This thread has actually reminded me of an experience we used to have with TV reception in the mid 90s.
At the time I was living at my parents' place in Kenilworth, Warwickshire. For a good few months in 1994, on and off, when watching ITV our picture became distorted.
Think of like a loading screen from an old 8-bit computer (Commodore 64, Spectrum, Amstrad) a coloured border, with a black screen, and white text inside the middle of it.
Now we received our pictures from the Sutton Coldfield transmitter, like most in the West Midlands, but during 1994 we started reeiving like a ghost image of what I have just described, juxtaposed with a grainy ITV picture, passing in and out of frame. The text inside the box beared something like "Nottingham..." something, something, "...CTV"
Now, Nottingham is an hours drive up the motorway. I should know. As a die hard Nottingham Forest fan, we used to drive up there a couple of times a month to see matches.
The most rememberred occurance of this was watching (Well trying to) ITV's heavily edited down, bad dub, version of Robocop, that year. Where the image was constantly passing backwards and forwards.
This happened only on ITV (None of the other 3 channels) and did so on and off for several months.
When I watched The Ring for the first time this too triggered my memory of this. The concept of some malevolent force sending out evil visions into the static of cable station down time, suddenly didn't feel that inplausible...
