The ITV Colour Strike | Black & White's Last Stand | An AMTV Documentary
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- Опубліковано 30 вер 2024
- In late 1969, the three channels that made up television in the UK, were now all operating full time colour services, for those viewers who could receive them. The advent of colour television was seen as a big deal back in the day, and even though the uptake of colour sets was slow, that didn't make it any less eventful or exciting!
However, just shy of the first anniversary of the transition to full colour, a bout of industrial action with the ITV companies, would see the other side plunged back, into the 'good old days' of monochrome. Join me, as we take a look at the build up, and the impact of, the ITV Colour Strike of 1970/71!
Sources for the video and audio used in this documentary are included in the credits at the end
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Not only is this fascinating, but also clarifying!
I live in the US and it's very difficult to find older British dramas. I managed to find the original Upstairs Downstairs to watch through unofficial channels--but a few episodes in, everything suddenly became black and white. I rationalized this as the uploader editing the episodes to avoid copyright strikes and I regretfully stopped watching the show because I wanted the original versions. All this time, it turns out that *was* the original version!
Thank you so much for making and uploading this video! Now I can finally go back to watching that show with peace of mind✌😂
I remember renting a colour set in 1971 for a few quid a month
£2/2s/2d per week was how much my grandparents rented their colour TV set from the summer of 1969 from Granada Television rental firm.
My Parents owned and ran a TV, Radio sales, hire and repair shop in East Sussex so we were very lucky as kids as my dad would bring home for weekends new products, from colour TV to VHS/betamax and I remember the video disc too, they ran the shop through the 70's and shut it down mid 2000's when they retired.
I don't remember the colour TV dispute, I was only a few years old at the time.
Great video
Been looking forward to this ☺️
Glad you enjoyed it Thomas! 😁
@@AdamMartyn great having you back 😊.
Which collection box set do you think we'll get after 22
Sorry im asking literally everyone lol
RTE Television in Ireland took five years to fully upgrade their television centre studios to colour. Commencing with their news/current affairs studio in 1971, drama productions by 1973 and finally general entertainment in their largest studio "Studio 1" at RTE finally happened in 1976.
Didn't the BBC help them to produce the 1971 Eurovision to go out in colour
@@robertcomer2767 Yes that is right. RTE started off airing imported colour shows from Britain and America in 1969, and only started convering their main studios in Dublin to colour by autumn 1971. The Eurovision Song Contest was held in the spring, and RTE had to produce it in colour, it was a sort of mark of respect for the contest. They went to the BBC commercial arm (not the licence fee funded division) and asked for an outside broadcast truck along with colour cameras for the event. BBC had very decent working relationship with RTE (especially since RTE bought in a heap load of BBC TV shows to are on RTE Television, and they also had a carriage agreement in place on the RTE cable TV network RTE Relays to provide BBC One and BBC Two on their cable service to viewers in Dublin) so BBC were very happy to provide the facilities, and of course on the BBC coverage they provided a special end credit mention for themselves.
Cool documentary, also I'm doing an Commercial Contest for my Character Elimination 3 series!
dig the retro style
Sometimes I wonder if a YT channel will purposely say something wrong just to get comments. Other times I stop watching and never watch that channel again...
It was arguably the perfect strike: large, looming impact on the company, minimal impact on the people. The '79 action was far more unpopular with consumers.
Sadly, you usually have to end up making a big enough rile to upset consumers that then complain to the main company to make progress. Of course, it's hard to thread that needle, increasingly so in the 21st century as companies have become larger and larger and more adept at branding and messaging (and also lobbying to weaken unions).
4:20 - NOT 4 lenses. The EMI 2001 and Marconi Mk7 had 1 lens, 4 pickup tubes. The Philips cameras, EMI 2005 and Marconi Mk8 had 3 tubes and 1 lens.
Thank you! I can’t believe the narrative was so misinformed. 4 lenses? Wouldn’t there be a convergence issue? Ha ha. Comment from Oakland California.
Glad to see this comment, so I don't have to post it myself! The cameras must have had a luminance output though, for the strikers to use.
@@cpm1003 4-tube cameras had a dedicated luminance tube, 3-tube ones didn’t so they just switched off the 4.43MHz PAL colour carrier to make those b/w.
Thank-you for commenting on that - it bugged me that a lens turret (from the days before the powered zoom lens) could be mistaken for the pickup devices.
