For almost half a century, the BBC’s broadcast schedule on a Saturday afternoon was both startlingly simple and comfortably unchanging. It amounted, in fact, to just a single word, one that somehow conveyed everything while telling viewers absolutely nothing. That word was Grandstand.

As anyone who has ever tried explaining the idea of a landline telephone to a teenager will know, the speed with which technology has shifted has rendered certain concepts not just redundant but somehow alien to generations who did not directly experience them.

The program “Grandstand” falls squarely into that category. From the moment it first appeared in 1958, it was a cornerstone of British broadcasting, a national institution, its bright, jolly theme song burned into the country’s consciousness. Its timings were consistent: “Grandstand” was on (almost) every Saturday, from midday until a little after 5 p.m.

Its content, though, was not. “Grandstand" was bookmarked by two soccer-related elements: “Football Focus,” a magazine-style preview of the weekend’s games, and “Final Score,” in which the host and a phalanx of reporters tracked the results live as they happened.

What happened in the middle was a sort of sporting potpourri, the exact opposite of on-demand television. Some weekends might contain international rugby or live tennis from Wimbledon or a Formula 1 grand prix. Others, a little thinner, might bring you hot badminton action from Kuala Lumpur, a few frames of snooker or some lawn bowling. (American readers of a certain age are probably flashing back to “Wide World of Sports” at this point, so here’s its famous intro.)

In 2001, the BBC made a slight tweak to the format, sluicing off “Football Focus” and “Final Score” as separate, identifiable entities. The Grandstand brand — beloved, but hemorrhaging viewers to satellite and cable broadcasters who had, by that stage, bought the television rights to anything anyone wanted to watch — would now apply only to the filling.