From Gray to Glorious: The Dawn of Color Television

In my previous column, The Grayscale Glory Days of 1960s Television, I discussed the first time I saw a television in 1960. This was a busy time for me because I’d only recently completed my third orbit around the Sun. Our television was black and white, but so was everyone else's (there weren’t any color televisions at that time), so that was OK.

It is perhaps worth noting that the widespread deployment of televisions was still a relatively new phenomenon when I was growing up in England as a child. In 1950, just ten years before we took possession of our first set, television in the UK was still a relatively rare luxury item. Only about 350,000 television licenses were issued in the UK in 1950, which worked out to roughly 4–5% of households having a set. In fact, even this paints a rather skewed picture (no pun intended), because coverage was limited mainly to London and the South East.

Television ownership grew rapidly, particularly around the time of the 1953 Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, when the number of licenses jumped to about 2.1 million (~25% of households). Once again, however, it was predominantly the more affluent folks in London and the South East who enjoyed television technology.

I hail from Sheffield in the North of England (where the real men come from). My mum and dad got married in 1953. They didn’t know anyone with a television, so they planned to listen to the coronation on the radio. Then, just before the event started, their radio died. My mum says she burst into tears. I think they ended up visiting friends who lived nearby to listen to their radio. At that time, my mum could never have imagined that she would one day be able to watch the coronation on demand, on YouTube, on her iPad tablet computer, but that’s a story for another time.

We didn’t actually own our first TV. We rented it from a small local company. Those 1960s vacuum tube TVs had a whole host of “quirks,” such as the classic vertical hold problem. In this case, the sync circuit (which kept the TV picture locked to the broadcast signal) would drift, and the picture would start to scroll continuously up or down until you fiddled with the “Vertical Hold” knob. Sometimes the picture would “tear” sideways or ripple; that was the horizontal hold drifting, requiring you to twiddle with the “Horizontal Hold” control.

My dad did his best, but it didn’t take much fiddling with the knobs on the back of the set before the picture became unrecognizable (and unrecoverable). Since we were renting our TV, if there were a problem, the TV repairman would come round to your house to fix it. Also, repair shops for TVs, radios, and other appliances were scattered throughout the city. It really was a ‘fix-it and hold-it-together’ mindset back then, as opposed to today’s throw-away culture.

The television programs we used to watch when I was a kid were pathetic compared to what’s available now. For example, we had programs like the Flower Pot Men, which featured two little men called Bill and Ben, who were formed out of flowerpots. They lived in big flowerpots next to a shed at the bottom of a garden. Growing between Bill and Ben’s flowerpot homes was their friend, Little Weed, who looked like a sunflower with a big, beaming smile on her face.

These were puppets. You could see the strings. I was only three-and-a-bit years old. I thought they were real. I wondered if we had any flowerpot men living at the bottom of our garden (we certainly had a lot of weeds).

We also had sort-of-but-not-quite cartoons like Captain Pugwash (who said things like “lolloping landlubbers” and “nautical nitwits” and “coddling catfish”) and Noggin the Nog (who was the good-natured son of King Knut, King of the Nogs, and Queen Grunhilda).

The reason I say these were “not quite cartoons” is that there was a cartoon-like background, but the characters were hand-drawn on pieces of card that were moved around in time with spoken words or music.

I remember once watching a cartoon about a happy little train. I was sitting on the sofa in the family room with my teddy bear, Big Ted. At some point, the little train started racing along the track. Then our view shifted, and we could see a great big hump in the track, but we knew the little train didn’t know it was there.

The view started swapping back and forth between the train and the hump in the track… the little train was getting closer and closer to the hump… the view swapped faster and faster…

I was sitting on the edge of my seat (I had to cover Big Ted’s eyes because he was too young for all the excitement). And then… and then… and then… Mum came in, turned off the television, and told me it was time for tea.

Even now, more than 60 years later, I still wonder what happened to that little train.

We also had some “live action” television shows like Tales of the Riverbank, which showcased Hammy Hamster and his friends. These were real animals who lived in real houses, sailed real boats, and had all sorts of interesting adventures on the river.

