[MartinMarris]

Worst bodge I know of was perpetrated by yours truly in the early 1970s. I was at boarding school where TV was forbidden in the dorms. I had repaired a discarded 405-line TV chassis (it was a Ferguson or a Murphy) that was probably from the late 1950s and only needed a couple of new caps.

I hid the TV chassis inside a large floor-standing speaker cabinet (back then, huge stereo installations were all the rage and were allowed in the dorms). The grill was a muslin/gauze through which the CRT was visible when switched on. There was a motorized cardboard curtain to conceal the screen in daylight. The electrical curtain mechanism was cobbled together using Meccano strips and a Meccano electric motor.

The mains was fed through thin strip cable purloined from a broken intercom installation. I had an on-off switch under the bed covers, mounted on a wooden fuse-box frame, open on the back with the switch lugs exposed. The audio was fed to headphones at each of the five beds in the dorm, and perhaps one side of the audio was connected to the (live) TV chassis (or did they use output transformers?).

I am amazed, in retrospect, that none of us was killed!