As an ex BBC engineer thank you for saving me from having to painstakingly explain all this... In reality the only thing that changed was that the colour burst signal was removed from sync pulses. (and in fact in some cases it wasn't removed very well leading to the intriguing possibility of using a colour recovery process on these recordings as was done for some of the lost colour Dr who shows from BBC).
The information in this video is confused! The cameras with a turret of several lenses were used to provide various shots, for example, wide angle and close up (before zoom lenses). The lens turret would rotate, to select the required lens. Separate lenses were NOT used for each of the primary colours. Inside the camera, the image coming from the selected lens, was split and focussed on three camera tubes (red, green, and blue, and some cameras had four tubes). In the case of the colour strike, a colour signal could be converted to Black & White, by removing the colour information. A bit like turning the colour down on your old CRT TV!
Most fancy colour TV's were rented back in the 70's and were taken away at the flick of a switch, usually with a puff of smoke too 😉😂
Yes, if you rented a colour telly in the period 1967-75, the repairman virtually lived at your house! Also, you scarcely needed a heater in the living room! It would always take up to a minute to come on, and would generate tons of static on the screen.
We rented in the 90s! TVs only really started to become an affordable consumer item in the late 90s
A Decca Bradford breaking down? Never! Oh yes, actually, quite a lot.
@@jdb47games We didnt get a colour tv until around 1977 and the set was a Kreisler Colourama or something like that. Down under didn't get colour until around 76 or so. The B&W we had was a PYE, and before that a valve PYE set.
I had a horrible coin ooerated one in my first place. Cost a fortune.
I've recently been rewatching Upstairs Downstairs, so this has been on my mind lately. Did you know they filmed two endings to the first episode, when they reshot it, one which matched the black and white version's ending, and led into the black and white episodes, and one where Sarah does not stay, that leads into the first of the colour episodes. If someone just wanted to broadcast the colour ones they'd use that alternate ending.
There's an interesting effect of the colour strike on ATV's Timeslip as two episodes were recorded in monochrome during the strike. The original colour tapes were wiped or possibly were too degraded to broadcast, and aside from one colour episode all we have to watch now are monochrome telerecordings. Most of these have an ITC frontcap and endcap but with the ATV In Colour Zoom music playing over the frontcap. There are two episodes where you can hear the alternative ATV Not-In-Colour Zoom music. So it's easy to tell which episodes were made during the strike even though 25 of 26 are monochrome only these days.
I understand The Year of the Burn Up was made in colour but originally shown in B&W. It was repeated in 1974 in colour. It looked really good in colour I recall.
It was probably the first and only time as the tapes were later wiped, but B&W film recordings thankfully survive.
I remember the Day of the Clone episodes made in B&W shown with the B&W version of the ATV ident.
I aquired a colour set around 1974 -- it was smashed when the person stealing it from a nightclub was discovered and threw it (a 26" console model) down a flight of stairs. I was given the carcass and repaired it. There was no way I could have afforded to buy one. These early sets were not just colour but also dual standard -- 625/405 line models capable of receiving both the colour UHF transmissions and the older VHF b&w service. The complexity this introduced into the set design had to be seen to be believed, it was essentially two sets in one with a huge solenoid driven switch reconfiguring the set for each system. The set used a mixture of valves and transistors -- all discrete components. I don't like to think how much it had cost new, but obviously it was so expensive that a thief was prepared to tuck the equivalent of a small chest of drawers under his arm and try to climb a set of stairs with it.
With technology having moved on in leaps and bounds, colourising 5 EPs of Upstairs, Downstairs for DVD/Bluray is not beyond reach. I do remember watching repeats of On The Buses and did wonder why it jumped from colour to black and white and back again
The reason for the slow uptake of colour TV's in Britain, at least in my experience, was not down to the cost of the TV's as they were just a one off payment that you could by on credit or rent quite cheaply, it was the cost of a colour TV licence that put a lot of people off because it was a yearly charge and quite expensive comapred to a momchrome licence, about four times more expensive. We never went colour in my house until 1988 due to that very reason. It was me who eventually got a colour TV in when I left school and started working.
I was looking for this comment!
