by Joe Moran
The arrival of colour television had been long delayed because of the failure to agree internationally which colour system to use. When Europe finally agreed on a standard, the 625-line BBC2 was the only British station with the technology to go colour immediately. David Attenborough, the BBC2 controller, wanted the kudos of making his channel the first colour one in Europe. It was believed that the Russians intended to introduce a colour service in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution in October 1967, and the French were also thought to be planning a start at the end of the year in time for the Winter Olympics in Grenoble.31 But Attenborough did not want to repeat the mistake of the American TV networks, which had started colour gradually and so treated the few hours of colour each week as a spectacular advertisement for it, making programmes of self-defeating complexity which most viewers, watching in monochrome, found disappointing.
Colour would thus arrive in two phases: a ‘colour launching period’ of about four hours a week, which would whet the public’s appetite and allow the retail trade to begin selling colour sets, and a full-scale, official unveiling of colour TV in December. Zero hour for the launching period was Saturday 1 July 1967, with a live transmission from Wimbledon: an obvious choice because it was easy to film with just three colour cameras. At 2 p.m., BBC2 switched from monochrome shots of Henley regatta and the colour camera panned in on the presenter Peter West, artfully flanked by flowerpots and a green umbrella. The Radio and Television Retailers’ Association guessed that there were no more than 5,000 colour sets in Britain; the manufacturers’ body put the number in the hundreds.32 The industry had been thrown by Attenborough’s decision to steal a march on the Europeans and there weren’t enough sets to sell to those who could afford them – who were not many, since they cost £300, a third of the price of a new Ford Zephyr. Colour viewing parties swelled the numbers slightly, and a few TV critics were allowed to watch in colour at BBC Television Centre, in the hope that they would reveal this miraculous vision to the unconverted. Even so, the first day of colour TV was probably viewed by about 10,000 people, 5,000 fewer than were watching in real colour on Centre Court.
America’s NTSC system for colour television, known contemptuously to British engineers as ‘Never Twice the Same Colour’, was a natural heir to the hyperrealistic, highly saturated hues of Technicolor film. As Jonathan Miller told a New York audience for whom he had arranged a private showing of his BBC monochrome production of Alice in Wonderland, their colour TV was ‘all gangrene and custard’. Attenborough insisted that Britain’s colour TV would be more ‘natural’ than monochrome, a more accurate representation of what the eye perceived. This was the continuation of an argument running all the way through western art between metaphysical and realistic notions of colour. In the former tradition, colour was a quality to be celebrated in itself, from the opulent religious art of the middle ages to the intense colour contrasts of the abstract expressionists. In the latter, painters like Leonardo and Rembrandt used restrained colours and chiaroscuro to bring the viewer closer to reality. Attenborough, in aesthetics as well as by profession, was a naturalist, convinced that the ‘honeymoon of delight’ on first seeing bright colours on a television set would wear off and the real gain would be that it would add information, give a sense of perspective and be more restful on the eye.33
Those who saw the first match in colour, in which another of Britain’s Wimbledon nearly men, Roger Taylor, beat the South African Cliff Drysdale, were impressed by its naturalism, with the flesh tints, the hardest thing to get right, nothing like the luminescent skin tones of MGM musicals. Colour imposed a new drama on the game, with the players’ faces darkening theatrically as clouds crossed the sun. The keen tennis fan noted the varied colour of the Centre Court turf and could see where the grass was sappy and a player might slip, and where it was brown and the ball might bounce awry. One detail inspired much comment: the bottles of orange and lime barley water by the umpire’s chair. A little like the LSD trippers in the summer of love happening elsewhere, the first colour TV watchers found themselves reintroduced to the world, from the greenness of grass to the orangeness of orange juice.
