1955 - TELEVISION
			TELEVISION COMES TO ORKNEY
		Television pictures were witnessed in Orkney for the first time in October, 1955 although it would be another three years before the county had its own TV transmitter. Television reception became possible in Orkney when the new transmitter at Meldrum, Aberdeenshire, was opened on October 13, 1955. The authorities did not claim that the transmitter would cover Orkney, but the few early pioneers in the county who had purchased TV sets found they could get reception which varied in quality, according to weather conditions, from perfect to like a snowstorm. The first programme to be seen was coverage of the official opening ceremony of the Meldrum transmitter followed by a film entitled Beyond the Grampians and then a somewhat esoteric programme from London on the psychology of thumb sucking among young children. Mr Robert Garden, of the Orkney Radio and Electrical Company, had a television set at his home in Berstane Road, Kirkwall, and several other people were trying out sets, it was reported. However, reception obviously did not prove sufficiently reliable for most people to venture out to pay the equivalent of two months wages on a TV set. There were only 36 television licenses in Orkney by the following June of 1956 when those who did have sets complained that reception was being disrupted by interference from a station in Russia. Although the BBC had identified the site of the redundant radar masts at Netherbutton, Holm, as the base for Orkneys own television transmitter early in 1957, there were complaints that people, within sight of the station, would not be able to receive programmes because of delays in parts of the Orkney Mainland. However, with the announcement that TV transmissions for Orkney would start on limited power from the Netherbutton transmitter on December, 1958, there was a pre-Christmas rush to buy sets. They were not cheap at a time when the average wage was still well below £10 a week. At the showroom of Orkney builders in Great Western Road.Kirkwall, a 14 inch portable cost 56 guineas and a 17 inch set cost 67 guineas. However, hundreds of reconditioned second hand sets were imported from the south at prices from £25 upwards. More than 600 people attended an open day at the Netherbutton transmitter station the following July and by December, 1959, when Netherbutton transmissions were increased to full power, there were nearly 2,000 licensed television sets in the county about one in every four households. The arrival of TV led to a warning that the rural cinema scheme could be withdrawn from six areas of the Orkney Mainland where attendances had fallen, but, despite TV, borrowings of books from the county library were reported at a record level in 1959.