Brilliantly done. I always wondered why certain episodes of on the buses were in high quality b&w...now I know ! Perhaps you might do a video on the gradual switch to nicam stereo. That was quite a slow process to get all channels and eventually all shows made in stereo
Another great documentary Adam, super interesting hearing about the transition to colour TV and some of it's issues! I'd be interested in seeing a documentary on the technician disputes of the 70s (the ones that affected Shada)
8:35 - the colour equipment didn’t go unused for months, it was being used but either with the 4.43MHz PAL colour carrier from the camera CCUs being switched off (on 3-tube cameras) or with the colour tubes removed (on 4-tube ones).
Our first colour TV was a Radio Rentals set that arrived in Feb 1979. The day it arrived was one of the most exciting of my childhood.
Just stumbled upon your channel, and already loving the information and production/editing quality! I remember my Mum telling me about when _her_ Mum bought their first colour TV; My Mum would get headaches from watching it because her Mum *insisted* on having the colour set to MAXIMUM _(as if to make it obvious to any visitors that _*_she had a colour TV_*_ )_
As mentioned, the irony was that the majority of those watching at home still only had black and white TV sets, anyway, so this strike would prove to be largely ineffectual in forcing the TV companies to submit to their demands. Most people weren't able to buy their own sets, by the way, but instead rented them from such companies as Rent-a-set, Radio Rentals, etc.
ALSO, there was no mention of the fact that owning or renting a colour TV meant you had to pay a lot more for the TV licence required as well. We still have the silly distinction between B&W and colour licences...
@@ukeleleEric B/w licence is currently £52.00 per year,if I remember right.Colour is £149?This matters in some households-although only about 8000 b/w licences currently issued,I understand.
B/w licences held by a diverse group of people-declining all the time.A few years back the figure was about 85,000,this suggests that many are held by elderly people
@@edwardnowill4408 TV license always confused me why would I ever pay that? I only stream to my TV and don't even have cable here in the USA so it's just odd to hear
@@michaelf.2449 many people don't pay it.sanctions under uk criminal law for non payment [heavy fines] were severe-now downgraded to a civil offence & thus non payment not so frightening.As you indicate Tv licences make little sense in today's world,& most people see little chance of tv licences lasting into the longer term future.
The quality of the colour images of President Eisenhower from 1958 is amazing...
I remember not having a colour telly in my house until 1974. My Mum & I didn't want colour and told my Dad we would switch it to B&W only (which you could on those early sets, the colour was adustable from zero to massively over-coloured!) to watch our favorite shows...... although of course we didn't and watched things in colour from then on.... apart from all the B&W made repeats of course.... lol
In the Republic of Ireland, RTE Television took a long time to expand their colour service, nearly all down to money problems, as RTE was always one of the most poorest national broadcasters in Europe until around the late 1980s. RTE colour imported programming started in 1969, with proper colour service launching in 1971 with the Eurovision Song Contest in Dublin the starting point.
I hadn't heard of this strike. Ulster going colour afterwards meant it probably went unnoticed in NI, especially since we were turning into a war zone by then, which would affect broadcasting in other ways. An interesting story, seeing a strike which was basically invisible to viewers, compared to other bigger ones, such as the much more famous one in '79.
I'm just glad the workers got their pay raise. Striking for 5% and getting 4% is pretty successful, good on 'em.
6:13 My guess is that PBS, despite a huge number of US viewers who still had monochrome TV sets at the time, thought that broadcasting black and white TV shows would hit their prestige and their standing with Congress; those who wanted to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would have pointed to those episodes and claimed that PBS was lagging behind, even with government support. Black and white television was seen as obsolete in the 70s and no major programming was being produced in that format. The success of Nick at Nite, a block on Nickelodeon that aired older (including black and white) television shows, in 1985 and the 50s and 60s nostalgia that occurred in the late 80s led PBS to buy those black and white episodes.
My Uncle was an early adopter. I remember us all piling round to his place in 1970 to watch the F.A. Cup final in colour. It was so annoying that Leeds were in the final as they played in all white kit. I know one of my favourite series of the time, Timeslip, was affected by the strike but this has been compounded by the fact even the episodes that were shot in colour have gone missing. The entire series is available but only one episode survives in colour.