Additionally, we had programs that featured clever animals, such as dogs and horses, and their not-so-clever human companions, who were often little boys. Just to give you a clue as to who was the star, the programs were named after the animals — like Lassie (the dog) and Champion the Wonder Horse — with no mention of the little boys, all of whom seemed to have similar names like Jimmy or Johnny or Timmy or Tommy.

In a typical scene, the heroic animal would race up to a group of adults and communicate what was happening. In the case of Lassie, for example, the message was conveyed by barking.

One of the adults would immediately say, “What? Tommy has fallen into the well?” He should have said, “What? Tommy has fallen into the well AGAIN?” because — between you and me — Tommy was a bit of a klutz who seemed to fall off something or into something at least once in every episode.

What about color? I’m glad you asked. In the 1950s and early 1960s, some companies began to advertise “color TV overlays” (sometimes referred to as “color screens” or “color conversion sheets”).

These were thin, transparent plastic sheets printed with broad horizontal bands of color. The most common design featured a blue band at the top (representing the sky), a brownish-orange band in the middle (for skin tones, clothing, interiors, and landscapes), and a green band at the bottom (for grass),

The sheet was cut to the size of the TV screen and taped, clipped, or fitted over the front of the cathode ray tube (CRT). When a black and white picture played behind it, parts of the image would appear tinted according to which band of the overlay they fell under.

These sheets gave a sort of “pseudo-color” look: skies were always blue, fields always green, and people ended up with brownish-orange faces if they appeared in the right place on the screen. There was also a “psychedelic” variant with rainbow stripes or concentric circles, which made TV shows look surreal rather than realistic.

I never saw one of these myself, but I’m sure I would have thought it was wonderful if I had. When I was 3 years old, I would have totally believed that I was looking at a color television set.

In reality, these color TV overlays were more of a gimmick than a mainstream solution. They were impulse-buy novelties, marketed aggressively but quickly discarded. Ads in comic books, catalogs, and department stores promoted them for a few dollars. Millions of people saw them advertised, and thousands bought them; however, adoption was relatively small compared to the number of TV owners.

Real color television didn’t come to the UK until 1967, when I was ten years old. I’d never even imagined that such a thing was possible. One Saturday, Mum, Dad, and I were wandering through the city center window shopping. We passed a large department store. One of the window displays was filled with televisions of myriad shapes and sizes. They were all showing the same program, and they were all black and white, except for one set in the middle that was in glorious color.

Mum, Dad, and I stood there for ages with our noses pressed against the window. I can still remember the program that was showing — a documentary about an ironworks. Red-orange-yellow molten metal was being poured into molds. It was awesome!

The way color television was implemented at that time was really rather clever. The engineers had to make sure two things happened. First, old black-and-white TVs still had to work with the new color broadcasts. Second, new color TVs still had to be able to display older black-and-white programs. The solution was to embed color as an “extra layer” in a sideband signal. The color information was “added on” in such a way that old black-and-white sets simply ignored it, while new color sets could decode it.

Even by 1967, TV viewing hours in the UK (including Sheffield) were still limited compared to today’s 24/7 expectation. As a result, it wasn't uncommon to be presented with a test card when you turned the television on. However, unlike the black-and-white Test Card C of my youth (this was shown in my previous column), we now basked in the glow of the color Test Card F.

As we discover on the Test Card F page on Wikipedia, this card was developed by BBC engineer George Hersee, who was the father of the girl in the central image. I bet George thought he was doing his daughter a favor. I also bet she ended up being teased mercilessly about this at school.

How about you? If you are from my generation, do you have any stories you’d care to share regarding your first sighting of a color television? Alternatively, if you’ve only ever known a television world filled with color, is there anything you’d like to ask? As always, I welcome your captivating comments, querulous questions, and sagacious suggestions, all of which you can share on Hackster's "Throwback Thursdays" Discord channel. I look forward to seeing you there.

P.S. Don't forget that you can peruse and ponder all of my Throwback Thursdays columns here.