Television

In the 1960s and early 1970s, if you were lucky enough to have a television it would have been black and white and there were only three channels to watch - BBC 1, BBC2 and Westward. In Plymouth, most tellies were rented from either Rumbelows, DER or Granada. There were no remote controls and tvs had a dial to tune them in. That meant if you were a kid, your parents were always asking you to get up and turn the channel over or turn the sound up or down. Remote controls were something you only heard of in American tv programmes. Because we had a black and white telly, mum used to take us to the cinema more and we'd see the latest Walt Disney or James Bond films. We'd always go to the local cinema in St Budeaux, 'The State' (it is now!), or travel into town to the ABC, the Drake or the Odeon in Union Street. One year, I remember, my gran visited us from her home in Seaham Harbour and took me to see 'Carry On Henry' at the ABC. She was embarrassed though because Barbara Windsor appeared in it with no clothes on. It seems tame nowadays. I suppose I was about 7 at the time.
We loved the tv then with shows like Randall and Hopkirk, Department S, The Champions, Land of the Giants, The Monkees etc.
I remember a family in the street getting the first colour tv in the early 1970s and all the kids were invited in to see it.
'What did you think of it?' asked my mum when I returned home.
'Rubbish!' I replied. 'Everyone's orange!'
The family who owned the telly didn't realise that you could adjust the colour and just left it at the highest setting!
Eventually, we rented our own colour tv and stopped going to the cinema. A colour tv seemed amazing back then and it was great to watch programmes like Kojak, Columbo, Hawaii Five-0, Kung Fu etc in full colour.
Nowadays, everyone has a colour tv and it's hard to imagine that people all had small black and white sets with legs that looked like they could walk towards you.
My old 20 inch tube telly has just gone kaputt so I decided to buy a new fangled 33 inch flat screen one. Wow!
Now, if only there was something on to watch...