I know the BBC broadcast experimental colour transmissions in the fifties when Crystal Palace transmitter opened, but were not satisfied with the NTSC system. It was when the PAL system came along that the BBC and ITA agreed that this was the one to use. As a kid,(on holidays), I used to watch all those BBC2 Trade Test Colour Films shown during the day, but in BW, as the likes of us did not have colour sets. "Giuseppina", "The Home Made Car", Coupe des Alpes", Beauty in Trust", "The Cattle Carters", and many other titles, mainly made by Shell and BP. For normal tv viewing, our family used to turn the turret tuner knob on the telly to channels 1 for BBC 1, or 9 for ITA,(VHF 405 lines) as it gave a clearer picture.We had three aerials, a Band I for BBC, a Band III for ITA, picking up from Beulah Hill, South Norwood, and a crude Group A aerial for BBC 2.
I still look out for "grey scale tracking" in TV pictures (from the trade film the colour television receiver) !
My family was the last in the street to get colour tv, we didn’t get it till 1979!
Would like to see the 1967-1968, 1980 and 1991 ITV Franchise Rounds put into separate documentaries.
Fascinating - I'd never heard of this. I was born in 1970 but was in the Border TV region so my parents wouldn't have noticed (my dad was an early colour TV adopter, but later on he backed the wrong horse with Video 2000 ;- ). Great stuff!
Video 2000 was a great recording device and a bloody awful movie watching device
My parents didn't rent a colour TV until 1983 anyway, we actually had a video recorder before we had a colour TV!
It still sounds weird to me to hear anyone describe red, blue and GREEN as "primary colours". I understand it from a technical perspective and how the RBG system works but i've always remembered red, blue and yellow as the primary colours and any child capable of finger painting knows green is what you get if you mix blue and yellow but now days its seemed to switch around and yellow is the mix of red and green. Just weird how science works or ideas change
My Parents did not get a Colour set until 1974. We had a push button 625 Line Monocrome set between 71 and 74. One of the first shows we saw in Colour was Upstairs Downstairs.
I really like how the Wizard of Oz's iconic scene was shot, incorporating both color and black and white together so seemlessly. You'd think it was done with some visual effects work - perhaps shoot it twice, once with B+W film and once with the color, then use a traveling matte to combine them. But the technical issues for that were a major challenge - the precision needed to match camera movements. How about shooting it in color, then transfering the color on to B+W to get a color mix, and feeding that into the matte? That would work, but it would need so much delicate work manually making an absolutely perfect matte. No, they found a simpler way.
It's all color. They just painted the set interior side in grey! Then they doused Dorothy's stunt double in grey dye as well. During the instant when she steps out of frame, the Dorothy wearing the grey-painted dress steps aside and a new Dorothy in a colorful outfit steps forward in her place.
Good video, but you're saying "lenses" when you mean "pickup tubes". Totally different thing. The multiple lenses seen on the old turret cameras were different focal lengths, they didn't pick up different colours.
What would happen when they switched lenses, would the feed cut out?
I remember as a kid watching the opening credits of Coronation Street, the dreary theme tune, the dreary smoke-emitting chimneys of dreary houses, the dreary lives of the occupants. Just the sound of that dreary theme tune was enough to make me lunge for the off switch or the channel selector. As an elderly person today, I look back, and still cannot understand what on earth would draw anyone to watching such randomly-generated drivel, or how anyone could survive being an actor in such a soap without suffering long-term mental damage from having to feign enthusiasm for the utterly boring scrips. Drivel is still drivel whether in B&W or colour.
Who's an edgy boy? Is it you? Who's an edgy boy?
I completely agree. I dont understand how people can watch them for years and years. TV is just soaps and 'talent' shows. It's a shame they don't have more programmes dedicated to life skills - coding, woodworking, electronics etc.
My mum watches all 3 soaps and I wonder how she has the time or patience to watch the same programme 3 times over
Some people like soaps. Some people don’t. What’s your point? I personally agree with you but you aren’t making a groundbreaking assessment there, people have watched all kinds of garbage on the TV from the moment broadcasting began. Some people just like watching the same drawn-out predictable storylines over and over again.
@@JamsterJules The internet fulfils your dreams of life skill tutorials in the form of endless UA-cam videos, WikiHow articles and other websites. That sort of stuff would never work on TV, which in itself is a dying format that the majority of younger people don’t care for.
“This is AMTV in color. Oh.( goes to black and white again)”😂😂😂 0:00
I’d never heard of this strike before. Interesting stuff
Superb documentary! Interesting topic and very well made.
