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Apart from the world of Hi' Def' and Plasma screens, television is not what it was.

I remember getting a ?500 telly for ?120 in 1992 when Rumbelows closed down. It was, and still is, one of the best tellies I've ever seen. The colour, clarity and detail were better than even the living room set which my father paid a good few hundred for and I spent almost all my ten years in my room as a result!

The telly is still one of my most prized posessions. But as the quality of terrestrial has dipped (including Freeview too!) it seems pretty pointless having it now.

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Do You Remember Television sets?

Do You Remember Television sets?

  • Aura
    on
    Had to keep banging ours as it kept going funny.
  • Anonymous user
    on
    I was a TV engineer in the 70's. Being a TV engineer in those days was easy. All faults boiled down to certain valves or transistors blowing, all you needed to know was which valve/transistor to change on a certain set to solve a certain problem. IN the 70's solid state selenium rectifiers came out, replacing the valve that did the job. You always knew when that had blown, you walked in the house to the smell of rotten fish. Like cars, certain TV's had certain, known design flaws, known problems. Some Decca TV's had the EHT (high voltage) rectifier in a perspex 'coffin'. After a while the high voltage began to 'track' across, making long sparks, which carbonised the perspex and made it track even more. After a couple of years uncorrected, the perspex coffin disintegrated, and sometime caught fire. The only solution was to chip away the blackened mess and leave the EHT rectifier dangling in space off the back of the LOPT (Line Output Transformer) Another thing you learned not to do was trust the carrying handle on portable TV's which became more common in the late 70's/early 80's. Almost everyone i know did the same as me, carry a portable by the handle and the handle failed, in my case the TV bounced all the way down the stairs of the workshop, and i had to do some serious fixing before the customer came back. Another thing you learned the hard way was that the big glass TV tubed could hold the high voltage charge for days, and if you touched the side connector by accident or stupidity you got an instant 25,000 volt pulse, probably similar to a modern tazer!!
  • Anonymous user
    on
    Aha...the dreaded remote debate! We had a new Baird TV once, paid for by an unexpected tax rebate my dad got. At last, he declared, Match of the Day in colour!! It didn't have buttons to push to change the channel but had a 'Touch Panel' that worked for about 2 months n then stopped. Eventually, I figured out thatif you touched the panel and jumped up in the air at the same time, you could change the channel no problem!! The sight of my dad hopping up n down to get the footy results on Grandstand haunts me till this day! I had a Saturday job in the local TV & Radio shop at the time and the repair guy there told me it was cos me Mom was using Mr Sheen to clean the telly and it was knackering the buttons up. When I told my Dad ( I could never keep my mouth shut )he went barmy and blamed her and her Mr Sheen for every ill in the house from the Mk2 Cortina that wouldn't start on any given Wednesday to the terminal condensation on the windows. He tried to clean the TV buttons with nail varnish remover but only succeeded in removing half of the varnish from the fake teak cabinet and melting the plastic surround on the volume control. That and the CONSTANT havin to adjust the Vertical Hold to stop the picture rolling up n down..... oh the joys
  • Anonymous user
    on
    I didn't even have colour until the end of the seventies. I remember that old black and white set - If you wanted to watch something that started at 7.00pm, you'd have to switch it on at 6.55 to give it time to warm up! And the most shocking thing of all (today's kids would never believe this) was if you got bored with one channel and wanted to see what was on either of the other two (three channels - what a choice!), you'd have to GET OUT OF YOUR CHAIR to turn it over!
  • Anonymous user
    on
    In the days when TVs had their own legs and the Ferguson ColourStar was king (accompanied by it's friend the VideoStar) i'd spend ages looking through the 2nd hand ads in the paper for a cheap big colour telly to replace my poor old 14" portable to use with my computer.

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