilis came to a crashing end with that most famous of royal broadcasts – the abdication speech of Edward VIII. What with Colin Firth’s purportedly Oscar-winning role as George VI (in The King’s Speech) due for release early next year, there is suddenly a lot of interest in the voice of kingship, and more interestingly the psychological gap between the royal and the human.

And Edward’s speech marks a key moment here. It was not only the most listened to broadcast of the decade, but also a royal broadcast message that completely broke the mould. Up to then, royal broadcasts had been slow measured salutations – beginning with the words that Rudyard Kipling wrote for George V in the first ever Christmas message ("I speak now from my home and from my heart to you all."…).

Edward’s initial draft of his famous speech was in fact written some days earlier on Thursday 3 December, a fact not known until the publication of the Duke of Windsor’s memoirs in 1951. He proposed to the Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, and to Sir John Reith, Director-General of the BBC, that he should speak directly to the nation (and ‘the Dominions’), seeking to explain his motives and then leave the people to decide…

This direct appeal proved too much for the government of the day. Baldwin thought it unconstitutional and would in fact divide the nation, muttering about a ‘coup d’etat’. So it sat in amber for a further week, until it was re-framed once the momentous decision had been made. 

Many of the famous phrases from the final speech were already there, however. He had ‘found it impossible to carry the heavy burdens of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love’; the ‘other person most nearly concerned’ had ‘tried up to the last to persuade me to take a different course’; he had made his decision ‘upon a single thought of what would in the end be best for all’.

Men and woman wept as they heard it, Churchill is reported to have had tears in his eyes after reading it (he also made a few final tweaks to it at the King’s request).

Audiences would have to wait many decades more - before they would hear such personal emotion expressed so directly in a broadcast by a member of the royal family.

Robert Seatter is Head of BBC History

The BBC Archive website remembers the abdication and the short reign of Edward VIII with a new archive collection.

On this website you can listen to the abdication speech and hear the moment history changed. Also released are some of the speeches Edward made when he was Prince, which give a fascinating hint of what he might have done if he had stayed on the throne. Among the television programmes you can watch is a 1970 interview with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. You can even read an extract from John Reith's diary in which he explains what it was like to be in the room with the King as he told the world that he was giving up the throne.

Forty years ago this week (8 Nov 1970), three men on a bicycle (‘trandem’) careered into our comic TV world, promising to do ‘anything, anytime, anywhere’. One was posh right down to his Union Jack underpants, one was a middle-class technocrat concocting new inventions in his back room, and the third was a flat-capped son of honest toil with a penchant for aggression (before becoming a passionate twitcher and observer of all things natural in our back garden…).

They were of course The Goodies! Can it really be 40 years ago they appeared for the first time? They came with a host of enduring, goofy, visually punning sketches – remember the trio chased by a giant rampaging Dougal (The Magic Roundabout was never ever the same again!), or by bomb-dropping geese, ‘ecky thump’ blood puddings, or when they turned delinquent on Skid Row, abandoned on the moon, and (ahead of its Who do you think you are? time) transformed themselves into their own ancestors: Keltic Kilty (Graeme) , Kinda Kinky (Bill) and Kountie Kutie (Tim)! And perhaps most memorable of all, in the episode ‘Kitten Kong’, where an enormous fluffy white kitten terrorised our cowering heroes.

Kids loved it, adults loved. One poor viewer apparently thought they were so funny that he laughed himself to death! It also had the rare notoriety of being derided as ‘too childish’ by BBC executives, while being criticised by Mary Whitehouse for being ‘too sexually orientated’. The mind boggles!

And occasionally, they even strutted their stuff on Top of the Pops. ‘The Funky Gibbon’, written by Bill Oddie, propelled them into the charts and made them the 5th biggest grossing pop act of 1975.
So where did The Goodies come from? The trio had met at Cambridge University, contemporaries of Beyond the Fringe/Monty Python, and created their unique brand of humour, inspired by – in their own words – a mix of Buster Keaton, Mad Magazine, Bugs Bunny and Tom & Jerry. Whatever the case, America’s superman heroes were never ever to be the same again. They were now transformed into bumbling, class-befuddled, benign and oh-so English do-gooders. Amazingly, they lasted for ten years, and their influence still lingers today in The Mighty Boosh and We Are Klang, to name but two.
Can’t you still hear that theme tune: Goody goody yum yum..?