Thank you William! 😁
I rented a colour TV in the late sixties, when only BBC2 was available in colour, but I'd forgotten about the ITV colour strike.
Where has this channel been all my life? Great content, well produced. My marathon rabbit hole is set for this week
Heard a story on radio years ago about a child who wanted parents to buy a colour set but parents would not budge. Child poured glass of water down back of B&W TV to force the issue. 'The man' was called to fix TV and repaired TV quite easily but noted to mum there was water in the back. I cannot remember what happened next.
I believe the child was killed
@@Benzona its true, I was the child
I bet the child was grounded for that.
Very interesting. I have never heard about this before. I was born at the end of 2970 and we still had black and white until around 1974. The first image I ever saw on a colour television at home was the Granada symbol. But despite having a UHF black and white set prior to thus, we would never have known about the colour strike. I do remember the 2979 itv strike but despite following television technology all of my life I had never heard about this at any point, even when talking yo people who do share the same interest. You learn something every day.
Three "Benny Hill Shows" were produced during the "colour strike." Two routines wound up in different places - the period sketch "Love Will Find A Way" made it to both "The Best of Benny Hill" movie and into U.S. half-hour syndication; and part of the "Uplift" sketch - where Lesley Goldie as "Joanna Bakewell-Tart" was interviewing Benny as malaprop-prone East End poet St. John Bossom - was featured on the "Words" side of his LP "Benny Hill: Words And Music." It was from the first of those three shows that he first performed "Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West)," a year before released as a single. The sketches on those shows were head and shoulders above the later remakes from the '80's whereby he and his cast began mailing in their performances.
Incidentally, it was because of the colour strike that Benny that year turned out five specials - after the strike was over, he finished the 1970-71 series back where he started - in colour.
My grandmother used to visit her neighbours because of their colour TV. She was taken aback by how immersive and cool it was.
In 1979 I bought a Sony Trinitron colour TV, about 14 inch, for, as I recall, £300. Imagine that in today's money. £3,000? I must have been mad.
I have the DVD box set of Budgie and the early episodes made during the Colour Strike are in monochrome
Lol this is so interesting. I'm an American millennial born in '86 so needless to say I have never heard about any of this. I plan on informing every nerd I know about this lol.
Sorry to be pedantic but colour TV cameras did not have four lenses, they had one - a varifocal lens. This distinguished them from the monochrome turret cameras which had several lenses and required the operator to change between lenses to obtain whichever shot was needed (although some of the last monochrome cameras did have varifocal lenses).
What colour cameras had were four tubes, the devices which converted the image into an electronic signal. Three were luminance (for colour - one each for the red, green and blue signal) and one was chrominance (for black and white). These would merge the picture seen by the camera and allowed the viewer to see a programme whatever the status of their receiver. It was the three colour tubes that were switched off meaning the colour camera could only use the chrominance tube to record an image.
Border was still transmitting local output in black and white until the mid-seventies. Its first network series of Mr & Mrs was made at Tyne Tees, as a co-production, to comply with an edict from the IBA that no black and white output was to air in daytime.
Watched this one on holiday while in Turkey. Always enjoyed Adam's work as one - he is so researched - two - his voice makes a good storyteller and - three - he approached it with a sense of humour but knows to tell the story and make people come back for more. Keep it up Adam 8-)
1967? Color TV came to the UK later than I imagine. How quant.
Just discovered this channel and have no clue how it doesn't have over a million subs! Awesome video.
Thats very kind of you! Maybe one day we'll crack a million! 😁
...and for those of you watching in black and white the pink ball is behind the blue.
I’m still angry about this. I was at the time obviously with my parents having got a fabulous Murphy 22” colour set (white cabinet). Yes, ruined Upstairs Downstairs etc and I’m still suffering today with my Timeslip DVD box set with only ONE episode from the series in colour.
Our family rented a colour TV in 1970. But only kept it for a short time, because the thing was so unreliable, and having to call the Radio Rentals engineer out every few weeks. Then we went back to a black and white TV until 1974.
This is great. I’d love to see your take on the many eras of school broadcasting - an area I enjoy looking at
Watching snooker in black and White was annoying 🤣🤣🤣🤣
my dad had the first tv set in his village way back when.but we never swapped to colour until 1980!
Colour TV has such a hold on the British psyche as an item of luxury that the tabloids were still outraged that some UK prisoners had colour TVs in their cells decades after you could even buy a monochrome one.
