As a child in the 1960’s my use of technology was limited to mostly the television in the corner of the main living room, it was a black and white television with an on/off switch and a volume control, the channel selector was attached to the near by window frame, I didn’t know at the time is was a cable television system rented from a company called Rediffusion.
The rotary dial on the window frame as I remember it, A,B,C were BBC One, BBC Two and ITV, the other letters were BBC Radio 1, 2, 3, 4 and maybe a local radio station.
The TV was tethered to this selector box and I found amazing I could turn off the television and unplug it from the wall and still listen to the radio or even a television channel via the television speaker, I do remember asking if it was possible to have a TV that could be moved to another room and just plugged in and have channels just find where the TV was, I didn’t know it at the time but in my head I just invented transmission of TV via radio waves and an aerial.
I remember sitting on the floor or on my mothers knee watching the television as we would mostly watch the television as a family and only after 5pm as mostly no television was broadcast in the daytime and in those days the TV was turned on to watch the news and some family show then the television was turned off again, as a kid I found it odd when a show was announced “In Colour” I couldn’t see the colour on our b/w television, the first time I saw a programme in colour was at a friend house when we watched “It’s a Knockout” after that I wanted my parents to get a colour television, I don’t think they did for a long time.
There was a record player in the house in the 1960s I guess it was my fathers as he was a club singer at the time, I remember it been played with singles stacked on the tall turntable pin at parties as I loved to watch the next record drop and start playing, there was albums and some 78s but I don’t remember what music it was.
I do remember getting in to trouble playing records at the wrong speeds or holding the turntable pin to slow it down, funnily I would do the same with my brother’s cassette recorder.
I don’t know where he got it but my brother had a cassette recorder similar to one of these in the late 1960s, but I don’t remember the make but it did have a microphone.
My brother would often use it to record music from Top of the Pops on the BBC or songs from the radio like the top 40, and when he let me I would record the title theme music of all the TV shows I liked to watch and some I didn’t watch, at the time having recorded so many theme tunes I could tell you the show from just the first few seconds, I would also often spend hours recording myself at fast or slow speeds by slowing down or speeding up the tape by holding the reels with my fingers or moving the capstan so the tape speeded up when recording, hours of fun for me.
I didn’t watch much TV then as I spent a lot of my time out playing with friends, but the programmes I did like to watch were things like Doctor Who, Thunderbirds, Tomorrow’s World and Top of the Pops and some US imports like Land of the Giants, Planet of the Apes, Dad was in control of the TV in them days and the only chance I got to watch what I wanted was before be came home or when he went to the pub.