My First Television. The Big Box in the Corner

The big box in the corner.

That’s what our first televsion was called.

It's the early 1960s, and I have a memory of a rather big box that stood in the corner of our rented home.

It had a very small screen.

In fact, the screen was so small that at times a pair of binoculars would have been useful. The room was small, but it seemed to be so far away.

But there was an answer to that - we just moved the sofa and chairs closer to the television.

It was mostly a box, but it had to be.

One day the television stopped working. When that happened, the main way of getting it to work again seemed to be to hit the top of the box. Dad tried that, but it did nothing to solve the issue. The picture remained blank.

He then called in the local repairman, who in due course arrived with his handyman bag of tools.

His first job was to take the back off the big box with a screwdriver. It only took a few minutes for him to decide that one of the valves needed to be replaced. While he was doing that, I had a quick look at what was in the back. Considering the actual screen was so small, I was surprised to see all the valves, transistors and a massive tube.

It surprised me that putting all that stuff together only produced such a small picture.

Looking into the back did show me one thing, though. I had been told by my granddad that all the people who appeared on television actually lived in the back of the television set. Of course, being very young and not knowing anything about how that was possible, I just accepted his expertise on the matter. It never occurred to me that while the box may have been big, it wasn’t that big. They must have been very small people.

The handyman, having changed the valve, then turned the television on. There then followed a wait of several minutes for the set to “warm up” and a picture to appear.

It was like magic.

When the picture finally showed, it was still flickering a little. The handyman then proceeded to give the top of the box a firm slap. Not once, but twice, and then the picture stopped flickering.

"There you go." He said, "It's as good as new now."

And the big box in the corner was probably as good as new, but we did not own it. The set was actually rented from a company called Redifusion. Back then, it was increasingly popular to rent electrical domestic items.

Of course, it meant that as the years passed, you actually paid for it many times over, but that’s how it was. Most people could not afford it, and a new television was expensive.

A black-and-white television could cost up to a few hundred pounds.

A colour television, considered a luxury item, cost up to several hundred pounds.

Ours was black and white.

At a time when earning a thousand pounds a year was considered a decent wage/salary, it was an expensive item to buy. So, my parents rented the big box in the corner.

But it was something to aspire to. As was having a telephone, a fridge freezer, a washing machine, and much later a video recorder. All were often rented, or bought “on tick”, higher purchase. The move towards buying things on credit had begun.

As to what I watched on the big box, it would mostly have been the children’s programmes, but there wasn’t much choice. We only had a couple of channels, the BBC and one commercial TV regional station.

I do remember watching Dr Who and the first moon landing in 1969, when Neil Armstrong announced, “One small step for mankind…”

And when they landed, it did look like they were living in a TV set.

                           

 

This story was originally published on Medium, May 19, 2025.

Image 1, free from Pexels, WR Heustis.

Image 2, free from Unsplash, History in HD.