Screen shot of BBC2, Christmas 1967

[stevej]

My interest in archive programming extends to the tv sets in use when the shows went out. I collect and restore them- at last count there were 27!

If you look at the link (memories of an ex-TV engineer) you'll see the first Philips colour set on the UK market. These were dual standard 625/405 of course. The photo captures what could perhaps be the only surviving image of BBC2 continuity from that historic first colour Christmas in 1967...

www.philipstv.org.uk/blog/early-philips-colour-tv/nostelgia/

Nice!

Steve

[Simon Collis]

I love nostalgia sites like that. Just spent a happy few minutes reading that while waiting for a USB stick to... wait, am I like that? Sometimes I repair computers as a hobby like these guys sometimes repair vintage TVs... Hmm...

[Dale Rumbold]

I found it interesting that the screen shot was of a Colour TV in Framlingham, Suffolk, at Christmas 1967, because around here (I'm in Ipswich) you couldn't get UHF/BBC2/Colour from Sudbury until 1968 : they must, therefore, have had their aerial pointing towards Tacolneston in Norfolk which WAS up and running for UHF/BBC2/Colour during 1967.
In my house, although we didn't have a colour set until 1972, we DID have UHF/BBC2 right from the start in 1964, because we rented a TV from British Relay (BRW) which was attached to a cable network that ran round all the houses on our council estate (Chantry, Ipswich) : we therefore had 4 channels (BBC1 ; BBC2 ; ITV Anglia ; ITV London) when 'normal' TVs in Ipswich, using an aerial, only had 2 (BBC1 ; Anglia). Mind you, the picture quality, especially on ITV London, was often dreadful : I'm not sure where they picked London up from in order to feed it through the cables ; nor indeed BBC2 as there were no UHF transmitters in this region for several years ; all channels suffered from regular ghosting and constant co-channel interference - it was possible to watch 2 channels at once sometimes when it was really bad! We did also get 4 radio channels, in decent quality, via the same set : Radio-1 reception on 247m MW was awful on a normal radio set in Ipswich, but crystal clear on the telly!

[Richard Marple]

Pre-Channel 4 a lot of cable TV systems had a 2nd ITV region available.

I did wonder if they were simply picked on a high quality aerial or else directly on a land line.

I remember reading that Whitehaven had a similar system with radio available.

[Simon Collis]

At one point my house had 5 terrestrial analogue channels - BBC 1/2, ITV Yorkshire, ITV Tyne Tees, Channel 4 and York TV. I'm not counting YTV and TTTV as separate as by this time they were both part of the same company again and running the same schedule...

[richardwoods]

I lived at Carlisle in the late 60's and we had 3 Channels then, BBC1, BBC Scotland and Border all in glorious 405 line VHF - no UHF / BBC 2 until after we left. In the early 70's in East Lincs we had the usual 3 channels on UHF BBC 1&2 and Anglia, and I had pretty good reception of Yorkshire from Elmley Moor on VHF 405 lines on a dipole aerial poked in a bottle in my bedroom. Good old VHF!