Television plays a major role in shaping ideas about ‘the nation’. As a mass medium, it can and does address a large and varied segment of the national population, entering their lives on an everyday basis in the privacy of their homes. For this reason, in the mid-twentieth century the development of the new medium was closely guarded and regulated by governments. Across Europe, the model of public service broadcasting (PSB) was adopted, explicitly linking broadcasting institutions to national aspirations and policies. Television was conceived as a national medium in its organization, its programmes and its audience.

This chapter explores connections between television as an institution and the nation as an imagined community, focusing in particular on the case of Flanders, the northern, Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. The central question it addresses is: how did public television in Flanders contribute to the construction of a ‘national’ Flemish imagined community? While it is not a nation-state, Flanders has national aspirations which from the 1950s were supported – albeit implicitly – by the fast-growing medium of television. Providing images of the nation, television literally contributed to the ‘imagining’ of the nation, creating a set of widely shared representations of and discourses about Flanders. One key dimension in these representations was the establishment of connections with the ‘national’ past, creating a sense of shared history.