British Heritage Television

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Keith Wicks

Don’t throw away that old 405-line set just yet! 

See British Heritage Television at:
http://405-line.tv/

Roger Bunce

The advantage of 405 line television was that, when watching “Fireball XL5”, you couldn’t see the strings. You can see what a selective viewer I am. Sadly, on DVD, there are strings all over the place.

Barry Bonner

Ah, yes 405 lines, the good old days of grey and white!

Did you know that a Blu-ray laser’s wavelength is 405nm? Full circle then!

Albert Barber

Does anyone remember the switch under the desk in NC1 to go from 405 to 625?

The S.Tel. E. once overpatched the lines to the transmitters because he wasn’t aware of the switch and nearly cause the transmitters to catch fire!

His name was Charles and it was going to or from “Oh Brother “ with Derek Nimmo: that’s all I can remember.

Mike Jordan

Apparently there was a (very bright?) indicator light in the news gallery at AP when 625 arrived so that the studio Technical Manager could check that the studio was working in the correct standard (before Standards converters were available).

I was in BH SWC when the final change to sending everything in 625 happened. Unfortunately, Gippie Joe had not provided 625 circuits to Bristol so we had exhaustive tests to see what degradation would be incurred if 625 was sent down the old 405 line circuits to BS before conversion at the transmitters.

The outcome was that it looked rather nasty so for quite some time, we got a downconverted feed back from CP for passing on to BS/CF/PY.

Bill Jenkin

I remember my hearing being good enough to know when I walked into a studio which line standard it was on by the line whistle.