please empty your brain below
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Beautiful ABBA reference
Stephen | 21.09.23 - 7:29 a.m. | #
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My comment too, Stephen, after a wonderfully nostalgic read. Thank you.
Waterhouse | 21.09.23 - 7:37 a.m. | #
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I am here for the ABBA reference, well played my friend.
Geofftech | 21.09.23 - 7:40 a.m. | #
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A memento of the past, and a well-preserved antique of the future. I’m sure a museum would be glad to have it eventually.
My bedside clock/radio/alarm is the Sony Digicube / Dream Machine I bought in the early 1990s, I think. AM/FM/LW and a green LED clock usefully visible across the room in the dark.
How much power does a 1980s TV cube draw in clock mode?
Andrew | 21.09.23 - 8:14 a.m. | #
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I see there is one on ebay for £160 so maybe do not take it to the tip as you might be able to sell it for a profit.
The TV would still work if you had a Freeview set top box with an RF output, but they are not so easy to find now. There are no magnets inside cathode ray tube, although there are normally some coils wound around the neck of the tube which are used to electromagnetically deflect the cathode ray. There would be a magnet on the loudspeaker but this would probably be shielded as in such a small TV it would be near the CRT. As the set also incorporated a cassette tape recorder it is hardly likely to unintentionally demagnetize recording tape. Possibly might chew the tape up but as Phillips invented the cassette tape recorder the mechanism was probably quite a good one.
When ITV started in the 1950's and TVs were sold that could get BBC and ITV they often had a 13 position tuner, so multi channel was possible back then and some people living on transmitter area boundaries might get for example BBC, ITV London and ITV Southern, the ITV channels occasionally having different regional programs and adverts.
You have done well to keep the set so long and still have it in working order
John | 21.09.23 - 8:23 a.m. | #
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I never knew such things existed - great read.
David | 21.09.23 - 8:40 a.m. | #
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A very entertaining piece of technostalgia.
Malcolm of Kent | 21.09.23 - 8:45 a.m. | #
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This takes me back! I got one of these for Christmas 1983 and like you it was my first bedroom tv that saw me through university and quite a few moves after. It was a great bit of kit and felt really modern at the time. No idea what happened to it, well done hanging on to yours for so long!
Andy | 21.09.23 - 9:14 a.m. | #
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There was no need to retune each time you went to and from university. Just use four more of the 10 channel slots, so 1-4 is for "home" and 5-8 is for university (or vice versa). That's what I did on my (12 channel, 12", colour, but no clock, radio or cassette) Pye, anyway!
Andrew | 21.09.23 - 9:21 a.m. | #
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That was certainly £129 well spent!
I got my 1st portable TV (colour) for my 21st birthday that same year!
Cornish Cockney | 21.09.23 - 9:25 a.m. | #
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My neighbours in SW2 took pity on me (I had no TV) and in 1982 gave me their old black-and-white portable Ferguson. In the years that followed I saw multiple programmes including "Threads", "Fatal Attraction" and weekly "Crimewatch" each Thursday. In Wales I bought an identical replacement for £12 in 1989 as the channel change buttons had worn out. I hung on to that one until digital switchover in 2013.
cau1khead | 21.09.23 - 9:27 a.m. | #
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Thank you, I enjoyed reading that. When the time comes, you might consider donating the set to the British Vintage Wireless and Television Museum in West Dulwich. In any case, I think you might like to visit them one day.
David Renwick | 21.09.23 - 10:09 a.m. | #
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Got Abba too!
Back in 1983 I didn't have a TV by choice as I was either out or listened to the radio (a smaller but arguably better choice of stations then than now). I quite enjoyed the attention of the TV licensing people who couldn't seem to believe I didn't have one and went so far as asking my neighbours if they'd heard the sound of a TV in my flat.
I might have been tempted by the multifunctionality of your set if I'd come across one, particularly for TOTP or OGWT. As it was, a work colleague felt I was deprived and insisted on passing me his B&W set when he upgraded to colour.
Andrew S | 21.09.23 - 10:20 a.m. | #
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I don't know if you have seen it but the new Radio Times is a special 100 years anniversary issue. The letters' page shows very clearly how important a role the magazine - and by association what has been available to watch - has played in people's lives.
dg writes: I have my copy thanks.
Joan | 21.09.23 - 10:29 a.m. | #
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I haven't thought about Hugh Jelly or the lovely Russell Churney for a very long time.
Jonathan Wadman | 21.09.23 - 10:53 a.m. | #
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Before I went to university, a few years after you did, I came into possession of a small black & white portable television which my grandmother had originally won at the bingo.
It was certainly much less snazzy than yours - it may have been made by Bush, but the memory fades - but despite the fact that you changed channel with a radio-style tuning dial, rather than buttons, it remained my only TV until well into the 21st century.
