What is the oldest surviving television broadcast recording?
As far as British television is concerned, the 30-line Baird system disc recordings described and displayed on Don McLean’s website are the oldest; these date from the early 1930s. See http://www.dfm.dircon.co.uk . Film was used in Baird’s intermediate film television process and had these films survived, they would now be a record of actual television transmissions. But financial circumstances meant that the film had to be processed afterwards to recover the silver and only a few inches of film survive, in the National Film & Television Archive (NFTVA). Moving on to recordings of all-electronic television, the BBC has at least three programmes from the 1936/7 period (Television Comes To London, 1937 Demonstration Film and Televising the Coronation) but all three were made entirely on film; they are not recordings of programmes as they were actually transmitted. The only off-screen film recordings known of pre-war British television are (1) a four-minute composite sequence recorded (wi
