Grace Wyndham Goldie, First Lady of Tele Book

The very first publicly-transmitted television in the world came from a tiny studio in Alexandra Palace in 1936. Its only viewers were a few hundred visitors to an exhibition in west London, promoted by a group of radio manufacturers. Among those watching it taking shape in the studio was a young radio critic, Grace Wyndham Goldie. By the time she retired from the BBC's Television Service, less than thirty years later, television programmes were dominating the leisure hours of the majority of the British population.
And it was Grace who influenced to an extraordinary degree what it was they watched. She supervised the gestation and birth of the first regular arts programme, the first nightly magazine programme, the first topical satire programme. She devised the ground rules governing the ways in which politicians presented themselves to the electorate. She also selected and fostered the careers of a succession of young programme makers, many of whom went on to occupy the most powerful seats in British broadcasting.