Picture Page

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Picture Page was a British television programme, broadcast on the BBC Television Service (now known as BBC One) from 1936 to 1939, and again after the service's hiatus during the Second World War from 1946 until 1952. It was the first British television series to become a long-running and regular popular hit.

The programme was in a magazine format with two hour-long editions broadcast each week covering a range of interviews with well-known personalities, features on a range of topics and coverage of public events taking place. The main presenter during the pre-war era was Canadian actress Joan Miller who played the role of a "switchboard operator" similar to that of a telephone exchange, "connecting" the viewers to the particular guests and items being featured that week. Miller was nicknamed "The Switchboard Girl" in the popular press and became one of the first television celebrities. She would be assisted by Leslie Mitchell and Jasmine Bligh, two of the BBC's three in-vision continuity announcers (the other being Elizabeth Cowell). Following the return of the programme in 1946, first Joan Gilbert and then later Mary Malcolm took on presenting duties.

Picture Page was produced live by the BBC from their Alexandra Palace television studios for the entirety of its run. The first episode was actually broadcast on 8 October 1936, some three and a half weeks before the official opening of the service on 2 November, as part of the ongoing test transmissions in the run-up to the launch date. Until 1949 the series was not recorded and thus none of the pre-1949 programmes exist anymore. Four shows from 1951 have survived in the form of telerecordings.^{[citation needed]}