Robert Seatter is Head of BBC History

Listen to comedian Ross Noble's revist to The Goodies: Anything, Anywhere, Anytime and Pick of the Week on Radio 4 for a Goodies fix. You can also watch the Return of the Goodies on Saturday night on BBC Two.

But in spite of this, hit it did – with all the force of a 500lb delayed-action bomb. Smashing in at a seventh floor window, it came to rest in the music library two floors below, killing seven members of BBC staff – but barely disrupting the unflappable news reader Bruce Belfrage. He gave a slight cough as the ceiling fell around him, then continued courageously with his reading of the 9pm news bulletin.

One of the BBC staff, describing the aftermath of the bomb attacks on Broadcasting House, called it ‘a scene from Dante’s Inferno’ (obviously a member of the Arts department!), but the BBC was only sharing what the rest of the UK was experiencing: the horror, the danger, the arbitrary nature of the Blitz, where one street survived, another next to it fell to the ground. Who lived, who died, was all a matter of chance.

But of course, broadcasting was identified early in the war as one of the obvious targets – hence its green-grey camouflage. Whole teams of broadcasters were evacuated to less urban parts of the UK, and strategies were put in place to ensure – whatever the eventuality – that broadcasting would carry on. Eventually in 1942, a bunker (or ‘stronghold’ as it was sometimes referred to) with walls 17 inches thick was built under the extension of Broadcasting House, so that vital broadcasting could persist.

Broadcasting House is not the only BBC London building to have been the target of bomb attack. More recently, Television Centre was hit in 2001 by an IRA bomb, leaving the front facade in mangled pieces. And nowadays the BBC, as many other public bodies, has to tread that difficult path between wanting to keep its buildings open and  accessible to the public who pays for them, and protecting them from invasive attack, come when it will.

Robert Seatter is Head of BBC History

See and hear the full story on BBC History's audio slideshow.

Well, we know that autumn’s really here when another band of courageous celebs don their glittering costumes and take on the challenge that is Strictly Come Dancing! It’s now well and truly part of the seasonal calendar, and has successfully reinvented Saturday night on the BBC.

Strange, but perhaps not so strange, to reflect that 60 years ago on 29 September 1950, Strictly’s predecessor, Come Dancing hit the air. It ran off and on from 1949 (regional launch) to 1998, making it one of TV’s longest running shows, and its removal was greeted with howls of horror from British ballroom dance fans.

It boasted an array of really famous presenters too. From Peter Dimmock (the future mastermind of the televisation of the 1953 coronation) and Leslie Mitchell (the British Clarke Gable-lookalike presenter of early BBC TV) to Angela Rippon, Judith Chalmers and Terry Wogan (and you can’t get much more famous than Sir Terry!). Its over-the-top glamour – even in black and white – fascinated a grey and gloomy Britain still in the grip of post war blues.

But strange, because in Britain the public perception is still one of surprise that anyone – but in particular a man - can dance. And yet, according to the Arts Council, dance is now the top UK leisure pursuit.

It has also been at the heart of our BBC TV schedules from the earliest times. In 1937, the BBC had Charles B Cochrane’s ‘Young Ladies’ in full-on variety mode, glamorous ballroom dancers, plus a young Margot Fonteyn in her tutu. Later, dance was the staple of every entertainment show – even Morecombe & Wise put on the top hat and tails, and Angela Rippon slid (almost) effortlessly from serious newscaster to dance presenter via her high kicks with Eric and Ernie!

So, in spite of ourselves, we really have been, and are, a nation of dance lovers. We aspire to its elegance – remember Audrey Hepburn singing in My Fair Lady ‘I could have danced all night’. Cue the whirling of countless sequinned dresses and straight-backed men in tails on Come Dancing.

But not too much… John Sergeant could never dance but we loved his indefatigable insistence on Strictly Come Dancing that he would try and try. We want sublime dance skill, but we also want a little deflating of its self-conscious pursuit of poise and perfection. What Strictly has cleverly pulled off is a bridge between these two TV dance extremes.

So to paraphrase Bruce and Tess: Keep dancing, BBC.

Robert Seatter is Head of BBC History

The Strictly Come Dancing Costumes are on display at BBC Television Centre until 11 October

Read a blog post from Dave Arch, the musical director and conductor of the live band for Strictly Come Dancing, on the TV blog.

