Experiments with twoway television as a possible replacement for the ordinary telephone were followed up so to speak by radio amateurs in Britain in the early 1930s Various popular science journals such as Radio News had detailed articles about how to construct television transmitters and receivers and throughout the 1930s experimenting amateurs were active in many parts of the country But Big Business represented by the British Radio Manufacturers Association in 1938 agreed upon standards for television equipment and channel regulations which drove the grassroots activists out And so there passed at least in Britain the historical moment for a countercultural development of television as a widely diffused grassroots egalitarian form of communication