TV's that were pre-VCR needed simple modifications to make them work with VCR's (altering the time constant of the flywheel sync) - it just needed that doing.

TV's from the VCR era usually had a single channel position specifically for a VCR, and this switched the time constant when you selected that channel.

Some later sets had a special tuning setting, where you could select VCR on any channel.

My PYE tv had a nice walnut brown cabinet.

We didn't go colour until around 1981 or 82. Our first colour TV was a 22" Toshiba with feather touch tuning (no remote), as far as i can remember.

The first colour set I bought was made by Decca, it was ex rental, a huge thing with valves inside. Amazingly it worked for 10 years, never needed repair. I replaced it with another ex rental set made by Rediffusion, that was also built like a tank and worked perfectly for years.

Yea we had a 1980 Philips G90, you could only view the VCR through channel 12, tuning it to any other channel meant the picture pulling at the top.

It is a good thing there wasn't the internet like we have now and the Digital Spy forums back in the early 1960s or else there would have been floods of "<name of country> is better than us at this" propaganda threads to contend with!

I was born in 1992, but my grandparents got their first colour TV in 1981, but it had a switch on it to switch it between black and white and colour mode. My grandad has got a combined portable black and white TV, cassette recorder and AM/LW/FM radio deck which he got in 1982 and is stored away in the shed.

Are you sure about that? - in over 40 years or repairing TV's I've never seen (or heard of) a set with any such switch?.

The sets had a colour control, which you could turn down to zero if you wanted to reduce a colour programme to B&W.

The first VHS VCR's had such a switch though (Ferguson 3292 - made by JVC), but in that case it allocated extra bandwidth to give an improved B&W image.

Hmmm.... perhaps they did mean colour control but mistakenly thought it was a switch because it was such a long time ago!

I wonder if you could have set the colour control to zero and only paid for a black and white TV licence, but plead you only had and watched black and white television dispite technically recieving a colour television transmission?

If I remember correctly ours was a Ultra Bermuda they had just come out.

Changing the subject slightly, does anyone recall the prism's that were available to look through to give the impression of colour on a B&W set, or did I imagine it?

I can remember as kid when off sick looking through the yellow cellophane off a Lucozade bottle at Andy Pandy on our 15" B&W set, and imagining it was in colour!!

Rented from Granada but thats all I remember.

Ours was (about 1975) a Rediffusion cable tv. All I remember is that it was a 22", wooden cabinet, black plastic front with a rectangled on/off switch about 1/4 " deep & three knobs - Volume, Briliance & colour

Broke down as regular as clockwork

I was born in 76 and always had colour tv. I do remember non remote control tv's though that even though there was only 4 channels there was 8 buttons to press. Channel 8 was the video channel

No, you would need a colour licence - simply turning down the colour wouldn't be enough.

However, along with many rental companies once B&W TV's were no longer available we did modify a few colour sets to B&W for long term B&W rental customers.

It wasn't a 'prism' it was just a crude coloured plastic sheet over the screen - if I remember correctly?, blue at the top, green in the middle and brown at the bottom?.

I only ever saw one once when I went in a customers house.

I think that's right. I never saw one, but there was a brief period during the transition to colour TV when "Can I convert my TV to colour?" was a Frequently Asked Question, and this was a "solution" that I saw advertised.

My memory is that the top section was blue (sky is blue, and is always at the top of the picture!) and the bottom section was green (because apart from sky, there has to be grass, obviously!), and that the middle section was transparent.

A couple of interesting links I've just found:

The 1955 Col-R-Tel colour converter for monochrome TV receivers. Puts a big spinning colour wheel in front of the screen. A bit like a DLP projector!

A 1962 April Fool's Day hoax that tricked many Swedish viewers into trying to convert their TVs to colour by putting nylon stockings over the screen...

Our (parent's) first colour tv was a Philips G11

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3049/2...11cb7db6e9.jpg

Lost count how many times we had it repaired. I think we spent more on repairs than the damn thing cost in the first place.

I was aged about 13 at the time. I was already into electronics, building and fixing things. We only had a black and white tv. So I got the idea of buying a faulty colour set and repairing it. I forget the make and model, but it was a huge all valve set, this would have been about 1976.

My dad delayed upgrading from a B&W to colour licence for almost a year, until he trusted the repaired set was going to last.

Over the next few years I bought more, fixed them and sold them, occasionally keeping one when I got one better than what we had.

In those early years, a lot of the sets I fixed were hideous all valve sets with live chassis and lethal EHT rectifier stacks. It's a wonder I didn't kill myself, and yes I did get quite a few electric shocks from the things. Things got a lot easier with first hybrid sets, then all solid state sets.

And that started me on a lifetime of buying faulty sets, repairing them and selling them. It's a fact I have never owned a tv set that was not faulty when I got it. I've repaired hundreds of them and still do a few from time to time now, mostly LCD sets now.

I've seen all the trends in styles of set, from nice real wood, to plastic pretend wood, then silver, then black, then silver, and currently we are in a "black" phase again (though the present shiny black I find awful, I much prefer matt black)

And the "gimmicks" the manufacturers like to stick on the front of sets. I had one some time back (a 22" FST) that proudly claimed to be "digital" of course long before digital tv was invented. I think it referred to electronic tuning rather than presets that you twiddled on older sets. Then there were the "stereo" sets that pre dated nicam stereo, so would only reproduce stereo sound from an external source.

If that Hitachi was an "instavision" with the plastic around the edge of the screen protruding outwards to meet the edge of the screen, then I've got one. Still works. Ex-school TV set. Hitachi made a range of models using this design, they're all pretty reliable (if they've had their original CRT replaced - the originals, which were made to switch on instantly, used to develop heater-cathode shorts at very short notice) and they're still quite common, you might be able to find one on the internet or at car boot sales etc.

July 1967, so most likely a Philips. Grundig TVs weren't that popular here at the time, I don't think.

No, as far as I'm aware Grundig never made dual-standard TV's for the UK market - we were a major Grundig dealer in later years.

Philips did (the G6) probably the worst colour TV ever made, and the reason we stopped selling Philips

Not likely, I would have thought they'd examine the set for a colour control and try and adjust it.

The only real way would be to remove the 4.43MHz PAL reference oscillating crystal. Then the set can't lock on to an incoming colour signal.

Bermudas were black and white sets.

Should have stuck to Thorn sets, they never made a valve or hybrid colour set, they were years ahead of all other manufacturers.

But to be honest there were never really any 'valve' sets, they were all hybrid - even the horrible Philips G6 wasn't completely valve.

Well it was their first one produced, perhaps they launched the G6 before it was properly refined just to try and compete with those large Deccas at the time?

Compare it with a G8 and the latter model, IIRC from fellow TV collectors, had major improvements over what came around 5 years before.

But I agree with regard to Philips.

They did launch the much-feared Charley VCR deck on to the world