It’s worrying if they are being given back, perhaps it they’d give me 50% discount I might ‘test’ it for them but I’m not paying to be a guinea pig.
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You were lucky,(adopting his best Yorkshire accent).We only had t’valve radio,at least it doubled as a room heater!
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405 lines or 625?
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No, Baird 240 lines as an upgrade from 30.
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Wow you must be even older than me!!!
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One B/W channel, showing Muffin the mule, or Bill and Ben, or Andy Pandy, or Rag, Tag and Bobtail, all four on boring repeat, and not much else except once the Coronation of QE2 !
The TV screen was very small in a very big box. I remember my Dad expanding my vocabulary with “RAF words” (top secret, not to be repeated) while unsuccessfully fiddling with knobs on the back of the box. My Mum would get the rental man in to fix it next day, but in the evening Dad would “improve it” again.
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No, just old enough…
I saw the Baird systems demonstrated in the 1960s at a lecture on TV history. JLB even had a colour system with spinning wheels.
Was ‘Picture Book’ also on at the same time?
Snooker in B&W was a “thing” and no one batted an eyelid!
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Not in my memories. I had to look it up. That was from 1956 onwards.
We saw six months of UK TV in 1953 and then again in 1957.
The best bits in 1957 were Six-Five Specials. The rest was eminently forgettable.
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Genuine live BBC commentary of the time: “The white ball is just behind the yellow, and for those of you watching in black and white, it is just behind the green”.
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Sky are going to release the “puck” as a stand-alone product without the need to buy Sky Glass. “Coming soon” so you can keep your 55" LG or Samsung with better picture/sound options and get Sky. Still a streaming service with their version of catch-up though.
Also note that you don’t get regional news, for example Norfolk will get London local news; applies to other regions as well. Best to check out the dedicated Sky forum (independent, but monitored by Sky).
I use a Humax Free-to-air terrestrial box as it can record up to (from memory) 5 different channels and I really don’t miss Sky now. The only “downside” to the Humax box is that Humax can’t get a licence agreement to have Netflix app on the box. My LG TV has it as an app in any case, so hardly a show- stopper.
Humax also make a Free-to-air satellite box which I have used in the past.
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Absolutely 
Back in Nov/Dec 2018 when they were promoting Sky Q they were offering T.V. 's for ‘Free’
I paid them £75.00 for a Brand New LG 38" LED 4K HDR Ultra HD which is so light even me with the muscle strength of a gnat can pick it up !
“I’ll Take That Deal !” me thought 
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So True !
Late Dad was a Yorkshireman so we had “When I Was a Lad…” Speeches growing up if ever we complained
Speaking of ‘Valves’ Dad [RAF Electronics Engineer] would always send for parts and fix things…the TV, Radios, the Car, the Washing Machine. When he retired he retrained as an Horologist until his eye-sight got too bad
Sadly when I moved in as his Carer 2007 I found him watching a small portable B & W with Internal Aerial…It was mainly ‘white noise’ and low sound
So got him Sky & Flatscreen and he was as happy as Larry watching TCM and Countdown - although he could never get the hang of how to find the Channels as his brain was still working in analogue…Bless 
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No Idea…late Dad would have known
Oh…What Seemed Like Hours as Children with Dad on the Roof fiddling with the Aerial and Shouting “How’s the Picture Now?”
In them days giving the TV a quick bang on the top could bring the picture back !!
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That is exactly why Servisol Super 10 became such a success. It cured almost all those bad connections in the valve sockets, scratchy volume controls and tuner turrets. But not the broken wires from all the wiggling about and vibration from the frustrated bangs.
However one sharp bang in just the right spot was often worth ten minutes to half an hour of dismantling, spraying carefully in only the right places, and reassembly.
Thank goodness for modern magic digits. The vast majority of faults are either finger trouble (find small child to fix it), computer crashed (switch it off, count to ten, switch it on again), or power supply (buy another PSU), or really dead (buy another magic box).
Although a judiciously applied light vacuum clean can often cure quite a lot of faults, even on an excessively hot PC.
In Africa in the 1960s I used to take the back off Dad’s B/W valve TV at the beginning of the rainy season (humidity up from 10% to 90%), vacuum out all the cat hairs and dust, and it would work for another year.
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When I first met the love of my life back in the late 60’s, going to her house her dad was always giving the top of the telly a whack when the picture went.
The first colour TV in the street where I lived was delivered to next door. We got invited round to view it, a big oak cabinet affair with doors on. We eventually had one, it was a rental job, my parents couldn’t afford to buy one. When we eventually got married my uncle/aunt gave us our first TV, colour it was but it turned yellow. I remembered to give it a whack on the top, it didn’t really work, I think a knob fell off. We ended up renting one from the same place as my parents did, couldn’t afford one.
Now I’m bleating on about can’t afford the Sky package, well I won’t pay out what they want for it.
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I remember renting a TV that you had to put 10pence coins in to work. The guy would call every couple of weeks to empty it.
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Picture Book was one of the ‘Watch With Mother’ pre-school kids shows that were on in the afternoon on BBC in the mid 50s:
Mondays - Picture Book
Tuesdays - Andy Pandy
Wednesdays - The Flowerpot Men
Thursdays - Rag, Tag and Bobtail
Fridays - The Woodentops
I was born in 1951. I can remember them clearly! (But ask me what I had for dinner last night…) Happy days 
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Most TVs were rented in the 50s and 60s. The biggest rental companies were Rediffusion, the Co-op and Radio Rentals, who employed armies of field service engineers who drove around in vans fixing them because they were always going wrong.
I trained as a TV service engineer in the early 70s, right when TVs were moving from valves and point-to-point wiring to solid-state and printed circuit boards. TVs became much more reliable and in a few years fixing them changed from diagnosing a problem with meters and oscilloscopes (requiring brains) to swapping out a circuit board (which didn’t, and also didn’t pay half as well…)
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