In 1953, when Norma Young was seven, her family became the first in their Glasgow tenement to get a TV set. It was a big deal – the Youngs had had to choose between a car or a TV. They opted for a 14in Ekco TV as deep as it was wide – and Norma was opened up to the world of The Woodentops and Andy Pandy, two shows that rapidly became her favourites. But at 6pm every evening the screen went blank, and Norma’s viewing was at an end.

This wasn’t her parents regulating her TV time – it was the state. Abolished 65 years ago on Wednesday, the break in programming between 6pm and 7pm every night was a government policy, known colloquially as the toddlers’ truce.

Most readers under the age of 70 will probably never have heard of this peculiar artefact, but those of Norma’s vintage certainly remember it. This paternalistic approach to broadcasting was seen at the time as being socially responsible, with the idea being that a TV-free hour would, as Time magazine put it, allow parents to “wring out their moppets and put them to bed”.

It was also in place to ensure that children didn’t accidentally stray into the dangerous world of adult television, where their fragile minds could be corrupted by the unutterable filth of Dixon of Dock Green or This Is Your Life.

To modern parents, struggling to combat their children’s unfettered access to social media at 11pm on a school night, the idea of the toddlers’ truce might seem a trifle quaint. But in the early 1950s, it was simply accepted as part of life.

“We didn’t think about it really,” says Norma. “You just got on with it. The TV stopped broadcasting at six o’clock, and that was my cue to have a bath and get into my jammies.”

Admittedly, this was against a backdrop of TV that was broadcast for less than 12 hours every day. The rules (as laid out by the postmaster general, of all people) stated that the BBC (and later ITV) could broadcast between 9am and 11pm, but with only two hours shown before 1pm.

The rules were even more draconian at weekends. Only eight hours of broadcasting was permitted on Saturdays, and only seven and three-quarter hours on Sundays. And on Sundays, no children’s programmes were permitted between 2pm and 4pm, lest it prevent youngsters from studying the Bible. Try getting your kid off TikTok to go and read Deuteronomy this weekend and see what happens.

LP Hartley famously opened his novel The Go-Between with the line: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” That was true nowhere more than television in the 1950s, and, viewed through the prism of modern sensibilities, some of the programming appears positively antediluvian. There was a children’s TV segment called Watch With Mother, the implicit message being that good mothers stayed at home while fathers went out and worked.

But by the mid-50s, in spite of the prevailing conservatism of the age, the toddlers’ truce was under threat, thanks to the booming popularity of TV as a medium. In 1950, only 350,000 homes in the UK had televisions. By 1960, the figure had risen to almost three-quarters of homes. When only a handful of the population were affected by the hour’s break, it seemed an irrelevance, but when tens of millions had their entertainment interrupted, it became an issue.

The second front that opened up against the toddlers’ truce came with the formation of ITV in 1955. (With Ant and Dec’s births still decades away, you wonder how they filled the airtime.) The BBC had always been rather in favour of the hour’s break. Funded by the licence fee, fewer hours of broadcast meant lower costs. But ITV was funded by advertising revenue. Having to shut down for an hour every day at 6pm denied it access to a lucrative teatime audience. And so the Independent Television Authority (ITA) began to lobby for the truce to be dropped.

In the early 50s, the postmaster general had been Herbrand Sackville, the first ever hereditary peer to join the Labour party, and a cabinet minister by the age of 23. In spite of his seemingly progressive politics, he broadly agreed with the evening break in transmission. But in April 1955, he was replaced by Charles Hill, who took a rather different tack. Hill later recalled: “This restriction seemed to me absurd and I said so. It was the responsibility of parents, not the state, to put their children to bed at the right time … I invited the BBC and the ITA to agree to its abolition.”

The BBC definitively did not agree to it – or even to a proposed compromise of a 30-minute break. But a groundswell of opposition was building, characterised by an editorial in the Daily Mirror that stated: “If parents can’t drag their children away from the TV screen, there is something wrong with the parents, not the TV programme.”

With the BBC resolutely intransigent on the issue, Hill asked parliament to intervene, and on 31 October 1956, the abolition of the toddlers’ truce was agreed. Even then, the BBC and the ITA couldn’t agree on a date for it to finish, so Hill decided himself: Saturday 16 February 1957.

The first programme the BBC broadcast in the slot was called Six-Five Special, an entertainment show with a heavy leaning towards rock’n’roll. On weekdays, the vacancy was filled by the news and current affairs show Tonight. With its informal approach, and willingness to embrace both the serious and the trivial (one early segment involved a dog that smoked a pipe), it was a precursor to The One Show, if The One Show was exclusively presented by white men in suits. The show’s presenter, Cliff Michelmore, ended each night’s broadcast with the phrase: “That’s all for tonight, the next Tonight will be tomorrow night. Until then, goodnight.”

Years later, the great Alan Whicker, who cut his broadcasting teeth on Tonight, commented: “The BBC was still embedded in its civil service ethos, which took broadcasting off the air every night between 6pm and 7pm, in case viewing parents had trouble getting their children to bed. Can you imagine? We were then writing the grammar of television, so that quaint, hour-long toddlers’ truce of 1957 did not long survive Tonight’s arrival. [In fact, it preceded it by two days.] Soon, viewers were being treated as grownups, where the next Tonight was always tomorrow night and you could make your own house rules in your own home.”

The toddlers’ truce was at an end. At least, almost at an end. A vestige of it survived for another year. On Sundays, transmission stopped between 6.15pm and 7.25pm, to allow viewers to attend church. By 1958, however, religious programming was allowed in what became known as the God slot. In 1961, Songs of Praise was launched.

Remarkably, the fabric of the nation remained intact in spite of TV now transmitting between 6pm and 7pm at night. Indeed, an expected backlash from parents unable to get their square-eyed small people into bed never materialised. The BBC received a grand total of six complaints on the subject.

Norma Young’s family were not among those who complained. While she admits that “they didn’t really enjoy us watching too much telly”, her dad was delighted. “My father loved television. He would watch any old rubbish.” When the adult programmes kicked in, Norma was sent to her bed to read – although she was occasionally allowed to stay up later to watch nature programmes presented by a nice young chap called Attenborough, still going strong 65 years later, with the toddlers’ truce now merely a strange footnote in TV history.