I remember BBC2 first coming on the air, but it was on 625 lines, which meant that you had to have a modern telly at the time. Ours was only VHF 405 lines.
My grandma rented a new TV with 625 lines, I can remember turning the 'turret' tuner to 625 lines to watch someting on BBC2. Trouble was that when you turned the tuner to 625 lines it produced a really loud whistle, which was the 15625Khz line oscillator and line output transformer. At the time I was 10 years old, but as much as I complained about the noise, none of the adults could hear it.
I remember that the TV was a Philips and later when I was an apprentice TV engineer I spent lots of time reconditioning the awful tuner units in these beasts.
Inside the tuner were 'biscuits' which were long clip in pieces of bakelite with tuned circuits mounted on them.
BBC2 was ahead of it's time back in the 60's. They showed stuff that I really didn't understand called 'culture'. It was later when BBC2 became the first colour TV channel around 1967. I went to an open day at the BBC and ITV transmitters at Winter Hill and in the BBC room they had a real colour TV camera as used for the BBC2 programmes.
When I was an appentice I enjoyed watching the BBC2 Trade Test Films. As I worked in the tuner department at Telefusion, I watched them in black and white, but occasionally got to watched them in colour in the colour room at Telefusion. My favourite was 'Ride the White Horses'.
