Ray Kessler

Ray was nine in 1974, and the box under his arm coming out of the electronics shop was the 150-in-1 with the wooden frame. He never left: he fixed televisions in Ohmsville for thirty-one years — and, from the day the first ones came in, the Betamax and VHS machines too, which meant a decade of belts, heads and idler tyres on top of the tubes — first out of the back of the shop and then out of his own van, so he spent three decades being the man you brought the broken thing to. He was in everybody's living room. Then the sets stopped having screws in them, people stopped bringing things, and the work dried up in about four years. He still has the kit, and the manual, with his own pencil marks on project forty-one. He is telling you this because nobody has asked him in a long time and he is pleased to be asked.