In the 70s when I was at school and we only had three channels, when there was Test cricket in the summer one of the channels would show the whole thing. I loved it, at least until I started to do summer jobs, even though England seemed not only to lose, but be slaughtered, with alarming frequency. Imagine now a third of your broadcasting capacity devoted to cricket, of all things.
My memory's a bit hazy on this, but I recall a time In the sixties when BBC1 would show just 20 minutes of the home tests, from 6.10 pm to 6.30.pm. That was it. Presumably they had the whole thing on BBC2, but we didn't have that at the time. I think you had to have some kind of upgraded telly.