I recently had a flashback to November 1974, to when my parents bought our first colour TV. I didn’t know they were going to get one, and so when I came back from school that day and saw it already on, showing one of my favourite TV shows, Timeslip, I was truly astonished. Colour made the characters seem almost 3-D, rather than the dull, flat grey I was used to.
The same was true when I first saw Star Trek on this new TV. I was amazed to discover that Kirk’s uniform was yellow-golden, Spock’s and McCoy’s were sky blue and Scotty’s was red. And that this colour range was also worn by the rest of the crew. In my childish naivete, I had assumed the uniforms were just different shades of grey! Of course, I knew people wore different coloured clothes in real life, but that awareness had not fully translated to the TV screen. So I didn’t “miss” colour on TV because I had never known it.
The same went for other shows I watched such as Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, UFO, Doctor Who; and even grown-up ones like the news or current affairs. All of them suddenly became fascinating to me.
What made this experience truly momentous for me, was more than just the “added colour”. It was as if a whole new visual dimension had opened up to me. Colour TV changed my perception of how I experienced the world.
It wasn’t just about visual abundance either. Colour made the shows feel more immediate, more real and less abstract. It was as if these shows had been speaking a different language, and now I could finally understand it.
I suspect that kids in the decades since haven’t had a comparable experience brought on by a single new visual technology. Yes, there have been enormous leaps in technology, but none of them felt like a fundamental change in perception. Later developments like HD, widescreen, and even virtual reality headsets, have been refinements or enhancements.
Today, we take colour TV for granted. But going from black and white to colour was a perceptual revelation for those of us who lived through that transition.
