I've always said that the best TV chassis ever made in Britain was the Thorn TX9.

The G8's were decent sets, as were the G11's - we had no G8's, but we did sell a number of G11's (Pye badged).

Mostly we were Thorn and RBM (which I even built PCB repair gigs for - 3000 and A823 series), bit of Pye, ITT, Sony, Telefunken - and various others.

Good days back then

All I can remember is that it was in a big white plastic case and was from a rental shop. I think it was about 1973, I used to trundle off to the shop to pay the rent every week/month ?

I adjusted it so that the colours looked as natural as possible, though it seemed that every other set I saw had the colour turned up to full - 'orrible.

I have probably repaired more G8's than any other single model, and used to be familiar with the different versions as the decoder panels went from all transistor affairs to using those new fangled integrated circuit things.

The best set I ever fixed (and kept for a while) was a Barco. Absolutely beautifully made and a delight to work on. A phone call to the manufacturer got me the service manual for free, and they supplied the parts I needed (actually a modification kit) Shame it wasn't remote control otherwise I would have kept it longer.

It's a Murphy, I'd expect.

This one, probably

http://www.oldtechnology.net/colour4.html#murphycv2215

Earliest parents owned one of ours was a 21" Ultra Bermuda colour. Made by thorn/ferguson? and definitely colour. 'Bermudacolour' was a name badged on its wooden casing surround. Late 1970s probably.

Ultra was a brand name of Thorn Consumer Electronics, along with Ferguson and HMV.

As you say, Bermuda Colour was a badge on their colour sets.

I 'think' my first colour set was an Ultra?, it was definitely a 19 inch Thorn 3000 series - and I never paid any attention to the actual name on the set.

Well I stand corrected. The only Bermudas I've seen are black and white models.

Our family's first colour TV was a Sony KV-1320UB Mk1 (the one with the 3AT2 valve in the EHT section). Apparently bought in 1969 (though the earliest advertisement I've been able to trace for the model is October 1970) and never needed its back taking off - still works today, though the tube has obviously gone low and can't be re-gunned or boosted!!!

A Philips 19" colour tv set with valves in 1976, rented from the guy in the electrical shop down the street. It had a magic eye on the front, like the magic eye in my Mums tape recorder. It had a lovely picture and great sound, I recall-much better than the dual tuner b/w Pye that it replaced, that must have been old by then as it had been my Nans.

When my Mum got a Ferguson videostar in 1982, it had to go back because it wouldnt take the video signal properly. It was still going great!

First one bought new was a Grundig 21 inch. We moved just after i bought it and the new place had a communal aerial feed with the other householders telling us, "you'll need to buy a convertor box".

Turned out it was VHF to UHF convertor as the transmition via the cable was VHF. Lo and behold when i plugged the aerial into the tv worked fiine, was made for either and didn't need a box.

We had cable tv as an experiment before it went nationwide, Superchannel was one plus lots of music videos. Can't remember the other channels much.

Unfortunately a month later the sound failed and they couldn't repair it so swapped for a new Phillips the same size. And of course i then need to buy a box, £35 damn quid!

If the poster above is referring to the VHS player with Ferguson Videostar then i still have one in the loft. It's a rebadged JVC i think.

Pretty inept engineers then


They were, all 'real' Ferguson VCR's were JVC.

My grandad had the first in our village, in between the Leeds-Chelsea FA Cup Final and the replay, which dates it to mid-April 1970. The first thing I saw in colour was the replay from Old Trafford; thought it was great.

No idea what make it was but it was big in a mid-brown wooden cabinet that had a small red square panel above the tuning buttons that glowed red when a colour programme was on. (yeah me neither).

The main thing I recall was the amount of b/w programming that was on; we used to go round a few times per week including Sundays. Bear in mind by now BBC1, BBC2 and ATV had settled into regular colour broadcasts, but a lot was in monochrome including the news, News Room as it was on BBC2 with a totally different look & feel to the BBC1 news bulletins. IIRC they kept the newsreaders separate too; Peter Woods was on 2 only for a long while.

