ITV's 60th Birthday

A LOT of tellies sold at the time came with more than three pre-set buttons. The fourth one was sometimes labelled "*", but usually labelled "ITA2", "IBA2" or "ITV2" depending on the era and manufacturer.

By the 80s it was common to have EIGHT pre-sets (presumably designed for those countries like Italy that had a lot more terrestrial analogue services). By then they were just labelled 1-8...

Ah - the days before remote controls...

I do remember some labelled BBC1 - Ch4, then 5-8. Handy for other regions and video channel.

I once saw a TV with a remote control in the 80s labelled BBC 1, BBC 2, BBC 3, ITV, Ch4 etc. the ITV button gave 4 on the TV's LED display, whilst "Ch4" gave "5". Bizarre!

Our telly in the 80s had, I think, 9 presets. It went...

BBC 1
BBC 2
ITV 1
ITV 2
5
6
7
8
9

BBC 1 & 2 were tuned to their namesakes. ITV 1 was Granada and ITV 2 was Channel 4. All the rest were static with white noise, which wouldn't automatically mute like on tellies made in the 90s onwards. I can't remember the make. It had a grey casing and the logo was a butterfly with bands of the spectrum colouring it. It was a decent TV. Finally popped its clogs in 1995 after some 15 years service. Don't think my parents have had a set last that long since.

On a Philips set my parents had in the 80s, the push buttons were labelled 1-8, yet open the tuning tray and it had BBC1, BBC2, ITV, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

Another feature I remember is that the buttons had green LEDs next to them, so you could easily see which was selected. Below the presets were volume and mute. Mute had a red LED. Funny wow these details come flooding back.

Could well have been the outer casing was generic, for an international market, but the tuning tray would only have contained UHF thumbwheels for UK use, where as almost every other country in the world used VHF and UHF for analogue TV services, (and a few still do use VHF into the DVB age). The UK were virtually unique in using UHF only for 625 line TV. Of course, we had effectively blocked out the use of VHF for 625, by having 405 line services there 1936 to 1985.

The telly I first remember in the lounge in the 80s had 8 presets. 1-4 and then 8 was the VCR. When we changed the TV to a Toshiba with 40 presets that remained, with Sky going on 5, which moved to 6 after the Channel 5 man came to retune. Which I discovered a year later I could have done myself anyway.

Then I worked out that the SCARTs gave better picture and sound and wired it all up that way!

Oh Yeah, the VCR was on the highest number on ours too. I remember being confused why it occasionally repeated one of the existing stations and sometimes was just static, before I was old enough to figure out what is was about. It meant we didn't have to watch the channel we were recording (which was the whole point of recording) unlike when we finally got cable in 2001.

The last button (usually 8 ) was often recommended for VCR use, as on many TVs it would 'loosen up' the
timebase circuitry. Without getting too technical, domestic VCR playback output was very unstable (compared with an off air broadcast) to improve the stability of the picture, manufacturers would build in special measures that were only activated by button 8 (or the last one, or the one actually labelled 'VCR').

Not only the UHF/VHF thing - the tuner would only have worked in the UK, Ireland, Hong Kong or South Africa as they were the only countries that used the same version of PAL: PAL-I:. The difference was the channel bandwidth and the audio subcarrier offset.

Channel 0 was quite often recommended for VCRs as well; but I think this was a later addition/suggestion and not all TVs could do this or had a Channel 0. My first TV, an Amstrad something or other, had 32 UHF "channels" but no channel 0. The downstairs TV did have a channel 0 I believe, and it remained that way until SCART leads came along.

Yep, our Philips (I think) TV had channel 0 for the video. It just wouldn't work as well on any other preset.

Incidently, not so long ago I saw someone on a bus with a new telly they'd presumably just bought. The box still boasted that it had 100 presets and Nicam stereo.