10:20 - the BBC didn’t have a full colour service until the late 70s. Many regional news programmes were in black and white until 1975/76. Some children’s programmes like Blue Peter and Zokko remained in b&w for a while.
BBC Bangor converted to Colour in 1978. Blue Peter was made in Colour from late 1970 I understand.
@@martinhughes2549 Our family got a colour telly in the autumn of 1971. The first episode or two of Blue Peter that I saw on the colour set was still in b&w, so the move to colour might have been a year later.
Gosh, Americans got colour in the 50s, UK in 60s... us here in Australia didn't get it until 1975!!
Think of Ireland, 1976 they got full colour service.
Upstairs Downstairs, the OG Downton Abbey
Moral of the Story: Pay your ducking workers
the kisses of the sun
were sweet i didn't blink
i let it in my eyes
like an exotic drink
A good documentary and a period I remember clearly but I affected me little as we didn’t have colour tv till about 1979! The lost revenue must have been huge and embarrassing to those who’s job it was to sell it. The sales force are what feeds growth and the ‘stuffed shirts’ were slow to learn. 5% was minuscule compared with the fortunes that lay ahead. Who ever saw an ex TV executive begging on the streets or down the job center. It must have cost millions. Colour tv was indeed a slow take up as any luxury in the austerity period. We had not even paid off our National Debt when this incarnation came along. A colour tv was about £300 and a new car £1200. If memory serves me right, our first colour tv cost £50 as an ex rental set. It was forever going wrong and heavy on transistors _ especially the power supply chopper circuit. Yes, I know a bit and like many households, putting food on the table and personal transport was more important.
To put this in perspective, around this time my first and second jobs paid 1250 and 2000 pounds. A year. Before tax. I was a graduate engineer so quite well paid. Rent for a small Coronation Street style of terrace (2 up, 2 down) was a few pounds a week. Just owning any car, let alone a new one, was a bit of a luxury.
@@martinusher1 Austere times indeed Martin and many reading this were just starting off in life. I was an apprentice Lift Engineer in 1972 and ironically, the years before- sold colour tvs as a saturday boy at the CoOp (RACS) in Woolwich- I say 'sold' but my recollection was either rental and HP- both options required a form-filling exercise and led to the inevitable 'when will that be?' from the customer, whos eyes had been full of hope before i gave them the bad news of the wait/delay in getting the rentals/HP agreed, then the wait for the dispatch of said Philips, Ferguson or if you had ideas above you station and pay-packet- Grundig! I could, even at that age, judge who could afford and who could not. And by 1978 when I got married, guess which category I ended up in..
Thanks for this! Australia didn't get colour TV until 1975!
Yup and the first show to get it was the Auntie Jack show. Infact they messed around with it so the entire show went colour and auntie jack stayed in black and white!
A fun fact about B&W television is that in Romania, Dallas was aired in monochrome, because the colour system was not yet adopted and still was a very popular show.
Why is your theme tune the song Rhythm Is A Dancer by Snap?
It's rather foreign to us these days to think that technological progress in television would be a center of contention. Israel also has a similarly interesting history for their introduction of color television, although the objections came straight from the government and not from technicians as the expense of color TV was apparently making Israeli society more unequal. Italy was behind the rest of Europe in color television adoption thanks to political turmoil from the Years of Lead as well as from economic problems brought about by the 1973 oil crisis, with its introduction being a point of debate for the Italian parliament in the 70s, only being able to carry on with partial color transmissions in 1977 - the poorer Yugoslavia already had channels broadcasting in color in 1971.
As an Israeli I was just thinking of that.
Television was considered by the government as an unwanted element that will corrupt the minds of the citizens and objected to any kind of TV broadcast. The first broadcast was in 1966 but only for educational purpose on special programs for schools and actual general broadcasts only began in 1968. They used old second hand black ans white equipment but purchased programs were in colour but since the government did not want people to buy expensive colour TV's they instructed the newly formed Israeli broadcast authority to remove the colourburst signal from the outgoing transition. this signal carries the colour sync information and without it the TV reverted to monochrome. This lasted until 1983 but long before that an electrical engineer called Shmuel Eden (later became a high ranking vice president in Intel) developed a device that added this sync info to the received signal that,in most cases, brought the colour back (it was not completely accurate but you could manually adjust it).
