In autumn 1953, Louis MacNeice – no longer the rising talent of the BBC Features Department but one of its aging statesmen – published a cri de coeur in which he lamented the passing of a sceptre the previous spring. On 2 June, Elizabeth Windsor had been crowned Queen of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth realms. It was not with the monarch, however, but with the televisual medium of her accession that MacNeice was concerned. ‘It was prophesied by some that sound broadcasting would die on Coronation Day,’ MacNeice observes in ‘A Plea for Sound’, but he cannot help but feel that television had let its public down: ‘to my mind and that of many others the coronation procession became a bore on the television screen and, paradoxically, regained both sweep and colour when one went over to the sound broadcast’ (1953: 129). MacNeice concedes that the ceremony itself, within Westminster Abbey, was well served by television, but the procession outside had ‘clutter[ed] up the poor little screen in [an] unsignificant way’ (129–32). Worse in MacNeice's view is the possibility that television, more so than sound broadcasting, may ‘shackle’ the imaginations of its audience (134).

The title of MacNeice's article communicates both his continued interest in the medium of radio and his awareness that, whatever he might wish to be true, television was in the ascendant. Indeed, in conventional accounts of British media history, the installation of Queen Elizabeth II serves as a double coronation in which Britain appointed a successor not only to their wartime monarch but also to the medium of their national self-representation. Television had been around for years; while its early, experimental phase at the interwar BBC had been suspended with the outbreak of hostilities, by 1946 the Corporation was once again in the business of vision. Before 1953, however, uptake of the new medium had been slow. It took a ceremony of national importance and visual splendour to prompt a public still emerging from years of austerity to spend £45 for an entry-level television set.