[bgadow]

I would explore the earlier sets with the high-current high voltage circuit. DuMont was a famous user of this design, and that brand name has a sort of fifties sound to it, right? They were very high end sets in their day.

If the character you want to kill has a weak heart they would be more likely to be done in by a typical low-current high voltage supply.

I'm not sure about the implosion route. If your repairman is tied up, he wants to come up with a surefire way of killing this person. Being close to an imploding crt would likely injure someone but death would certainly be far from guaranteed.

So, he is tied up in that chair across the room and directs his captor as such: "that wire coming out of the little cage on the right, the fat red wire, don't tell me it is connected to the side of the picture tube? Oh, that is ALL wrong. Pull it out! Now, shove it in one of those holes on the side of the tuner. Got it? Good! Now, come on around and turn the set on...ZZZAPPPPPPP!!!!!!!!!!!

An old story (probably dating from the fifties) and a very sad one, involved a young girl who was killed by a TV set. Seems that the repairman had lost one of the screws that held the chassis in place, so he just grabbed something he had on hand. The replacment was too long and touched a live wire up inside the chassis, thus putting a high voltage on the metal cabinet.

There is a group out there on the net (bet you would have to look hard) which believes that some sort of cold fusion style power source (or some such) is being hidden by the government and big corporations. The secret, some of them feel, is in a small news story from the mid-60s detailing how a young child was killed by an exploding GE color TV. There was quite an interesting thread about this on VK several years back. I don't know that you want to follow this angle as it is much more sci-fi than what you are after, but I thought I would mention it, if just to keep the legend alive!