Forums Forums Wirral History : Chasing the Past Wirral History Was it really better ?

remember when we had slot tv from Telebank, the credit would always run out at the worst possible time. what a joy.

When my Grandparents got their first colour TV (my Granddad resisted getting one for years, he thought B&W was enough for anyone) I was given their old set for my bedroom (quite a luxury then).

The set was a little bit old, and the phrase "it just needs to warm up" was never more aptly used. The tubes were really on their last legs, and today it would have been straight down the dump with it, but to me turning it on and then going for the evening family meal before a picture had appeared was just part of its charm (although very frustrating).

I couldn't really watch it after bedtime either, despite the heat being given off from the back warming the room nicely, if I was caught with it on it would be turned off, and the National Anthem would have been playing before it showed a picture again.

"Tubes" ? surely we had valves in those days. We hadn't gone American then!

Think the tube was what we would now call a monitor, could be wrong though.

The tube was the CRT or cathode ray tube. The valves were what the Yanks called tubes, short for vacuum tubes.

By "tubes" I did indeed mean the vacuum tubes, or valves.

So Dr., when the lady down the road said she was having her tubes tied??

how on earth did we manage without playstations and mobile phones and the like?

anybody else play 'ivanhoe' wearing a balaclava and using the prop for a lance and a binlid for a shield.......

Yes Ivanhoe with balaclava and the bin lid, can't do that now. Rob Roy with a kilt,Robin Hood of course with bows and arrows made from privet hedges.Great stuff.

I guess you would have been watching this then Ivanhoe on YouTube If you didn't have a telly, you could always go round to one of your mates houses. You could always spot the ones with a TV, because they had a big X or H shaped ariel on the roof - each element was nearly five foot long!
Then there was the Lone Ranger, for which I had an outfit and a teepee. I think these, like so many toys then, were by Triang. Then we had the likes of Meccanno and Hornby to keep us happy (well, if we could pursuade someone to buy them for us) plus Dinky and Corgi toys, and not forgetting the boats from the Star Yacht company in Birkenhead. It kept us amused, even educated, and kept a lot of British workers in a job.
Failing that a rope, a ball or a box could be good fun. If we wanted to talk to our mates we used two paper cups and a piece of string.
Now, what did I do with my spud gun..? Ah! Its over on the shelf, by the empty tins of National Dried milk.

2 tin cans and a length of string were our mobile phones.

listening to the jimmy clitheroe show and the 'hit parade' on sunday until the dreaded......
'sing something simple' started

We called that sing something sinful.
When I worked as a barman,some years back there was an old dear who came in only on Sunday nights with her family and insisted that we had that programme on.

well said norton,i collect dinkys.and i have a few star yachts,i used to live facing the factory .both great toys and both locally made,brilliant.

was it really better? ,what cracking nostalgic thread and so funny, and for me, maybe for all the wrong reasons it WAS better everything was more apreiciated, and lets face it after being scrubbed with carbolic soap, gassed at the dentist,living on offal, and sleeping with a parrafin time bomb in the house were all still here to tell the tale