Farmworker Became a Celebrity For Owning a TV
When BBC Television began on 2 November 1936, sets were wildly expensive and the broadcast range of the service was rather limited.
That made being a viewer, especially outside of London, so unusual that one farmworker from rural Suffolk became a bit of a celebrity in the 1930s, simply for owning a set. George Boar of Long Melford - a village about 65 miles north east of London - used an inheritance to buy his TV. This was so notable that when he told a journalist he wanted a wife to watch it with, the press reported him receiving letters from 800 women.
Television historian Prof John Wyver told the BBC: "The idea that a rural working class man like George had a television, and watched it regularly, was sufficient to attract really quite a lot of press attention." He said that in the 1930s, viewers were "mostly upper middle-class, because a television cost at least the same as a family car."
George's TV cost 120 guineas in 1937. That is the equivalent of around £7,700 ($10,000) in 2026. An extraordinary figure as a farm labourer in the 1930s would have been earning less than £100 per year. But, in order to ensure he could also actually watch his TV (with, eventually, his wife), he also had to pay £70 (approx £4,300 now) to have a 60ft (18m) mast set in two tons of concrete in his garden, to ensure reception from the BBC's only television transmitter at Alexandra Palace in North London. So, George spent a century's worth of salary on his acquisition.
Boar would allow fellow villagers to come and watch the set. One is still alive today. Dorothy Theobald, who has lived in Long Melford all her life and will be 100 in December says that it was the size of George's television which she remembers from her childhood, more than the programmes. "It was a great big bit of furniture, with just a little screen."
She also remembers that Boar "advertised for a wife". When the newspapers reported he wanted someone to watch his set with, he received so many letters they had to be poured out of a sack through his window. The good news is that he was married two years later.