In the launching period, it was the trivial detail that mesmerised: the cherry-red shirt of the Virginian, the chestnut-brown eyes of Joan Bakewell, the swirling clothes of the flower-bedizened Haight-Ashbury hippies on Whicker’s World. There were also a lot of dull trade test colour films repeated over and over again, including ‘Prospect for Plastics’, an industrial film documentary about the influence of plastics on our lives, and ‘Overhaul’, a guided tour of London Transport’s Aldenham bus overhaul works, before the full colour service began at last on Saturday 2 December 1967. The big draw of the first weekend’s schedules, moved from BBC1 especially for the occasion, was The Black and White Minstrel Show.
A small number of dissenters preferred the austere contrasts of black and white to what they saw as the bogus glamour of colour. Ken Loach said he would rather have made his 1967 film Poor Cow in monochrome, and John Boorman, who was moving away from making television documentaries into filmmaking, considered himself lucky to have been ‘trafficking in a contiguous monochrome world … a familiar reality transposed into a parallel universe … Reality is what we live, film is metaphor.’ Others worried that colour would disenchant the world. The BBC’s head of light entertainment, Tom Sloan, pointed out that colour TV was much less kind to skin than monochrome, mercilessly revealing brewer’s bloom, bloodshot eyes and stained teeth. The comedian Dick Emery had a complete set of plastic crowns made for his new BBC2 colour show.34
Most critics, however, welcomed colour for its re-education of their vision. An emetic yellow tanktop worn by a right-wing Rhodesian in an interview ‘commented on the poor taste that goes with moneyed racism as well as a yard of closely argued print would have done,’ wrote Peter Black. Nicholas Garnham felt that BBC2’s new colour series on the life of Christ beautifully conveyed the Biblical symbolism of water as a lifegiving force, through the glaring white of the Dead Sea’s foreshore salt and the emerald green Jordan surrounded by parched ochre. William Hardcastle, watching the US open golf championship, suddenly saw the whole point of colour TV when the camera caught ‘the full plump face of Nicklaus, furiously contemplating a putt, between the brightly trousered legs of a caddy’.35
The BBC Natural History Unit’s The Major, a tender study of a year in the life of a village green oak tree destined to be felled, had already been shot in colour in 1963, ready to become one of BBC2’s most repeated shows after the arrival of colour TV. Relying only on the understated revelations afforded by high-fidelity colour, it delicately interweaved images of local life, from Morris dancing to cricket matches, with footage of the wood ants and blue jays that made the oak their home. Ron Eastman’s The Private Life of a Kingfisher, with its stunning underwater shot of a kingfisher on the River Test in Hampshire diving to catch a fish, was also repeated many times.
Earlier 405-line black and white was not high definition enough to show a fishing line clearly, so fishing programmes tended to involve a presenter waggling a bendy stick unproductively in the air; but BBC2’s new Anglers’ Corner, with Bernard Venables, conveyed beautifully in 625-line colour the choreography of rod and line against the changing light of a day on the water. Percy Thrower, meanwhile, had been presenting Gardening Club, a studio programme with glassless greenhouses and soil bussed in each week, in black and white since 1954. In colour a studio garden looked unconvincing, so BBC2’s new Gardeners’ World was filmed at Magnolias, Thrower’s own garden in Shrewsbury. Colour TV thus inadvertently created a more intimate relationship between gardening presenters and viewers. Thirty or forty cars were often parked by Magnolias, as people came to look at the garden, armed with binoculars. When Thrower held charity open days, thousands came, parking coaches and cars in nearby fields.36 These tourist trips to see someone’s fairly ordinary back garden would never have happened without colour TV. It introduced viewers to the
parochial natural world they thought they already knew, from gardens to river banks, and made them see it afresh.
