It was not possible to put a cathode ray tube TV above fire on the chimney breast, but height and size does depend on the room, I have removed the brackets on chimney breast myself as I don't want the TV to dominate the room. But being high does allow one to view it even when there are chairs between one and the TV. With a living room 22 foot long TV being high is not really a problem.
We have an open fire, but I have a board in front of it and the exhaust of the portable AC is attached to it so I can run it without opening windows, I have never lit a fire in the grate, however it is there for emergencies should the oil fuelled CH fail. I don't really want to move the TV if we do want to light the fire.
Yes and longer than the Valve TV a neighbour has recently disposed of.
It does seem odd, we called are the amplifying devices valves, but we called the cathode ray display a tube? The old TV's had large resistors to drop the voltage, I know one broke and I found the smoothing iron was same resistance, so plugged the iron into TV to watch it, had to remember to set it to cotton or the thermostat would work just as the program was getting excited, however this does point out how much power they used.
Non of my TV's today use more than 200 watt and the screen size is well over the 22" which with cathode ray we thought was massive, hard to find a TV today under 28". The old 14" was great for bedroom, now the TV dominates my bedroom at 28".
Seems odd we still call the boxes used to watch TV set top boxes, but today I would not try balancing my DVD player or satellite box on the top of the TV, however I do have Blu-ray, Satellite, boxes which also need power, so the TV stand allows me to hide all the wires.