Potatoes have eyes – ideal for TV reception
In a blog last week, I mentioned that Jon Hale of the Emporium vintage clothing shop in Greenwich had ‘invented’ a new sound amplification system – he just put his partner Jacki Cook’s iPhone into a drinking glass.
It seems lateral thinking inventiveness runs in Jacki’s family too. She now tells me:
“In the 1960s, when colour television first came out, my mum was moaning to my dad that she wanted a colour telly, but they couldn’t afford to buy one and my dad didn’t really like change. So he painted the screen of our black & white TV in stripes – I guess he used water colours – blue at the top for the sky, a pinky colour in the middle for people’s faces and a bit of green at the bottom for grass and we watched the TV like that for a couple of years.”
“Did your mother appreciate it?” I asked.
“No,” Jacki told me, “No, she didn’t. But he also made television aerials out of potatoes and forks, did my dad. The fork as the conductor stuck in a big potato. So that distracted her.”
SO IT GOES - John Fleming's blog 