My friend had something like that. He was able to stick a toothpick in the Playboy Channel’s button and push it just right to get the picture sometimes.
Apparently, he doesn’t know that TVs don’t emit UV. Well, actually, LCD TVs with a CCFL backlight do emit some UV, as all fluorescents do (and plasma TVs, which both use a mercury vapor discharge to illuminate phosphors), but that isn’t relevant to CRTs (which use an electron beam), and in any case, the Sun emits far more UV.
Of course, some old TVs were recalled because they emitted hazardous levels of x-rays due to insufficient shielding (vacuum tube TVs contain a HV rectifier tube, and for some color TVs, a voltage regulator tube, and unlike CRTs with lead glass, they don’t have built-in shielding and are an intense point source of x-rays).
Possibly, the hamster was affected by the 15.75 kHz noise produced by the horizontal sweep/flyback circuit (some people can hear this as a high-pitched whistle, especially if something is loose), but I doubt it would be bad enough to kill it.
One of my childhood memories is of hearing that high-pitched whine any time I was near the TV department at a store. It’s one of those things you stop hearing as an adult, because as you age your ears lose sensitivity to higher frequencies.
I have very few childhood TV memories. My family had a B&W TV (long after everybody we knew had color, because my folks were cheap). It broke in 1976, when I was 10, and my parents elected to neither repair nor replace it, because they were cheap. Well, actually, their explanation was that we spent too much time watching TV instead of talking with each other, and that without a TV we could spend more time doing “family things” together. Yeah, that worked out :rolleyes: With the TV we were at least all in the same room together. Once it was gone the four of us all just went off and did our own things.
Yes, he did. You might be able to find some excerpts of that on YouTube; I remember seeing some clips on VHS years ago. Very few have survived.
Steverino took songs like The Bird is the Word and Papa Oo-Mau Mau and read them slowly and seriously, as if they were high-class poetry.
Papa Oo.
Papa Oo Mau Mau.
Papa Oo. Ooo, Papa Ooo…
Of couse, Steve wasn’t a fan of rock n’ roll, so he was really making fun of the lyrics, not just putting them in a different light. It wasn’t his best bit, IMHO, and didn’t endear him to the younger crowd.
I didn’t think they had 19" or smaller color TVs - at least affordable ones - before the early 1980s. I had a B&W portable in my dorm room in my first three years of college (fall 1980-spring 1983). I “upgraded” to a color portable when I got my first computer - an Atari 800.
You forgot 13. Originally, it was 1-12, but at some point (in the 1940s, I think), the FCC shifted the TV frequencies for some reason, and rather than shift all of the channel numbers as well (which would make all of the channel numbers on every TV off by one), they moved Channel 1 to the other end of the spectrum and called it Channel 13.
Those were the days - vertical hold, ghosting (especially with cable TV; for some reason, the Channel 7 antenna signal “fought” with the cable signal, so it was pretty much impossible to get a clear picture), cable outages that affect every channel, “Please Stand By”, getting three different ABC stations at once (before the FCC said that the “local” ABC station could force all cable companies in its area to black out ABC programming on the other two, so it made no sense to have more than one available), trying to get that one UHF channel that’s 60 miles away…
And, of course, tube testers in hardware stores…and movies on network TV (“they’re finally showing Gone With the Wind!”).
As a kid (1970s) we had an already-old black and white TV, maybe 19". We regularly made trips to the vacuum-tube testing kiosk at the local Fred Meyer. It was a fun time when my parents would boost me on their knee and let me plug the tube into the tester 
Our TV was a rare duck that used a similar one of these remotes. It was ultrasonic, though only had three buttons IIRC, power, channel up, channel down, and made a high pitched “boing” when a button was pressed.
The real entertainment value came in that it was sensitive to many metallic jingly noises. Shaking car keys would reliably flip the channels at random. The dog’s collar and tags would also flip the channels if it shook or walked in front of the TV 
I had a friend in the 1970’s whose family made a nice living with their TV repair shop.
I lived in Atlanta which had the fortune of six (6!) stations - the three networks, PBS, “Channel 69”, and, of course, WTCG, Ted Turner’s first TV station.
I happily remember the day that our old B&W TV was relegated to my parents’ bedroom to make room for a color TV in the living room. It wasn’t the color TV that I loved; I loved the fact that I could now go to their bedroom and watch reruns of Star Trek, which were just starting to be shown in syndication. I even remember the time and channel: 6 p.m., channel 13 in the Los Angeles area. My parents watched the boring old news at 6 and I got to watch Star Trek. Bliss!
How about frequent visits from “the TV repair man” with his huge wooden tool box filled with tubes and back of the set off for adjustments.
Those antenna rotors were like a dinner bell for kids. When the whole neighborhood started humming with everyone’s antenna pointing to downtown, you knew that Dad was home, he was watching the evening news and it was time to go home and get washed up for dinner.
They didn’t actually shift them. Originally they allocated 1 thru 13 for VHF, but it was soon discovered that channel one was too close to other broadcasting signals. The FCC reallocated it and TV manufacturers removed channel one from their tuners. Note that they didn’t just not paint a number one on the dial anymore, they modified the tuners so they didn’t receive that frequency. You can see pictures of some of the very first televisions which had a channel one on their dials.