My Father, the Rooftop Aerialist and Suicide Electrician
When Good Reception Was Never Good Enough
In our Blaenymaes house in the 1960s, the greatest threat to our rented television wasn't wear and tear; it was my father's unwavering belief in his own technical genius. My father had a curious fascination with the televisions we rented, or “bought,” over the years. At least once or twice a week, he’d announce that the picture was off, or the reception was bad. To the rest of us, my mother included, there never seemed to be an actual problem with the signal or the picture quality. But for him, it was a mission.
A "bad reception" meant only one thing: he had to climb onto the roof and start twisting the aerial. This required a military-level operation. My mother would be glued to the TV, relaying the picture's status to one of us at the back window. That message would then be passed to someone in the back garden, who would, in turn, shout it up to my father on the roof.
The inherent flaw in this chain of command was the delay. By the time the message reached my father, he'd invariably already twisted the aerial to a new position. Much frustration and shouting would echo through the garden until, eventually, the reception was "restored." More often than not, after all that palaver, the aerial had simply returned to its original, perfectly functional position.
The Perils of the Inner Workings
The next "problem" was picture quality. This was a more intimate, and significantly more dangerous, affair. My father would grab his trusty screwdriver and meticulously dismantle the back of the television. With the live circuitry exposed, he would then poke his screwdriver into the inner workings, turning various components while scrutinizing the screen for any hint of improvement.
Of course, the TV was fully powered, electricity coursing through its valves and circuits. One misstep could have sent him flying across the room, potentially with fatal consequences. In those days, we didn't have a telephone. Someone would have had to sprint to the nearest public phone box, praying it hadn't been vandalized, to dial 999. And with CPR lessons still a distant concept, we'd likely have just stood there, poking him and nervously saying, "Wake up, Dad."
Despite my father's self-declared expertise and remarkable technical skill, his efforts usually made no discernible difference. In fact, they often made the picture quality worse and, on occasion, resulted in the TV being utterly broken. This, naturally, led to some uncomfortable conversations with the TV owners. My father, ever resourceful, invariably explained that "the kids had done it."
The most maddening aspect of these episodes wasn't the wasted time or the risk to life and limb—it was that my father genuinely believed he was improving our viewing experience. His intentions were pure, even if his methods bordered on the suicidal.
Photo by Denny Müller on Unsplash