Rogues Gallery

What’s happened here then? I don’t know, but I’ll give you my hypothesis, based purely on this photograph.

When the flats were built the council shied away from installing a proper communal TV system because they’d been ripped off plenty of times before. Instead they had some special wall brackets made and had masts fixed above each group of six flats. They then told the tenants that they could fix their own aerials onto the masts. This meant that they had in effect created a TV distribution system with no earth bonding, but no matter. As time went on the tenants added more and more aerials, because they were naturally unwilling to adhere to the council’s stereotypical view that people in small council flats have only one TV set.

Eventually the mast snapped. The firm sent out to effect the repair didn’t feel like dismantling all the cross arms and aerials, so they decided to re-use the top part of the old mast. In order to do this they fitted a short length of mast into the brackets and used a mast coupler to slot the old mast into place. Not long afterwards the wind blew and of course the new mast bent over, since the stress was concentrated at the bottom of the mast coupler.

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