Demise of School TVs...

[robjkmannering]

Watching the launch of the space shuttle (early 80's) in class on what I think was a Ferguson TX model? Remember thinking that the picture wasn't as sharp as on the Granada rental set we had at home but can't remember what that was?
The classroom set was wheeled around on a trolley that it shared with a cub microtec monitor and a BBC model B although not at the same time!
Happy days,
Rob

[Line whistle]

Hi,
Between 1970 and 1976 at my Infants/ Junior school the tv was in a light wood cabinet with doors.I think when they opened a black hood came out at the top. It sat on a tubular metal trolley/stand. The screen was quite round I would guess 21". I don't reacall any controls on the front of the set. When we were shown around our future high school I couldn't believe it when they told us they had three colour tv's and a vcr.
Cheers,
Des.

[Danny]

Hi in aprox 1968 in my primary school there was what seemed massive at the time a large screen set on a long leeged trolly i remember the controls were on the side it looked like a giant ekco t230 but i actually think it was a pye with what must have been a 21" 70 deg tube. the set had doors whith a hood that came out when thay were opend. when i got to the secondary school in the english class there was another such a monster it failed when i was in my 4th year. i was given a chance to have the set. sadly i didnt have it long as i pulled it to pieces. i do remember though the shassis was made up of two decks the transistorised if on top whith the valve timbase on the bottom. the lopt actually plugged into the pcb on coloured mountings it also had a masive mains transformer. I think it was a decca but cannot be certain it also had doors whith a hood.
the current sets being used at the time where phillips solid state sets whith the G8 type slanted controls. The only colour set at that time was a brc 3500 and phillips 1500 vcr in the current affairs room . Danny

[terrykc]

Originally Posted by MALC SCOTT

Our school had no tv or radio. The best we had was a piano!!

Match your piano and raise you a wind-up gramophone ...

Actually, we did have radio at junior school (1950-55). There was a master receiver in the office and speakers, as others have mentioned, in the classrooms.

However, there was no speaker in the school hall where the piano and the afore mentioned gramophone (with its supply of country dancing records) lived but there was a pre-war radio of some description which was used for "Music and Movement" ...

No radio at grammar school - in fact, the nearest we got to anything electronic was the master/slave clocks (whose volume seemed to increase ten-fold at examination time ...) and a 16mm projector in a room next to the 6th form common room which we only ever saw as an end of term 'treat'.

There was a tape recorder in the school but, like the projector, it was never used for lessons! Its sole use seemed to be for recording our performances of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas every year ...

It was a Lane, IIRC (or was that just the deck?) which was built on a sheet of Formica covered plywood!

[Aerodyne]

I too worked for DER during the 1960s and often went 'back to school' to fix the big-screen sets with their 950 series chassis. I recall at least one where kids had pushed a set over, big stand and all, onto its face. Tube stayed intact, though. Tough beggars, those school sets (other than the flimsy knobs and aerial socket panels)
-Tony

[chipp1968]

Gary's set is fab Looks dual standard with round tube too .

[AndiiT]

Hi,
The school sets that I encountered were all of BRC/Thorn design,at primary school there was a Thorn 1400 chassis "schools" receiver, whilst at secondary school there were a couple of 1500 chassis and a 3700 (schools modified 3500 chassis) colour receiver. Secondary school also had a couple of Thorn/RRC 8200/01 VCR machines which were baseband only versions of the Philips N1500/01, with no tuner or clock timer, these machines also had some other electrical differences in the power switching arrangements to allow an external mechanical timer to be used.

In my working life, whist working for DER, I spent some time repairing/maintaining a number of schools television receivers, although these monsters were badged RRC, which stood for Radio Rentals Contracts, in the Teesside area DER had the repair contract for them, I think that this may have varied regionally however.

The last of the schools receivers that I encountered were TX10s, housed in large cabinets on trolley stands, I recall installing a few of these when some of the schools updated their sets.

The 1400 and 1500 chassis mentioned earlier were actually the 1475 and 1575 chassis to distinguish them from the domestic versions.

Andrew

[dseymo1]

Thorn/RRC 8200/01 VCR machines which were baseband only versions of the Philips N1500/01, with no tuner or clock timer, these machines also had some other electrical differences in the power switching arrangements to allow an external mechanical timer to be used.

Unfortunately, this arrangement wasn't entirely successful - the machines I had charge of would as often as not wake up to the clock signal, lace up, unlace, and shut down again!

[Focus Diode]

The last School TV I saw was in 1982 just before I left school. It had the same style open door pop up shield as the earlier BRC models but this looked like a Thorn 9000 series colour set, used in conjunction with a 1st generation piano key VHS VCR. I'm sure both were branded "BAIRD".

Reading Andrew's comments above I guess the receiver seen in 1973 was a 1475 chassis.

Brian

[AnthonyG]

The staff room at Anglia Ruskin University still has a c1982 Ferguson TX with 'Cambridge College of Art and Technology' (a predecessor institution) stickers all over it - whether it will survive digital switch over I don't know.

At school there were various TV sets and video recorders, I remember a Sony KV1800 with one of the four control knobs missing, I eventually gave the English teacher a replacement one from a scrap set I found at a dump!

[crusher19860138]

I well remember watching the first space shuttle launch in 1981 from cape canaveral,the teacher apologising for us having to watch in black and white,due to the colour set out of order,i suspect we watched the launch on 405 lines,as it had a 'vee' aerial on the top of the set.

[ppppenguin]

My memory of schools' sets was largely of the ILEA Decca 25" monsters. Late 1960s and 1970s. Many of these had a monitor option with connectors behind a flap on the side of the cabinet. My school (William Ellis in Highgate) also had a CV2100 VTR which was carefully guarded by the AV tech.

