First of all, are you actually based in the UK? You might have forgotten this but in the bad old days of DOS, each country had a country code and code page for console support. The code page for the UK was 850 if I remember correctly. Not sure about the country code but it might have been 44. If these don't match your machine, you won't see pound signs until you make them match. There was a driver called keyboard.sys that provided the appropriate symbols. In fact, even Windows has a similar concept.

Open up a console window on your screen, then hold down the shift key whilst hitting the number 3. Do you see pound signs?