The All England Club has always insisted that tennis players wear white. So for British TV viewers watching Wimbledon on 1 July 1967 there was no surprise in the kit. Everything else in the coverage, though, was a shock: the green of the court, the sunny blue or rainy grey of the London skies, the yellow of the lemon squash the players drank between games. The tournament – in which Billie Jean King won the women’s singles and John Newcombe the men’s – was the first British TV programme to be screened in colour.
Whereas theatre could show the world naturalistically from the start – and cinema used some colour from 1903 until it became standard in the 1940s – TV long suffered the frustration of having to present the world in false tones. This gap was caused by the prohibitive expense of a process that had long been theoretically possible. Engineering systems for colour TV were patented in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1928, John Logie Baird gave the first technical demonstration in the UK.
His achievement came six years after his fellow Scot John Reith had begun the BBC as a radio service. Logie Baird’s invention created an image using three light sources and three primary colours, the latter alluded to for years in the test cards, striped like Neapolitan ice cream, that were broadcast between shows before 24-hour programming.
For technical and economic reasons, it would be decades before colour became generally available to viewers. As it had been with nuclear weapons, and would be with moon landings, the US was first. After practice transmissions in 1950, CBS and NBC began a phased transition three years later. Being able to judge the exact shade of the anchorman’s toupee didn’t become standard in the US until 1965.
In the intervening period, there was a market for cheap pieces of plastic (sold for a dollar) that were divided into horizontal thirds of blue, reddish and green. Stuck on the screen, these cheat-sheets created an illusion of colour viewing. Vexed to have been bested by America, the Soviet Union caught up in 1967, its first colour broadcast being the parade to mark the 50th anniversary of the revolution.
In breaking out of monochrome that same year, the UK was in the first big wave of adopters. In Britain, colour TV became a status symbol not only for individuals – you can tell a lot about an older person’s background by whether they saw the first new-fangled programmes at somebody else’s house – but also for broadcasters. The BBC launched it in a rush, bringing forward the date to get ahead of Germany.
What’s distinctive about the history of British colour TV is that the switchover was directly responsible for the creation of certain genres that dominate the medium to this day. As the technology was experimental, the corporation decided to trial it on the newcomer, BBC2, which in 1967 was run by David Attenborough. He embraced the new palette, not least because he understood at once its possibilities for his type of broadcasting. Life on Earth, Paradise Birds and The Private Life of Plants would hardly have been worth making if viewers were unable to see the glories of plumage, pelts and petals.
It is no coincidence that Gardeners’ World will celebrate its 50th birthday in January next year either (flowers had also been central to the first ever US broadcast in the format – a report on the 1954 Tournament of Roses parade). But Attenborough, one of the true visionaries of early TV, was not just looking out for his own genre. He saw at once that two types of content – arts and sport – could now be fully born through the coming of colour.
Appreciating the medium’s potential to become an international picture gallery, he commissioned from the art historian Kenneth Clark Civilisation: A Personal View (1969). Its director Michael Gill (whose son would, under the name AA Gill, later turn many producers puce with his Sunday Times TV reviews) chose to film in 35mm stock, giving one of the first big colour TV series the visual allure of a Hollywood movie.
Attenborough also added snooker to the BBC sports portfolio. In fact, green seems to have been the primary colour of Britain’s early efforts in the new technology: the grass of Centre Court and Percy Thrower’s garden, the baize of snooker tables, lush French nature in the paintings of Monet, Cézanne and Renoir.
So thrilled was the industry with its new spectacles that, even as late as 1985, ITV was initially resistant to The Last Place on Earth, a drama about Scott’s Antarctic expedition. The network feared that the snowscapes would be tough viewing because white didn’t “read” well on colour sets.
Once viewers expected everything to be colour, programme-makers gradually began – as movie directors already had – to use the older medium for experimental effect or to represent the past. A 1976 episode of M*A*S*H and a 1988 episode of thirtysomething were shown wholly or largely in black and white.
According to the most recently available figures from TV Licensing, just over 8,000 people in the UK still watch TV in its pre-1967 form – or, in a possibly crucial distinction, continue to buy black and white TV licences. The highest concentrations of refuseniks are in London and the Outer Hebrides. As these licences cost around a third of colour ones, sceptics suspect that there may be canny purchasers gambling that no one will ever come round to check if you know that Jon Snow wears snazzy ties on Channel 4 News.
A more charitable view is that the holdouts are purists who, like enthusiasts for acoustic guitar or period classical instruments, believe that the art form should be experienced in its original manner. They are entitled to that view.
But most TV lovers remain grateful for what was a sort of national cataract operation, releasing the medium’s true potential. Viewers of Wimbledon this year will have HD, super slow-mo and numerous other innovations. But, without the one that happened 50 years ago today, they would be watching a pointless set.
