Modernity on Monthly Terms

The television rental shop was one of those places where the future arrived with a payment book. Not the bright future, exactly. A heavier one, with a service counter, a van round the back, and a showroom window full of sets that looked less like furniture than weather systems. You didn't buy the future. You agreed to have it in the house for another month.

Radio Rentals began in Brighton in 1930, renting radio sets before the company grew into television and video recorders. By the colour-TV years, chains such as Radio Rentals, DER, Rediffusion, Granada, Visionhire and Martin Dawes had become ordinary names on the British high street. A Historic UK account of the colour-TV rental boom puts the appeal bluntly: sets were expensive, valve and cathode-ray-tube technology could be temperamental, and monthly rental made the machine feel possible. If it failed, somebody came out.

That last part matters. Renting a television was not just a credit arrangement, although it was certainly that. It was a relationship with an infrastructure of maintenance. The shop window promised novelty, but the real product was continuity: the engineer, the replacement set, the sense that this big humming box in the corner belonged partly to a company whose sticker was still on the back. Domestic technology had not yet become disposable enough to pretend it was weightless.

The figures are slightly absurd now. Radio Rentals claimed more than two million customers, 500 shops, and more than 6,000 technicians and skilled installers. That is not a niche. That is a parallel utility system, threaded through sitting rooms and shopping precincts, doing for entertainment what the gas board did for heat. A television came with a man in a branded van, which is a sentence that already feels older than the object it describes.

There is a useful little ache in that model. The rented set made modernity feel conditional. You could watch the same coronations, Cup Finals, sitcoms, news disasters and Saturday night light entertainment as everyone else, but the apparatus was on loan. The image belonged to the nation; the box belonged to Thorn, Granada, Visionhire, whoever had the paperwork. It was mass culture with a standing order attached.

The end came with the usual mixture of consolidation and cheapness. Radio Rentals was acquired by Thorn in 1968; Granada's rental line grew out of Robinson Rentals, incorporated in 1954 and renamed around 1969. By 2000, the Radio Rentals and Granada names had been folded into Boxclever, and a retrospective account of the lost TV rental shop records the bricks-and-mortar side ending in 2003. Boxclever still exists online, its own company history describing an amalgam of Radio Rentals, Visionhire, Rediffusion, DVR and DER. The ghost survives, but without the shop window.

I like the vanished shop more than I probably should. Not because renting was romantic. It could be expensive, paternalistic, and mildly humiliating in the way all household credit can be humiliating. However, it left behind a clear shape of dependency. You knew the machine had a chain of responsibility behind it. Somebody carried it in. Somebody could take it away.

Flat screens killed that theatre. So did supermarkets, online finance, consumer credit, landfill thinking, the whole clean nonsense of frictionless ownership. The old rental shop asked you to walk into town and negotiate with modernity over a counter. It made the future local, brown-carpeted, slightly warm from the backs of twenty display sets. Somewhere in that warmth was a truth we now hide inside checkout buttons.

Sources:

Great Service, Great Sets: Remembering the TV Rental Shop — East of the M60

The Great Colour TV Scam of the 1970s — Historic UK

Robinson Rentals — Grace's Guide

Who We Are — Boxclever