Monochrome did have the effect of making the colour seem that much better, much like HD over SD now I expect.

They sound lazy rather than inept, to me

It was actually made in Germany, where VHF and UHF were both used for analogue colour programmes. Unlike some other manufacturers I could mention (Panasonic), Grundig didn't waste time, effort and money adapting the set simply because the VHF waveband wasn't used for TV transmissions or was used for a then soon-to-die TV system here in the UK. The only adapting they would needed to have done to the tuner would have been to readjust the tuner's audio stage to take account of the slightly different offset audio frequency in the UK from that in Germany. German efficiency. No point in wasting little things like that when over-the-air VHF was unusable on those sets in this country anyway. They might as well leave it in, just in case it's needed anyway.

Obviously when such things as teletext and NICAM are brought into the picture, things begin to get complex.


Which one of the many JVC models with Ferguson Videostar printed on them would this be then?

Mine was a Saisho 14" (1400 I think) back in 1986 (ish), passed it onto a mate when I upgraded to a later Matsui 1455 in about 1990. Still got the Matsui in the loft and was working when I stashed it up there.

My parents bought an ITT push-button colour set to replace our elderly Rediffusion B&W set in 1980. It was bought from Tempo and was desperately unreliable. The local ITT engineer became a regular visitor. Eventually it was replaced with another ITT set (remote control this time), but bought from the local ITT dealer and that lasted a good 8 or so years before being replaced with a newer, better equipped Panasonic.

My maternal grandparents had a colour set back in the 70s - it was a PYE and also seemed to receive a lot of engineers visits. Replaced in the early 80s with a Hitachi instaview, which had experienced one failure (I'm guessing Nigel Goodwin or John Currie will be able to hazard an accurate guess at what the fault was) before lasting very many years.

My paternal grandparents waited until the early 80s and bought themselves a Panasonic with 'feather touch' channel controls. Also had a 5 pin DIN audio out so you could record the soundtrack from the TV. This one lasted about 10 years with few, if any problems.

Reading these posts about how early colour sets lasted "8 years" makes me realise modern sets aren't so bad after all.

I must have been unbelievably lucky because every set I have ever owned has been repaired once (when I got it) and then they just keep working. My nearly 30 year old Sony KV1400UB is still in daily use. and we have an almost as old Grundig portable in a cupboard, still working but now just kept as a spare set.

It was only the early valve sets that I found horribly unreliable.

I was born in 1972 and my parents had one then.It was made of wood. It lasted until about 1987 when my parents got my Grandparents one which was no longer made of wood.

Instavision. I mentioned the fault earlier, it would have been a heater-cathode short.

I do have a CBP-226 with me now, but that was after Hitachi dropped the Instavision tubes from manufacture but before they had run out of "Instavision" badged cabinets - result is that this is an Instavision when it really isn't

Early *British* colour sets - see my post about an early colour Sony that has worked faultlessly from day one.

Many early british sets were reliable as well, and Sony and Hitachi sets went faulty just the same - plus of course the Japanese sets were a couple of generations later than the early UK sets.

My Aunt's G.E.C. colour tv had a colour lamp that lit like this when a colour transmission was on.

I think a Grundig.

Pretty sure it was a Pye around 1970 - probably 26". It was rented in a wooden case and had silver push knobs for changing channels. We upgraded every few years as they kept going wrong only to work when the repairman turned up. It had, I think six channels so we used the main three pointed at the Anglia region and the other three pointed at the Midlands region. Post 1974 when the Belmont region went over to Yorkshire we went up a set that had 8 channels so that we could add Yorkshire. I much regret that my parents never had a VCR when they came in as I might have had something that I could donate to TV Ark - I had to wait until the late 1980's before getting a reconditioned Panasonic and by that time TV's were far more reliable so I brought a reconditioned Grundig that didn't last very long so I spent a bit more money and got a Panasonic. Lasted for years.

My parents got our first colour TV in about 1980 - A Rediffusion Mk4 with infra-red remote control.

They got that along with a Panasonic front loading VHS video recorder - this had a remote control connected by a wire.

How often did it break down then? Once a week? once a month? Once a year?