Set against the tumult of the economic downturn, the announcement that an obscure factory in East Anglia is to close with the loss of 60 jobs is hardly the most momentous news.

It is not just any old factory, though; it is our last real link with a device that changed the shape of the 20th century and occupies more of our leisure time than any other man-made object.

When the Sanyo UK factory in Lowestoft shuts next month, Britain will no longer make televisions. The nation that invented television and pioneered its use as a broadcasting medium will have to leave that to other countries.

The Lowestoft plant, which once employed 350 workers and turned out 500,000 sets a year, was owned by Philips before Sanyo bought it in 1982, and before that Pye. Pye, Decca, Murphy, Dynatron and HMV; back in the Fifties and Sixties, when no one would even dream of buying a foreign set, those were the names people thought of when thinking of televisions.

Times Archive, 1926: The 'Televisor'

Successful test of Mr Baird's new apparatus

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The most evocative name of all was Baird. On January 26, 1926, John Logie Baird invited members of the Royal Institution — and a man from The Times — to a laboratory in Soho, Central London, to witness a demonstration of his new invention.

“The image as transmitted was faint and often blurred,” reported The Times, cautiously, “but substantiated the claim that through the ‘televisor’, as Mr Baird has named his apparatus, it is possible to transmit and reproduce instantly the details of movement, and such things as the play of expression on the face.”

From there to John Sergeant cavorting around on Strictly Come Dancing is perhaps not such a huge leap, but the televisions Britons watch now are manufactured several thousand miles away.

There is still a Baird around today; he is Iain Baird, the grandson of the Scots inventor and curator of television at the National Media Museum in Bradford. “It is a sad day,” said Mr Baird. “My grandfather would be very disappointed that Britain has lost the manufacturing side.”

Back in the day Britain led the way in television manufacture. It may not have been the version pioneered by John Logie Baird – rivals soon came along with improved alternatives – but during the late Thirties Britain had more televisions than anywhere else. “Before the war Britain had more than 20,000 sets,” said Mr Baird. “That was more than Germany had, and more than the United States had. They were the two other countries that were getting into television.

“There were at least 30 manufacturers in the postwar years. All the TV sets that were being watched in the country would have been made here. I don’t think any sets were imported at all. It was in the early Seventies that things started to go wrong.”

The beginning of the end came during the early days of colour television, when Sony came up with its Trinitron system, which produced a sharper picture. British manufacturers began to struggle; their sets were just not as good.

The reliability of domestic sets was often a problem. “Quite often you would buy one of these sets, get it in the living room and turn it on, and it would not work,” said Mr Baird. “There were some sets that were called curtain-burners because of the heat they generated.”

LCD and plasma screens accelerated the decline. Expensive at first, they soon dropped in price, and manufacturers of old-fashioned cathode ray tube sets – big and heavy, not sleek and flat – found it impossible to compete against cheap foreign imports.

As Noel Salmon, vice-president of Sanyo Industries, said: “The current economic situation and price competitiveness have resulted in insufficient orders for the company to remain viable, despite major investment on both product and manufacturing technology.

“The introduction of LCD television imports, primarily from China, Turkey and Eastern Europe, created . . . pressure on UK and other EU manufacturers. Most have now closed and transferred their manufacturing to countries with low wage economies. There appears to be no realistic prospect of an upturn in commercial business for at least the next two years.” For the British television manufacturing industry, however, that is several years too late.

Eighty years of highlights

1925 John Logie Baird, below, gives first public demonstration of television
1927 The BBC is granted a Royal Charter
1936 First “high-definition” broadcasts begin
1946 Licence fee of £2 introduced
1949 Television signal range extends beyond London
1953 The Coronation attracts about 27 million viewers
1954 Daily news bulletins begin. First TV weatherman, George Cowling, also appears
1955 Independent television begins
1958 Households with a TV outnumber those with just a radio
1962 First slow-motion replay in British, during Grand National coverage
1964 BBC Two launches
1967 BBC Two broadcasts in colour. BBC One and ITV follow in 1969
1970 Mexico World Cup finals are the first to be shown live and in colour in the UK
1976 Colour sets outnumber black and white ones
1982 Channel 4 starts broadcasting
1989 Sky Television begins satellite broadcasting
1996 Frank Bruno v Mike Tyson boxing match the first pay-per-view event on British TV
1998 Digital terrestrial TV and widescreen format broadcasts begin
2001 BBC shows first interactive programme on its digital service
2006 First high-definition broadcasts

Sources: University of Leicester; tvhistory.co.uk ; birth-of-tv.org

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