In the Israeli case, since the colour was only "erased" from the transition signal colour is available today in programs that were recorded with colour equipment.
Love the music @1:00
Another excellent video. I was hoping you'd cover this after the you did the ITV strikes, and mentioned that then. Another great example of a programme affected was On the Buses.
That "Oh" in the into just cracked me up.
As a former broadcast engineer, I appreciate your work
Interesting. I lived through this period and wasn't even aware of this strike. But, there again, we had black and white until the mid 1970's.
By god those tv rental shops must have been sitting on a goldmine when colour came in. Crap tv's costing a fortune and forever breaking down.
Our first colour TV was a slot television. 50p for 10 hours viewing. You'd think we were heading for a full scale nuclear war if it switched off in the middle of Crossroads and no 50p on the top of the TV. My poor mother like many others must have bought 10 tvs over with all the rent paid to the likes of DER and Radio Rentals. I actually thought the sets were made to break down considering they're always seemed to be an engineer in the house fixing the crap they rented out.
I think one of the reasons why Europe tv stations lagged behind the US and Japan when adopting colour was because those two countries used the NTSC (National Television Standards Committee) standard, which was apparently rushed to market by adapting (IIRC) a technology originally designed for colour closed-circuit tv. The system wasn't particularly well suited for over-the-air transmission, leading to distortions in colour hues, such that the standard was given the unfortunate nickname Never The Same Colour.
The BBC and other European broadcasters got together to come up with a proper colour tv standard that actually worked, and like all committees (particularly those comprising of groups speaking multiple languages) the discussions dragged on for a while. An early French proposed standard called SECAM (Sequential Colour and Memory) fixed the American hue distortions and allowed for more stable signals over longer distances. But the BBC and many countries finally adopted a variation of the SECAM system called PAL (Phase Alternating Line, nickname: People Aren't Lavender) that adopted SECAM's colour fixing techniques, but wasn't quite as radical when it came to the signal structure apparently.
Pal is not sequential, it's differential: it first sends an image line straight to the tv, then sends the next one "inverted" so the color error gets to Zero by itself. It stores the next line while drawing the actual one. It uses AM signal for sending the image, it actually sends a grayscale image and the values of red and blue to the TV to make the substraction and decode the colours (blue minus white and red minus white equals green).
Pal is an enhanced NTSC, not a Secam derivative and it has been created in Germany by AEG-Telefunken.
Secam has NOTHING to do with Pal. First of all, it uses FM to send first (white minus blue) and then (white minus red) piecing them together in the screen, in "sequence".
Other color system it has been developed but used by no country is DSC from Philips, i believe it used 2 subcarriers to send simultaneously all the luminance and chrominance information but i know little about it.
@@MadScientist750 In terms of the way the signals were transmitted over the air, PAL is indeed closer to NTSC, but in terms of the way the signal is encoded the systems are very different. PAL uses a wider channel bandwidth and different resolution. Both SECAM and PAL were ways of addressing the colour problem with NTSC, and although SECAM uses sequential colour, the PAL and SECAM share the same wider bandwidth and have compatible resolutions. The upshot is that, for devices like VCRs, games consoles, and home computers, creating a device that can handle both PAL and SECAM is relatively simple, but getting a device that can handle both PAL and NTSC requires a lot of work. (This is why dual standard PAL/SECAM VCRs were commonplace from the early 80s on, but it wasn't until the 90s that we got cheap devices that could handle both PAL and NTSC competently.)
Although the PAL standard was indeed developed in Germany, it was done so as part of the European Broadcasting Union in close collaboration with groups like the BBC, and indeed the BBC was the first broadcaster to ever broadcast using it.
@@r5img It is actually correct what you say, both systems tried to resolve what NTSC was uncapable of.
I remember that my mom got a licence for black and white TV, even though she had a colour TV. Just because it was cheaper than a colour licence. She had it for years until the 90s, when TV goons came round to check.
Rhythm is a Dancer? :)
Thats the one!
Great documentary, but a small technical point - cameras only ever had one lens. The group of four seen on earlier cameras is a lens turret, which was how they changed focal lengths before zoom lenses were introduced at around the same time as colour cameras (you can actually see it moving in an earlier clip) and has nothing to do with colour reproduction.
