Granada's TV Rental Stuff

[Inspector Sands]

Very unusual and not very useful in the 80s. But mind you the next step was putting too many presets, I remember seeing sets in the 90s and 2000s still boasting '100 channel memory' when there's no way in the UK that they would ever be used even if connected to cable

But there was various other things that outputted in a way that a TV saw as another channel.  Such as old school games consoles and VCRs.  The TV just saw them as another broadcast channel, and VCRs were by default usually on UHF Channel 37, which was where Channel 5 launched (for the most part) and the whole returning thing they had to do to launch.

Yes of course, but you weren't ever going to have 95 devices connected... and there were only 47 UHF channels (some sets would have had a VHF tuner too, but in most cases it was absent/disabled)

That said in the dying days of analogue I did fill every preset on my portable TV with the help of a long bit of coax lashed up down the hall of my shared house

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We didn’t rent our TV equipment, but I remember our first top loading Ferguson video recorder - my Dad was a steelworker and in the 1980s was insistent on buying British manufactured home electronics and appliances - regularly had to be sent back to Comet for repairs.

Except that Ferguson VCR (8922 ?) was 100% badge engineered by JVC in Japan

https://www.rewindmuseum.com/vhs.htm

Our first VHS was a Ferguson Videostar 3V29 and it was a great machine and the quality was great, I digitised some of it's recordings a few years back and they looked excellent. 

I remember it had a few repairs though, the tracking needed sorting a few times and the bulb under the tape machanism always blew, funnily enough when I Google the machine now that part comes up for sale. I seem to remember that the bulb fault had a knock on effect on the device itself