I remember watching the evening news on 11th September 2001 on it in my flat in Dalston.
Towards the end, the main challenge was convincing the people in the post office that I really only needed a black and white licence.
CJS | 21.09.23 - 11:07 a.m. | #
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What a great bit of kit, cutting edge for its time. I can see it in the V&A one day.
"This is the Philips 9TC 2100 all in one TV/Radio/Cassette player that used to belong to the esteemed London blogger Diamond Geezer."
Mikey C | 21.09.23 - 11:11 a.m. | #
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I, too, bought my first own television in 1983. 4th February, a Sony KV-1400UB costing £239. Like yours, it went straight into my bedroom where it also served as a monitor for my Sinclair Spectrum. Happy days!
ChrisL | 21.09.23 - 11:36 a.m. | #
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A reminder of some of the great brands in 1980s making or selling genuinely useful stuff that are now gone, or a shadow of their former selves: Littlewoods, Timothy Whites, Bush, Phillips - plus, elsewhere in the news today, Toshiba.
Read the blog 4 times and still cannot find the ABBA connection frequently mentioned above!
scrumpy | 21.09.23 - 11:38 a.m. | #
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Even more amazing than that part of it still works is that you can still find the operating manual. (I can never find the manual for a machine that's developed a fault, although I can usually find the one for the machine it replaced)
I'm struggling with the ABBA reference as well, unless its a very oblique reference to "The Day Before You Came"
timbo | 21.09.23 - 11:49 a.m. | #
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Very much not oblique.
diamond geezer | Homepage | 21.09.23 - 11:55 a.m. | #
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That's a great story. I still have a working cassette player and cassettes but why? I need to record a couple of things from them to save as digital files, which no one will think of as interesting when I am dead.
Andrew | Homepage | 21.09.23 - 12:33 p.m. | #
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You should measure the power consumption of this "clock". It's very likely that it is much more than a current dedicated clock, so perhaps a replacement would pay for itself.
MK | 21.09.23 - 12:48 p.m. | #
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Amazing that your TV has lasted longer than Clements!
Tones | 21.09.23 - 2:44 p.m. | #
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The main Clements store went in 2004 and the little furniture shop with its name in 2018. The successor in its building TJ Hughes has also left. B&M now.
Shopping in Watford town centre is a pale shadow of what it was - no Clements, no Trewins/John Lewis, no Woolworths, no BHS, no Debenhams. Wilko goes next week I think.
Andrew | 21.09.23 - 4:40 p.m. | #
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In '72, I had a short-wave Comms radio at Uni. Yes there was a TV for all to watch, but Tomorrow's World was out-voted. So, tuning it to 27MHz, the 2nd harmonic picked up the 54MHz sound carrier of the old 405-line TV! It was fun trying to work out which episode of Tom & Jerry was on - "Thomas, Where is that cat?"!
NK | 21.09.23 - 6:08 p.m. | #
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I think you would enjoy visiting the Philips museum in Eindhoven.
Jimmy | 21.09.23 - 7:34 p.m. | #
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Great suff - I'm surprised I wasn't aware of that. I did similar a few years later with a Lenco TC9101 - it was smaller - about the size of the Star Trek Original Series desktop terminals but easy to take with me during a mobile period of my life. It was colour with decent definition too. Now gathering dust, but served well, especially when plugged into the early 90's German cable tv system. 30-ish channels on a rotary tuner!
NickW | 21.09.23 - 7:39 p.m. | #
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At one time, we had a B&W UK spec TV and a Belgian-spec colour one. The relationship (frequency difference) between the picture and sound channels in Belgium was different from that in the UK which meabnt the Belgian TV didn't work properly. But by tuning both TVs to the British TV channels we could watch the (colour) Belgian TV whilst getting the sound on the B&W British one.
timbo | 21.09.23 - 11:06 p.m. | #
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I wondered whether, if you hadn't had the TV, you might have spent time in your bedroom reading the latest one by Marilyn French - or something in that style?
Waterhouse | 22.09.23 - 8:59 a.m. | #
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Fantastic.
There's a line to be added to your 'Single Life' post:
Single: You get to choose which historic electricals to keep.
Coupled: Someone else decides what goes to the tip when you are not looking.
Not that I am in any way bitter of course... and the fact that the instruction booklets are often kept as souvenirs only makes it worse.
Blue Witch | 22.09.23 - 9:50 a.m. | #
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have you considered donating it to the TV museum. They have a low power 405 transmitter to show how old TV's work.
Andrew Jarman | 22.09.23 - 2:37 p.m. | #
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I wonder if Techmoan on YouTube would be interested in this.
RG | 22.09.23 - 6:10 p.m. | #
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