One hundred years of one house in Chorlton ....... part 156 ..... the telly that makes you feel ancient

 The continuing story of the house Joe and Mary Ann Scott lived in for over 50 years and the families that have lived here since.*

We all have those moments when you realize just how many years have passed you by.

For me it can be any one of a heap of things from the comics of my youth, the shocking revelation that I grew up eating sugar sandwiches, or that back in the 1950s our first phone was shared with another family, which meant we could only use it when they weren’t but we could listen into their conversations.

But today it is the telly, and not any telly but the one we rented which offered up just three channels.  It was colour and was a recent upgrade from a black and white one and yes to change channels you had to get up, cross the room and push the button.

No fancy remote gadget for which every family spawned a different name, which in our case was “the dit dit”.  

Of course, the absence of one meant we couldn’t lose it and end up arguing about who had lost it, only to find it down the side of the settee two hours later.

But it did have a wooden case which allowed you to polish it and think it was really a bit of furniture.

And that I suppose was a step forward from our first 1950s set which had double doors with a walnut finish which I I suppose was a statement about how tellies were not yet fully accepted and had to be hidden as a piece of something else.

This particular set dates from 1978 and is a reminder that the first colour transmissions by the BBC were only a decade earlier.

I remember going to the Welcome Inn one summer afternoon to watch Wimbledon, not that I am a tennis fan rather it was the novelty of watching one of the first colour transmission.

The observant will spot that we rented this set.  In those years we were customers of both Visionhire and Rediffusion, although I can’t quite remember which we finished up with.  Suffice to say I think Visionhire occupied a double fronted shop on Barlow Moor Road, and Rediffusion or maybe Granada were almost opposite on the corner of St Annes and Barlow Moor Roads.

As a story it’s not perhaps the most dramatic piece of history but is how we lived in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and looking at the set now I do feel old.

Location; Beech Road

Pictures; Our telly, circa 1978, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*The Story of a House, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20story%20of%20a%20house