Derek stays tuned into the past with passion for old TVs

But while today's TVs are more reliable than when he started out as an apprentice with Rediffusion in the early 1960s, the 69-year-old grandfather from Penkridge has lost none of his passion for electronics, which he developed as a child.

"My father was a fireman in Stafford, and at lunchtime he would go into a shop called Rowney's where he would just sit and watch them working on the televisions," he recalls.

"Sometimes he would bring valves home for me to see, and I would just look at them, they were wonderful things."

It has been many years since TVs featured valves – small glass vacuum tubes which controlled electric currents. But Derek still keeps a few in his small workshop in Wolverhampton city centre, which is like treasure trove of television history. Alongside the latest large-screen, LCD high-definition sets sits an old black-and-white set from around 50 years ago.

"You had to turn the dial to choose the channel. Back then it was ITV or BBC and you then had to use the knob in the middle for fine tuning," he explains. Shelves are crammed with equipment and components from the last 50 years. A multi-tester from the 1960s competes for space with its modern digital equivalent. And in a drawer is the book which helped start it all – A Beginner's Guide To Television, by F J Camm, which his father bought him for Christmas in 1958.

"When somebody came to school asking if anybody was interested in an apprenticeship with Rediffusion, I jumped at the chance, it was just the job," he says.

He studied at Wolverhampton and Staffordshire Technical College, which is now the university, and later received further training when colour television made its debut in the late 1960s.

"When colour television came out it was very unreliable, it wouldn't work when you took it out the box, let alone installed it in somebody's house," he says.

"I would go out with somebody from the sales team, it was all rental in those days, and I would install them in people's homes. They were always big houses, because colour television was very expensive back then."

Around 1975, he went into business with a partner, operating from a shared shop in Worcester Street Wolverhampton, and running four vans to fix TVs in people's homes.

Derek, who still repairs TVs but now works alone, says it is a very different industry today. "We live in a throwaway soci