OMG...Is This Real?

OK, who can remember a sheet of thin, transparent plastic that you cut to size and stuck over your black & white TV screen? The top portion of the screen was blue for the sky, the middle had a reddish tint, and the bottom was green for grass. Possibly one other person on here, I'd guess.

I can! Granny had it during the seventies ... only she had a "deluxe" glass variant!
Quite heavy glass in the three listed colours was placed in front of the screen of the black and white TV using special holders that held both lower parts of the glass. Grandma resisted buying a colour TV for a long time, because she simply didn't see the need for something like that...

Let’s play “Grumpy Old Codgers”!

The colored sheet was just a bit before my time but my former brother in law recalled his dad bringing one home in the early-to-mid 60s. It didn’t work very well!

My parents held out until 1979 before they finally got an RCA console style color TV. I think it had a whopping 15 inch screen and I want to say it cost around $500! That would be a bit over $1900 USD in 2021. They didn’t spring for cable TV until 1992, by which point I had moved away.

That RCA was pretty much dead when they moved away in 1998, so we had it hauled off. Years later, I noticed the identical model in Patchy The Pirate’s living room in the Spongebob “Lost Episode”.



The type of RCA TV I mentioned.

Image stolen from a random image search.

I found it! Granny had this one:





The translation of the text on the packaging:

COLORAMA

OFFERS YOU
PLEASANT FEELING
WITH YOUR TV

SENSE OF COLOUR IMAGE
AND IT RESTS YOUR EYES

COLOUR GLASS FILTER FOR TV SCREEN

[Super]

Grumpy Old Codger #2...What have you to say?

Well Monty...all this talk about them thar fancy picture boxes got me to thinking when my parents got their first color TV. It was about 1972 and they had to buy a whole house to get it. Upon their first move from the big city to the country the Ranch style home they bought had a 24" (huge at the time) Heath Kit TV built into the wall of the living room. The previous owner dabbled in electronics at the time and built it. The large chassis that housed the TV Tubes extended into the attached garage. It was built in high on the wall much like how big screens are now, and saved much room for furniture. My Dad loved it because when he sat in his new fangled Recliner Chair he could see the TV without looking through his bi-focal glasses which he turned upside down to watch TV before.

Must also note for the young-uns here that the measurements of the old TV's were not that of the actual viewing area which was always less that than measurement which were square and not rectangle like now.

Next question Grumpy Old Codgers....
remember the good times that you had when you had to get up from your comfy chair just to turn the dial to change the channel or wait until a family member got up and ask them to. Yes...the great times before Remote Controls.  No channel surfing back then....then again...we only had 4 channels to choose from and for me, one of those were from Canada because we lived so close.

It was our neighbors over the road that had the colour overlay thingy. My parents bought our first TV in 1960 in time for them to watch the Summer Olympics from Rome. We had two channels to choose from, BBC & ITV.  BBC2 arrived in 1964, and colour in 1967.  I was out delivering newspapers on the day of the 1966 World Cup Final between England and West Germany, listening on my Transistor Radio.

Colour came in 1972, but we didn't immediately get the colour TV (why throw away a perfectly fine TV set?) We never had a Colorama coloured glass filter (only Grandma had one) and I remember that the programs were changed manually, which was not a problem, because although there were a dozen buttons for various programs, we only had two, one of which always showed rather boring political broadcasts, summaries of Marshal Tito's travellings around the world, and discussions about the meetings of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia.  

Cartoon for kids (just one a day) was on Channel 1 at 19.15 every day. A sacred time! And I had to be quiet at certain times, such as the time when the central news program was broadcast at 19.30, and, of course, the time when "Peyton Place" was shown in the afternoon in the 1970s.

Mom always had a sufficient supply of PCL 15 lamps (I don't know what those "lamps" actually were), which for some reason had to be manually inserted into the TV by removing the back side of the TV. If the lamp burned out, the images on the screen would disappear, which Mom feared more than the apocalypse. Therefore, it was crucial to have a replacement lamp in the cupboard if the lamp in the TV burns out just at the time of crucial shows, such as "Peyton Place" or (my favourite): "Space: 1999". 

And now the flying saucers are popping out of the giant screens on the buildings? God I'm ancient...

You guys had Space:1999 too? Sweet, although i'm a much later generation [1998 was such a good year for Tomy's bank balance in Plarail sales, since such a loyal customer was born then  ], I grew up with loads of the Gerry Anderson shows, like Stingray and probably most notably Thunderbirds - Thunderbirds was, and still is probably one of my favourite TV shows ever, I grew up watching old VHS tapes that my dad had collected for me [he remembers Thunderbirds & Stingray when they originally aired in the 60's] so it was kind of passed along the generations lol

Always interesting to find out other places that the Gerry Anderson shows reached though, until I got into anime and Japanese culture I had no idea that the Gerry Anderson shows, Thunderbirds in particular are actually rather popular in Japan, which initially surprised me, until I watched a number of anime that pretty clearly took inspiration from the Gerry Anderson canon, notably Neon Genesis Evangelion which [for those in the know] references a huge number of Gerry Anderson shows as the director was a fan of his work; I think there were some Space:1999 references in that too, so yeah   

But yeah, always fascinating to hear the miriyad of places these shows reached, I always thought they were very much a British thing that never really left the UK, but honestly, it never ceases to amaze me how far they went on export 

Interestingly, I got into Space:1999 much later, mainly when I 'rediscovered' the Gerry Anderson canon in my teens by re-watching Thunderbirds/Stingray/anime, and yeah, I really enjoy it, admittedly you could argue that it's aged a bit, but I think it still holds up even now, like most of the Anderson shows 

As for the 'PCL 15 lamps', those sound like vacuum tubes to me - Older electronics, including TVs and radios relied on them in a time before transistors were common and affordable, although in fairness I think here in the UK most new electronics by the mid 1970's had switched to transistors or other methods of operation, as I collect old electronics, and what I have, dating back to about the mid 1970's has all-transistor construction, whereas some of my relatives recall 'valves' or 'tubes' as they were known for short being commonly used through to the end of the 1960's at least, so if I were to guess, what you had was probably one of the last generations of television to use vacuum tubes as opposed to transistors 




Of course, you'd be forgiven for thinking these tubes were lightbulbs, as they do look oddly similar in shape, and the fact that both items are contained in a glass 'bulb' - You wouldn't get much light out of one of these though lol 

Well, I assumed they weren’t light bulbs, they just looked like those, but my mom always called them “PCL lamps”. Whatever they were, once that thing died in the middle of “Peyton Place,” and since then there’s always been a solid supply in the cupboard.

Yes, we had "Space: 1999"! And I had "Eagle":

[Super]

Is that a picture of the Eagle that you still have from the past? I remember the series but didn't watch it much...was it a British production? Dinky toys was British right?

The pic is from the net, but I remember my Eagle was just like that one! I suppose they are British, just as the show (original network: ITV)