About this site

The 1968-1983 TV set loosely mimics a daily schedule of British Television from that era by displaying various station clocks, idents, opening title sequences, test cards and even nothing but static, depending on what time or day viewers choose to 'tune in' by clicking on one of the four available channels. So, for example, if you select BBC2 on a weekday morning shortly after 11am then you should see the opening sequence to "Play School", switch to BBC1 at 7:10pm on a Thursday evening and you'll get "Top of the Pops"... etc.

Images loaded onto the screen will change at specific times of the day, so if you switch on ITV at 9:59pm on a weekday you'll see a regional clock and then at precisely 10pm the screen will automatically refresh to show "News at Ten". The switch between images can fail on slower connections (or if the server hosting the images is lagging) but the transition will be pretty seamless if everything is up to speed.

The station clocks are real-time, recreated using a combination of paint.net and Adobe Flash Professional and then converted into SVG files. Many of the clocks have never appeared in this form on-line before whilst those that have are my own slap-dash versions designed with the small display area in mind. Visit Andrew Wiseman's 625 Television Room here to view superior and more accurate versions of those clocks.

The set model is the very same set I grew up watching as a child in the 1970's, a Korting Transmare 54660 (see the original image at the 'South West England Vintage Television Museum' here).

The screen is made up of several layers, from bottom to top they are stacked as follows......

1. Youtube embeds
2. SVG graphics (station clocks and the caption generator)
3. GIF animations and static images
4. Signal noise
5. Co-channel interference (seen as rolling horizontal stripes)
6. Teletext
7. Set on/off and change channel effects.

Some of the images appearing on the screen will be accompanied by audio, such as test cards, startups, schools intervals, station idents and the odd programme, there is also a youtube playlist channel. Android users of Chrome will also need to switch to "Desktop Site" on the main settings menu for the videos to play.

Chrome browsers may be set for audio files and videos to be triggered only when the user clicks a button, so whilst the channel-changing and on/off sound-effects will be heard, idents and other items will remain silent. To override the default setting and have all of the audio and video files play when they are supposed to, you can navigate to the relevant Chrome settings page by copying the following text....   chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy   .....then paste that text into the adress bar, press enter and once the settings page has loaded, change the default setting to "No user gesture is required". However, if you are viewing on a mobile device with a pay-as-you-go data plan you may not wish to do this (Whilst most of the audio file sizes are no larger than an image file, some of the test card audio files can be as large as 5mb).

Test card music and larger audio files are now hosted on Microsoft Onedrive and loaded via the drive to web interface. Security settings on some browsers may block that connection with a warning, you can test the link and opt to proceed here.