‘Can I come in to watch TV?’
Howard Robinson recalls the excitement of that very first TV…
My family lived in a small colliery village in the South Wales valley of the River Ebbw, close to the huge Ebbw Vale steelworks employing 12,000 men and women and, to the south, a coal mine.
Our street was a long one and our house was somewhere near the middle. It was called Curre Street, but in the Valleys dialect it was often known as ‘Currie Street’. It ran north to south down the steep-sided valley.
Life suddenly changed for our family one day in 1952 when we became the proud owners of a TV set! The long, quiet evenings playing cards and dominos were gone, as were the hours of being mesmerised by the flickering flames of the open coal fire while listening to Dick Barton Special Agent on the wireless. Dad had won some money on the football pools… enough to buy a television set, which cost a lot of money in those days. And it wasn’t just any old television set either – it had a 14in screen and the cabinet was so big it had to stand on the floor.
Four knobs on the front controlled the brightness, the contrast, the sound and, very importantly, the frame hold, to stop the picture from continually ‘rolling’. Dad often had problems with that. From what I remember, it was a ‘KB’ – Kolster Brandes.
The aerial was up eight steps in the back garden and was a huge double ‘H’ about 6ft high, 3ft across and on a 10ft-long aluminium pole.
Its positioning to gain the best picture was something of an art – if it was slightly out there would be two of everything on the screen. Before very long, word of our televsion set had spread along the street where we lived and every day at 5pm, just before Children’s Hour began, there would be a knock on the door. “Please can I come in to watch the television?” I don’t think it entered our parents’ heads to refuse and not share our good fortune. That was the way of things then. Children filled the living room and much of the floor space to watch programmes such as Whirligig or
‘Life suddenly changed for us in 1952 when we became the proud owners of a TV set’