A wider audience

Live television coverage of the Olympic Games began in 1936, when black-and-white images of the Berlin Games were beamed out to athletes in the Olympic Village and to Berliners in 25 special viewing rooms across the city. By the time London 1948 came around, TV technology had moved on, with high-resolution cameras allowing the Games to be taken out to a wider audience. The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) broadcast events live across the nation. In covering the swimming, its commentators made the point that the athletes “were televised while still wet”, highlighting the immediacy of events. Although there were only an estimated 80,000 TV sets in the United Kingdom at the time – most of them in private houses – evidence suggests that average audiences peaked at over half a million.

Sixteen years later, at Tokyo 1964, television broadcasting of the Olympic Games went global, paving the way for today’s huge audiences. Today’s Olympic Games attract TV audiences in the billions. Beijing 2008 had a total audience of 4.3 billion tuning in across the two weeks of the Games, equating to 70 per cent of the world’s population. Athens 2004 pulled in 3.9 billion viewers and London 2012 3.6 billion.

Despite the advances made by television, most Britons followed the 1948 Olympic Games on radio. The Olympic Radio Centre was set up at the Palace of Arts in Wembley Park, a central location from where broadcasters could quickly send out reporters to cover the action. An operational hub, the centre linked every outside broadcast microphone at every competition venue and helped ensure quality coverage. Run by the BBC, it was used by 250 reporters from 60 radio stations broadcasting in 41 languages, an Olympic Games record at the time. In total, six hours of action were broadcast live to domestic and international audiences every day from the centre, whose central control room was capable of handling 32 broadcasts at any one time and combining live commentaries from multiple venues.