Watching television is no longer black and white

Date Published: 16-Jan-2013

A radio presenter recently made some comment in passing about colour television – and anyone under 40 years of age probably wondered if there was any other kind. Because the notion of having to describe television as available in colour is about as bizarre these days as describing a car coming with wheels.

But for those of an older vintage, the advent of colour television was as exciting as rural electrification to a slightly older generation – you’d be happy to sit there watching the test card (another thing that now requires explanation) just because it was no longer in black and white.

We were reared on black and white television and didn’t feel any poorer for it – although the arrival of colour quickly showed us what we were missing.

There were neighbours of ours who were ahead of the posse and in the run-up to this era of televisual technicolour, they found a device that sort of bridged the gap between our old world and this bright new dawn.

It would be best described as a transparent sheet which covered the entire screen and gave off a sort of green hue to transform the black and white picture into a sort of slightly blurred version of a Martian landscape.

In hindsight it just looked like the tube was broken, but because it broadcast programmes in something other than black and white – in this case, lime green – we were mesmerised by this technological breakthrough right before our very eyes.

And when we first caught sight of actual colour television for real and in all its glory – needless to say, not at home for a number of years yet – it was a moment in time you were destined to simply never forget.

If my own memory doesn’t fail me, the first face I saw was Brendan ‘Legs’ O’Reilly’s, the former international high-jumper turned sportscaster, sitting in the Sports Stadium studio and going back and over to the racing from some outpost or other.

Now I’ve little more than a passing interest in galloping horses, but I was glued to this cacophony of colour as these brown animals raced across the green grass. Vincent O’Brien himself wouldn’t have been more captivated by the spectacle.

And as time went by and the onward march of colour television continued, you realised Ireland didn’t play rugby in grey jerseys, and snooker suddenly made sense.

It was Ted Lowe, the late lamented voice of the sport, who once informed viewers ‘for those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green’ – but you kind of knew where Whispering Ted was coming from.

I’ve been asked more recently by the younger members of our household how we managed in a time before TV was governed by the remote control.

I’ve explained that, for a long time, there was no need for a remote control because there was only one channel – and then when we doubled our television choice to two, the youngest member of the family doubled as the remote by being shoed in the direction of the tube to switch from one RTE channel to the other.

Those were the days when we waited for television to start in the evenings and then the adults stood for the national anthem when it closed down before midnight.

When we turned on the telly, we started with a white spot that then became a full screen – and we saw it disappeared in the opposite sequence later on that night.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.