Life in Black and White. Page 2

I remember, many years ago, an announcement that there was to be a "test transmission" of colour TV.

People who, like myself, had an IQ of average or above realised immediately that this transmission would be visible in colour only to those who had already invested in a colour TV set ready for the advent of colour transmissions.

However, there was a woman of my acquaintance who insisted that the transmission would be visible in colour on every TV in the land.

I put it to her that, if such were the case, there was absolutely no point in buying a colour TV as one's ordinary black and white TV would pick up programs in colour when they were transmitted.

She saw my point to an extent but still insisted that the test transmission would be visible in colour to everybody.

She was, of course, a dickhead.

When I was a lad, all life (not just TV & photos) was black and white, colour wasn't invented until the Sun went yellow.

I think Pot Black came on the TV when colour was introduced.

"For those with black and white TVs the pink ball is behind the yellow" or something like that.

Anyway I think that some ITV companies produced programmes in colour before there were colour TVs and the BBC famously produced The Forsyte Saga only in black and white without realiing the implications and potential of producing it in colour. Obviously someone in control didn't have the Forsyte.

One of the early programmes transmitted in colour was, of course, the Black & White Minstrels.

Quote: Billy Bunter @ 28th February 2019, 7:52 PM

One of the early programmes transmitted in colour was, of course, the Black & White Minstrels.

View original

I was brought up to refer to them as "The Minstrels of Indistinguishable Hue".

Such was my political correctness that I went to school in a grey blazer, grey shirt, grey tie, grey trousers, grey socks and grey shoes. I was a notorious clock-watcher and that really annoyed my teacher until I explained to him that, far from being bored in his lessons, I was actually rejoicing in the passage of time because every tick of the clock was one second nearer to the day when I would have grey hair.

Even today, I refuse to have a colour TV set and such is my mindset that I see everybody on TV as a person indistinguishable in appearance from any other person, regardless of race, gender, size, shape, or disability.

I love watching TV even though, in recent times, the quality of stand-up comedians has been deteriorating year by year and we've now reached the point where we're seeing some seriously shite comedy from comedians who are so seriously shite that they would have been booed off the stage in any local pub prior to the latter years of the 20th century.

Something's happened, and I've missed it.

I inherited my first TV when my sister got a portable colour TV and gave me her black and white set. It was a tiny screen of only a few inches and had a built in Betamax player, audio cassette player and all the radio bands. Without that I would have never seen shows like Who Dares Wins, The James Whale Show and Absolutely at an age when I should have been asleep for school the next day. I tuned in to police frequencies a few times to listen to them talking to each other but that quickly got boring.

I can tell what colour all the balls are on a Snooker table on a black and white set because of the different tones. The only one that can be tricky is the brown can be mistaken for a red. A red herring.