[jayceebee]

Great chassis the 1500, a workhorse of the rental market. The fact that it has a green coloured PCB is evidence of it being late schedule set, most production was red. With a good CRT and the occasional repair they had long lives, the problem with the very high mileage sets was cooking and eventual conductivity of the PCB around the PCL805. I never saw one fitted but Thorn produced a transistorised field stage add on pcb to keep them going (here was also a board produced fitted with a TBA120 to finally put an end to intercarrier buzz on the 1400).
In my experience the only lockfits to give trouble in these were VT7 and VT8, both BF197s the BF196 fitted in the AGC controlled IF stages were much more reliable. At one time BF197s became scarce for some reason and BF199s were supplied as a replacement, a definite drop in performance could be noticed.

Yes the black level did wander around a bit but very few people complained, as an apprentice at a Bush/Murphy dealer believe it or not more complained about the screen going almost totally black during the gaps in the adverts on the legendary A640 sets, some viewed it as a fault not a feature. Just goes to show how fickle the general public could be.

John.