BBC One goes colour

I remember being more impressed that all channels could now be received on a "single, simple aerial" than that they were in colour. At least in theory they could, it didn't work so well where I was living at the time.

Sadly, it was an event that seemed to pass me by. We didn't even get BBC2 until started working and bought a little Ferguson B&W portable telly for my bedroom. Colour, we only got at home when I bought my first colour set in about '75 or '76. We met colour in my granddad's work, but even he wasn't enamoured with it until more reliable sets came along, like his Philips G8.

I remember the excitement at BBC2 and colour, and have very clear memories of the exhibition that was held in the Queen's Hall in Leeds, somewhere way back about '66/'67 or '68. I was riveted by the film about the building of the Aswan Dam, never mind the mind boggling array of array of makes and models.

I have a long lasting memory of a lad at school asking our teacher "What was it like before they invented colour?" - Somehow, this youth had it in mind that the whole world must have been black and white beforehand. He'd seen plenty of B&W photos and films, and had assumed that was the way the world had been until a Frenchman invented colour!

Posted by: Katie Bush

 I was riveted by the film about the building of the Aswan Dam

I think you mean the Kariba Dam, Marion!

The film was called The Captive River  Take a look and see if I'm right.

The film I remember best was Prospect for Plastics  Still very interesting and educational 55 years on, even if the pipe smoking chemistry master is definitely something from the past!

When I first saw this on YouTube I got a surprise. There is one sequence with a row of machines making plastic beakers where one escapes and rolls across the floor. I would have sworn that black was white that it rolled to the right but it doesn't!

Of course, then came the sudden realisation that, although I must have seen this event possibly hundreds of times, I was virtually always seeing it through the bench mirror!

Like many of the Trade Test films, it was a two reeler and suddenly the film would switch to colour bars and slides with reel two starting sometime later - because, until very late on before the introduction of colour in 1967, the BBC only had one colour telecine machine!

Of course, I saw many of the early Trade Test films - such as the 1958 Coupe des Alpes - on 405 lines. Until the Pilkington Committee decided that colour would only be broadcast on the 'new' 625-line standard, the BBC used a 405-line adaptation of NTSC. Although test transmissions carried on, there was a gap of several years that the public couldn't see them which only ended when Dual Standard sets for the introduction of BBC2 became available.

Incidentally, all of my viewing of the 405-line tests was from Crystal Palace. Were they carried on other transmitters or did you just get Test-card C?

I have only read about the 405 colour test transmissions from London, the same for the early, 1958, BW 405 and 625 UHF test transmissions around 650Mhz.

Understandable, the technical section and main studios were in London and much easier for them to test them locally.

I might have a word with a mate of mine when I see him on Wednesday - he was part of the 'colour intake' as it was called back in 1968; he's still going strong and looks exactly the same now as I remembered him thirty years ago!

It was chatting to him and another former colleague that revealed that some of what is written about BBC Elstree on Wikipedia is utter pish too.