J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:

Was it purely that they were deaf? If so, would they have been one of
the few cases where an external preamp (in the room, not masthead) was
actually useful (or were the noise figures of external preamps pretty
bad then)?

We used to fit second-hand transistorised masthead amps inside those
early UHF sets that had valve tuners. What an improvement!

Bill