Only about 20,000 of Britain’s 15 million sets – one home in every 750 – were yet in colour. The Postmaster General’s decision to let BBC2 go it alone, and for colour TV to begin, in his words, as ‘a rich man’s toy’, meant that few viewers were willing to pay for colour just for the minority channel. Only England had the television transmitters set up for colour, and in some parts of the country there was still no television at all. In the remote crofts of the Scottish Highlands and Islands, they complained of ‘television starvation’. Local dealers often took it upon themselves to bring television to the farthest flung outposts before the official transmitters arrived. Television had arrived unofficially on the Isle of Lewis in 1959, six years before a mast officially arrived in the Outer Hebrides on Wester Ross, when a Stornoway TV dealer bought an old radio mast for £25 and brought the first TV, illegally, to about 1,000 homes.37
In 1964 an electrician discovered a weak signal on the top of Mallaigvaig, a hill behind the port of Mallaig on the mainland opposite Skye. He installed a portable, battery-powered set on the hilltop and the town’s residents climbed up in darkness to watch the evening programmes. A local firm tried unsuccessfully to install piped television from there to the town. The proprietor, David McMinn, said: ‘We have had persistent letters to MPs but we have been getting nowhere … The demand … well everybody’s frantic for it. Take the winter up in this west coast. There is nothing by way of entertainment in these places.’ As for the Isle of Skye itself, its relay transmitter kept being delayed. The islanders’ anger came to a head in September 1963 when, according to the Stornoway Gazette, many Skyemen had to travel as far as Fort Augustus or Inverness to see the Rangers v. Real Madrid European Cup tie on television.38 The mast on Skriaig in Skye finally opened in March 1966, just in time for the World Cup for which Scotland had failed to qualify.
‘Is this not the land of the bens and glens and the heroes?’ asked the chairman of the Broadcasting Council for Scotland, Sir David Milne, quoting an old Scottish song. ‘But it is the bens, and there are so many of them and so much of them, which get in the way of the viewing and listening of the heroes, and the heroes’ wives and families.’ The most ambitious project to bring television to the Highlands was the ‘Great Glen Chain’, a ribbon of transmitter links running from Rosemarkie on the Moray Firth to Oban on the west coast, along the loch-filled geological fault that bisects Scotland. Finished in 1963, it brought television to remote outposts on the western seaboard like Ballaculish, Kinlochleven and Ardgour. The Scottish secretary Michael Noble said that not since the time of General Wade, the eighteenth-century army officer who built roads and bridges as a way of controlling the Scots, had the Highlands been made so open to the influence of the south. He did not underrate ‘the dangers to Gaelic culture inherent in what the transmitters would bring’. By the mid 1960s, ninety-seven per cent of Scots had TV reception.39
In the Western Isles and parts of the Highlands, the Free and Free Presbyterian Churches of Scotland, formed in the mid-nineteenth century, still held a puritan grip on cultural life. Their kirks were unadorned, Presbyterians believing that the word of the Bible was all, and best heard without visual diversions, so they were naturally ill-disposed to television. In the summer there was a communion season, an elongated Sabbath from Thursday to Monday with church services twice a day. Sermons focused on the dangers of the congregation ‘backsliding’, through Sabbath breaches like drinking, driving and watching TV. ‘A flood of lurid salacious matter emanates into our homes via a means which to date has resented and resisted all attempt at control and stricture,’ stated the 1966 annual report on Religion and Morals issued by the Synod of Glenelg in Lochalsh. ‘The Sabbath, for some unknown reason, seems to be the day when this medium excels in its foul moral oozings.’40
But there was also a great appetite for television in isolated regions, particularly in the far north. The Highlands and Islands Film Guild, fighting a rearguard action against depopulation, had begun a touring cinema in 1946, showing films in the hamlets and villages of the crofting counties. Villagers in remote areas eagerly awaited the arrival of the Guild and the showing of the films would often be followed by a ceilidh. But the spread of television from the early 1960s onwards affected attendances drastically, especially among the over-thirties. On the edges of the nation, the march of technological progress was accelerated: Shetland, which had only seen its first film in 1950, had television thirteen years later. Struggling to attract audiences, the Guild folded in 1970.
