For the Housewife? From ‘The Singing Cook’ to ‘Common-Sense Cookery’: The First (Distrupted) Twenty Years of Television Cooking Programmes in Britain (1936-1955)

Geddes, Kevin

Abstract

The first television broadcasts in Britain were beamed to affluent households in London on the second of November 1936. The first cooking programmes followed two weeks later. Television, initially seen as a ‘disruption’ to the routines of home life and social existence (Ellis 2002), quickly emerged as a staple part of British family life. Few counted on television cooking programmes disrupting the transmission of cooking experience between the families who tuned in, just as Britain, gripped by the Second World War and rationing, needed that knowledge and skill the most. Little has been documented about the early pioneers of television cooking, in particular the difference between broadcasts pre- and post- War. This research focuses on the social, cultural and technological disruptions which shaped television cooking programmes around war-time, setting a path for the genre in the decades to come. This paper will use archive materials from the Alexandra Palace Television Society, the BBC Archives as well as other primary and secondary materials to uncover a shift in priority, and audience, as war disrupted the celebrity tinged broadcasts of the 1930s, in favour of the Ministry of Food approved advice, based on disruption to diets and culinary confidence, once the disrupted pioneering television service resumed. This paper will conclude that disruptive social events have impacts not only on food and cooking, but on the way both are produced by media institutions, shaped by those involved and viewed by audiences, which may feel as relevant and poignant for disruption today and tomorrow.

Citation

Geddes, K. (2020). For the Housewife? From ‘The Singing Cook’ to ‘Common-Sense Cookery’: The First (Distrupted) Twenty Years of Television Cooking Programmes in Britain (1936-1955). https://doi.org/10.21427/fv5b-ww74

• Conference Name: Dublin Gastronomy Symposium 2020
• Conference Location: Virtual - online
• Start Date: May 25, 2020
• End Date: May 29, 2020
• Online Publication Date: May 12, 2020
• Publication Date: May 12, 2020
• Deposit Date: Jun 24, 2020
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.21427/fv5b-ww74
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/2671739