THE Conservatives have claimed that without private electricity, Britain’s flatscreen televisions would still be showing the test card.
Labour’s pledges to renationalise energy have been criticised by Tories who say this would lead to 1970s-style television shutdowns with only a girl with a blackboard and clown doll to watch.
Energy secretary Greg Clark said: “Younger people won’t remember how bad the old public electricity was, how crackly and grey.
“You couldn’t run a toaster on it without banging on the wall to ask the neighbours if they’d finished using theirs, and it smelled funny like burning fish.
“Yet that is the low-grade electricity Labour want to return us to, electricity so bad it left children watching a black-and-white clock thing for half-an-hour before Tales Of The Riverbank started.
“Forget running your 60-inch TV on it. There’d be one tiny five-inch picture in the corner of the screen, black-and-white, and if you tried to binge-watch it’d blow up.”
55-year-old Eleanor Shaw said: “I’ve been a Labour supporter all my life, but they can’t be fucking with my telly. Not my telly.”