On the Isle of Harris, the new Hattersley looms, installed in crofters’ homes to make tweed, could be operated while watching television, because they did not require the weaver to change bobbins, they stopped automatically if a thread broke, and cards could be inserted to make patterns. In crofting communities, knitting was another common source of extra income, and another trade practised easily while watching television, although a (male) writer in the Dundee-based People’s Journal worried that TV would distract the womenfolk from this important cottage industry.41
The wave of English hippies who came to the Western Isles in the late 1960s in search of a simpler life found themselves at odds with the islanders’ embrace of modernity. When the folk singer Vashti Bunyan arrived with her boyfriend Robert Lewis on the Hebridean island of Berneray in 1969, having spent a year and a half driving all the way from London in a horse-drawn cart, they found newly minted rows of electricity and telegraph poles and television installed in the crofters’ cottages. Their ambition to live a bucolic life was met with puzzlement and suspicion by the natives of Berneray, who were not prepared to turn their backs on modernity when it had barely arrived. ‘Remote areas are obsessed with communications,’ wrote the Oxford anthropologist Edwin Ardener. ‘The world always beckons – the Johnsonian road to England, or the coast, or wherever it is, is an attraction to the young, for it leads from your very door to everywhere … The assiduity with which television is watched in remote areas has a particular quality. A programme on the Mafia is squirrelled away as part of the endless phantasmagoria of life that begins at Oban or Kelvinside.’42
Many in the Hebrides welcomed the late arrival of English TV as a way of breaking down the ‘brimstone curtain’ imposed by the Free Church. The poet Iain Crichton Smith, brought up in Upper Bayble, a tiny Gaelic-speaking village on the Isle of Lewis, was ambivalent about TV because he was a fierce defender of Gaelic while lamenting the power of the Free Church, which he thought insular and philistine. He also resented tourists and exiled Hebrideans romanticising the islanders as noble savages. These were the kind of people, he thought, who, when they saw television sets in Hebridean houses, regretted their presence as if the natives had somehow let them down: ‘How could the islanders have betrayed him so profoundly, so cheated him of his dream?’43
Television was also getting more ambitious at depicting these remote areas of Britain to the rest of the country. Over a July weekend in 1967, six climbers scaled Orkney’s Old Man of Hoy live on BBC1, in the most technically complex outside broadcast yet attempted. Even before the broadcast could begin, sixteen tonnes of equipment had to be ferried from the Firth of Clyde into Rackwick Bay in army assault craft and dragged on sledges over a peat bog to the cliff edge by a Scots Guards platoon. The impact the ensuing broadcast had on viewers is more surprising because televised climbing was inherently methodical and laborious and had been tried several times before with little impact. The BBC had first experimented in 1963 with a live programme from Snowdon, but the action was so misted up by rain and the climbers so hard to pick out that one reviewer commented that it was ‘several hours of watching dirty cotton wool twitching in a draught’. Dougal Haston, one of the Old Man of Hoy team, could never understand why viewers wanted to watch such slow, repetitive moments, and wondered if, subconsciously, they were hoping someone would fall off.44
The BBC executive Chris Brashe
r, who was the commentator for the Hoy climb, was a compelling, driven character – already well-known as the pacemaker for Roger Bannister’s four-minute mile in 1954 and as an Olympic gold medallist in 1956 – and he managed to get the climb commissioned in the face of doubters in the corporation. He insisted that it should not be just Saturday afternoon padding on Grandstand as the previous climbs had been, but a big event broadcast live to give it ‘a touch of the Colosseum’. It was also as stage-managed as it could be, with bolts and pitons pre-fixed partway up so the climbers could make a smoother ascent when they were live, but with the equipment artfully concealed. Viewers never saw the climbing cameramen or the sherpas carrying equipment.45
The climbers turned out to have a pleasingly rough-hewn eloquence, describing the crumbling sandstone on which they were trying to gain purchase as ‘cracking biscuits’, ‘hard sugar’ or ‘like climbing over gigantic dinner plates breaking under your feet’, and reacting dryly to the fulmar petrels spraying vomit right into their faces. ‘If anything goes wrong,’ one of them said, ‘the only medical equipment we’ll need is a spade.’ There was an intriguing contrast between the earnest, monosyllabic hard men, like Dougal Haston and Pete Crew, and the new breed of climbing personalities whom Tom Patey called the ‘Telstars’ – like Patey himself, who in one vertiginous moment swung out fifteen feet from the cliff on the rope, just for a laugh.46