• Children and the BBC - from Muffin the Mule to Tinky Winky

• Start of the Light Programme 29 July 1945

There's no denying that we British are a bit funny about the French. We love them for our houses in their countryside, their tasty gourmet food, their filmstars, their sex appeal. But when it comes to politics, it's a very different story. So it's a turn up for the books when there's a real moment of entente cordiale. And not token co-operation, but absolute open emotionalism.

I witnessed it at the French Institute, when I went to the first UK screening of a film about 'the Free French' in London during WW2. At the end of the film, an auditorium of (mainly) French viewers stood up and applauded their surviving Resistance fighters but also the BBC that gave them a unique voice.

It will be even more publicly expressed when President Sarkozy, his wife and an entourage of over 800 people come to the UK - and more especially the BBC - for the 70th anniversary of General de Gaulle's famous broadcast on BBC airwaves to occupied France on 18 June 1940. We in Britain know little about this momentous broadcast, but for the French it is absolutely huge. For this broadcast did in some way create the public personality of General de Gaulle, create the Resistance movement, and in turn create (in modern memory) the idea of unified and free France. President Sarkozy has himself said - 'We are all the children of the 18 June'.

So what exactly happened? General de Gaulle had fled his country on June 17, 1940, as the new administration, sought an armistice with Hitler. A relative unknown, de Gaulle entreated the British government to let him broadcast to France from London in a last ditch attempt to save his country. The cabinet initially refused but Winston Churchill insisted. And so the general went on air urging the French not to capitulate, but to fight on alongside Britain and the US, ending his broadcast with the famous words: 'The flame of French resistance must not, and will not be extinguished.'

The French Resistance - which went on to play a crucial role in defeating the Germans - was born as a result, and de Gaulle named as its leader. The Free French (as his followers were called) were allowed five minutes each day on the BBC French Service to broadcast to occupied France and orchestrate their defiance. Many impassioned addresses were made by de Gaulle himself, either from Broadcasting House or Bush House, and he was regarded as the 'secret hope' by those living under German rule. Even today, the sound of the opening jingle of those BBC broadcasts can bring tears to the eyes of surviving listeners. 'Unprecedented in media history' is how one of the most famous Resistance survivors described these lifeline broadcasts.

It's moving and humbling to be told by others of the impact of the BBC 70 years ago, and it's salutary to remind ourselves that wars go on, media freedom is still a precious thing, and many of our BBC News and World Service colleagues are today carrying on that vital role of giving voice to the voiceless on air.

Robert Seatter is Head of BBC History

• Director of BBC Global News, Peter Horrocks speaks to the Telegraph 

But I must confess to being partial - and one of my favourite BBC anniversaries crops up today. It's the quirky and idiosyncratic story of a nightingale and a cello. Once upon a time...

On 19th May 1924, BBC radio listeners heard for the first time an extraordinary duet live from a Surrey garden. The cellist was Beatrice Harrison, who had recently performed the British debut of Delius's Cello Concerto, which had been written for her. The nightingales were the birds in the woods around Harrison's home in Oxted, who were attracted by the sound of her cello.

Harrison first became aware of the birds one summer evening as she practised her instrument in the garden. As she played she heard a nightingale answer and then echo the notes of the cello. When this duet was repeated night after night Harrison somehow managed to persuade the BBC that it should be broadcast. Engineers carried out a successful test and the following night the live broadcast took place.  Harrison played and the nightingales, eventually, joined in.

The public reaction was such that the experiment was repeated the next month and then every spring for the following 12 years. Harrison and the nightingales became internationally renowned and she received 50,000 fan letters. Writing in the Radio Times before the second broadcast,  BBC Managing Director John Reith said the nightingale "has swept the country...with a wave of something closely akin to emotionalism, and a glamour of romance has flashed across the prosaic round of many a life". What a great prose style that man had!

And why does the 'glamour of romance' still touch me? I suppose it's partly for the same reason that Springwatch works its charm on audiences today. It's the belief that, even in this post-industrial age, we still have some relationship with our 'natural' neighbours. Nature touches us - and even more extraordinary, does not ignore us: a nightingale may answer a cello.

RS

More information at BBC History.

Robert Seatter is Head of BBC History