TV

Like most Brits of that age, we didn't have a television until 1953.  That was when the coronation took place at Westminster Abbey; the Queen had assumed the title immediately her father King George VI died a year earlier.  So we went to the shop in the town that sold TV's, but they were very expensive and way outside my father's budget.  Therefore we did what most Brits did under the circumstances, we rented the set.  It was a nine-inch Murphy as I remember and it had two knobs on the front and about four round the back.  My father was always twiddling to get the vertical hold right and also the horizontal.  It used to drive my mother crazy.  There was one TV station, the BBC - that was it.  It usually began at 7:00 in the evening and shut off at 11:00, but we thought it was great.  There were two transmitting stations that covered the UK, one in Sutton Colefield and the other in Alexandra Palace; if you were outside those areas, you'd had it.  But we all had the radio anyway, which up to then had been our main form of entertainment.  Around 1955 a new channel opened up, this was the commercial channel where adverts were played, and they were quite good as I remember.