Cameras had multiple *sensors* for different colours, which would have been vidicon or plumbicon tubes at the time. Three tube cameras mixed the outputs of these tubes in a certain proportion (roughly 59% green, 11% blue and 30% red) to produce a black and white picture, four tube cameras worked as described in the video. Fortunately analogue television is designed to treat colour as a sort of optional extra, so they could simply disable the colour subcarrier part of the signal and carry on working as normal.
Incidentally, this three-sensor design is still in use, right up to the latest 8K broadcast cameras.
Unions, unions f* unions! They always cause grief!
Nope. Always caused by incompetent management.
@@peteterry2877 No. I don’t agree. Management usually get things right. It’s up to the workers to do their jobs properly.
@@nigelkthomas9501 Clearly they are not getting things right if their mismanagement causes such an upset among the workforce it results in industrial action. Strikes don't just happen. In nearly every case they are a result of management wanting to impose changes that impact detrimentally on the workforce.
i like your retro intro music and graphics. presumably intentional? 😆
i feel like i am watching something on bbc2 at 1am, in 1980. for some reason 🤣
my dad refused to rent a tv, so unlike my mate up the road, whose parents rented the latest tv. we had Pot Black in b/w ☹️
Cool video Adam I can remember in the itv colour strike 1970 Coronation Street Xmas episode was showed in monochrome
I can remember schools progranes were on tv from about 9am to 12pm watch with mother at 12 noon news and schools again till about 3.45pm as schools kicked us out at 4pm 1969-74ish then the kids progs started followed by news crossroads, comedy progs then Corrie another comedy or maybe take your pick then 9pm cop or upstairs down stairs, news at 10pm steptoe and son close down and the dot dissapearing about 11.30pm
Proper daytime television did not kick off in the UK until October 1972. This was down to the fact that the British government controlled the amount of broadcasting hours per day each TV channel could provide. Before 1972, the government limited the three television channels available to a maximum of 8 hours per day of what they called "general entertainment programming". This included soap operas, dramas, movies, kids shows, talk shows, news, nearly everything. However some programmes were exempted from the 8 hour limit = schools programmes, adult education, religious programmes, weather forecasts and coverage of sporting events. Also on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Year's Eve and New Year's Day was exempted under the Christmas allowance. So daytime TV could never properly take off until 1972, as if any channel did try to air some proper daytime shows, they did not have much left out of their 8 hour limit for the main evening viewing. Hence why schools programmes, adult education and sport clogged up afternoon telly in the sixties.
0:05
*the ident fades to monochrome color*
Adam: oh
Colour did not come to our home until 1986, not just the higher cost of renting a colour TeleVision set but also the higher cost of a colour TeleVision licence, my home now has no TeleVision thus saving the cost of a licence, as I discovered TeleVision to be the trigger for my migraines, though youtube on a computer does not trigger an attack !
I do remember this period and the shows concerned. In this period most people were still renting Televisions because of the Up Front costs. We did watch Upstairs Downstairs, but I was a lot more interested in science programs like Horizon. Later I worked in Video Production (at that time B&W was utterly dead) including a small amount of Broadcast. So I remember the atmosphere over union related disputes.
Fascinating! I wonder how many colour TV owners were slapping the side of the telly to try and get colour back? 😅
My phone has a "bedtime mode" that will switch the screen to monochrome late at night. It kicked in while I was watching this video and it took me several minutes to realize, which I thought was hilariously on point.
Well that was fascinating! 🤩
Thames technically started with the others but were 2 days late as they didn't broadcast on Saturdays or Sundays
This is AMTV in colour oh
Lunacy! Still recording in colour yet showing it in B&W! You couldn’t make it up!
That is British broadcasting unions for you!
I'm British and this is amazing. The info, the opening, the AMTV Productions logo, all perfect.
And don't forget you found the oldest colour recording found in the US!
The dedication is amazing and I wish you made even more. So far, you made 2 more documentaries and they are BOTH superb.
Thank you Michael! They do take time to make, but i will make more 😊
My uncle had a color RCA in the late 50s. Amazing that the UK was so behind.
As I really knew that since the Christmas episode, almost all the episodes of the 4th series of LWT's On The Buses was filmed during the colour strike. (With the exceptions of the first episode of the series "Nowhere to Go" until the fourth episode "The Other Woman" was filmed in colour while airing it in B&W when the strike began.)