Time To Remember? There are those in the club of a certain age who’ve been watching TV in the U.K. almost since day one....well, the 1950’s anyway. Ever since a day’s programme schedule finished with the playing of the National Anthem. Ever since there was just one TV channel. Ever since you owned a 9” screen set....a 12” set was the ultimate - and pictures were 405 lines - and in black and white.
Time To Remember?
Can you remember the first TV set you bought? Ours was a Ferguson ‘Senator’. It was the bees-knees in that you didn’t have to get out of your armchair to turn a knob to switch it on, or another to adjust the volume. ...it had a wired remote control - a shiny 3/8” cream-coloured connecting cable, one end plugged in the back of the set, the other terminating in a sleek hand operated controller....wow! Programmes we used to watch were Barry Bucknall’s Do It Yourself’, ‘The Golden Girls’ and in later years, a comedy, which you see virtually nothing of in this age of constant repeats, ‘I Didn’t Know You Cared’.
[Picture credit - https://www.comedy.co.uk/tv/i_didnt_know_you_cared/, copyright BBC]
We recently watched a few episodes of the latter on YouTube and still found it extremely funny, bringing back pleasant memories. That comedy should be given a fresh airing....we get loads of ‘Last of the Summer Wine’, ‘Only Fools & Horses’, ‘Porridge’, etc but not that one....I bet some of today’s 30-40 year-olds have never seen it. And that same group might find it hard to believe, that even in the 1980's ALL television stopped soon after midnight - even earlier - but not before playing things out with the national anthem. After the last program had finished, a BBC announcer with a posh voice used to wish us all a very good night, remind us to turn our television sets off, and then leave the national anthem playing. We’d respect our Queen by listening attentively (unless it was a Saturday when we’d just stumbled home from the pub, which obviously closed at 11pm in those days). Finally, the hypnotic ‘swirling globes’ BBC logo would disappear and the television set would go blank. And, in case you really did forget to turn your TV set off, a few minutes later a loud constant high-pitched warning sound would play for the whole night until the next morning’s programming began. When you turned the set back on, you needed to wait a couple of minutes for it to warm up and produce, WOW! a black and white picture! Almost everything was broadcast live, and, secondly, almost all of it was produced in the studio. An Outside Broadcast was complex and expensive and involved several huge lorries full of cables and equipment. Ah well, those were the days, Remember?
[TV Photo Credit - John Atherton https://www.flickr.com/photos/gbaku/ ]