We watched a lot of Apollo stuff on them.

[ENGLISH VICTOR]

I went to boarding school in Essex from 1952-4 we had a film projector and a Murphy 15" t.v but I don't recal schools programmes, only childrens hour. Perhaps schools programmes began later. During latter years at boarding school in Surrey we certainly had no t.v. again we did have a film projector to watch popular films on Saturday nights, all censored by the head master of course.
When did Schools programmes first begin?
Victor.

[AidanLunn]

I do believe they started on the BBC in 1960.

ITV, with its network of regional stations is a little more complex, as schools programmes were introduced one by one into each region, as they "went online" so to speak.

I believe Associated-Rediffusion in London was the first of the lot, in 1957.

[GLENZ32]

I remember at primary school we had a Philips mono valve set in the recreation room, I used to watch it after school had finished for the day while waiting to be picked up as we lived out in the country and a rural bus would do the rounds and our school was the last one on the way.
It was a S8 chassis with Hi-Z sound and P series valves, I've got one in my collection, always remember it having a great picture and that sound, it was better than our colour set at home! One day we were watching it and all of a sudden it went to frame collapse and some other kid got really upset, I wanted to get in the back of it and find out what was wrong but wasn't allowed to... It got fixed and went for about 6 months then it stopped again and they got rid of it and replaced it with some horrible Bell colour set and that was more unreliable than the Philips!

[arjoll]

Quite a different experience from a different country

I was at primary school from 1977 to 1982 - no TVs or VCRs there at all! Visuals were sent down from the NZ National Film Library and usually 16mm film or 35mm filmstrips. Sometimes there were radio programmes broadcast on The National Programme (4YZ here), which were piped to the specific classroom through the intercom system.

Intermediate 1983/84, there was a VCR and TV in the library, we watched some of the '84 Olympics during our library time there, and the teacher had an old valve B&W TV in the room and loved cricket in the summer - the era of Aus/NZ ODI's with legends like Lance Cairns. The school also had a JVC camera and separate recorder and tuner/timer unit.

High school from 1985 to 1989, had a few VCRs and TVs on trolleys. In the first couple of years there were lunchtime movies on a Friday - I remember seeing Jabberwocky over three consecutive Fridays. 16mm prints, and they even had an anamorphic lens! Quite spectacular really, projected onto the cyclorama in the auditorium. At one music class near the end of 3rd form in '85 we watched bits of Live Aid taped off-air on VHS. Actual educational material was usually on VHS, early on I remember seeing some that had been recorded by pointing a camera at a movie screen, later on everything was delivered on video.

At Otagi Uni a couple of lecture theatres had CRT projectors that occasionally worked, while some had a few wall mounted TVs - the theatres in the old Geology Department were scarey, six big 26" NEC beasts, three on each side! At one point in '93 a few of us hired an early LCD projector and watched some movies in the flat - VHS and mono sound, but it was amazing seeing it on the 'big screen' (a sheet stuck to the wall with gaff!).

[paolo]

I went to school in Co Durham in the 1970's and I can't recall a TV during my time at infants school, but at the junior school I clearly remember a large colour TV in a wooden case with a sliding wooden door or doors. (I think it was a DER..but for some reason I seem to recall the "By Appointment To" logo. Wasn't that just Dynatron? Anyway, we used to go into the TV room to watch Music Time and Good Health and all of those sorts of things. As for radio, it was one of those wooden, square units that used a 1/4" jack as mentioned earlier. Tape was from a Tandberg in a sturdy wooden box. For records, it was Clarke and Smith with the oval speaker and the Garrard deck.

By the time I went to senior school, I can't remember TV or video being used that much. I do know that we had Philips 1500/1700s but can't remember what TV's were used. Around 1982/3, the Philips machines were replaced with Hitachi VHS models that looked super futuristic and high tech. I suppose, for the time, they were!

Paul

[Aerodyne]

By appointment to... was DER!
-Tony

[martinhog]

Hi, looks like I will be the first to say "Rediffusion !".When our new "ahead of it's time" Junior school extension was completed in 1972, it was totaly open plan with no walls between each class room (They have since been turned into individual rooms).
Each class area had a Rediffusion socket and a wall mounted speaker. The speaker was used for School's Radio Broadcast and also the TV sound . The TV could be plugged into the redifussion socket in any class room, it was a huge 24" black and white with doors and a canopy sat on a metal wheeled frame which we could ride on when we took at back to it's designated storage area . It was quiet a novelty to us as you could get 2 x ITV's and the sound did not come out of the actual TV.

[HMV 1120]

As a side note, about half of the films I watched in geography (and virtually all in geology) during my A levels (last academic year) were still on a VCR. In geology in particular as much discussion went into the late 80's/early 90's fashion styles as to the pertinent geological principles laid down Lyell, Huton and Smith. Most of the videos had been recorded off of terestrial TV and were second or third copies in some cases. We forbid forwarding through the adverts too...

I don't think we ever watched a single streamed program, and dvds were all played through the computer and digital projector (many of which developed a reputation for being 'awkward', especially when it came to plugging in guest laptops). In my experience certain videos will continue to be written into the course until they are physically damaged or the equipment to play them no longer works. I suspect they will languish in a cupboard long after being declared obselete simply because they provide read-made cover material for supply teachers.

I'm now with Exeter University under Camborne School of Mines and, whilst this campus is virtually new with all-digital lecture theatres (Law for example is taught by video link from Exeter), about two thirds of our film resources in the library are on video. I'll be bringing my VCR down after the Christmas break as it's much more convenient than sitting in the library waiting for a machine to be free.
Mind you, if you want obselete, you should see some of the equipment in use at the test mine...
(air-powered trains anyone?)

Robs