One of many films transmitted during the day in the early stages of colour TV in the UK. Rescued from an old video tape so quite poor quality. Should prompt a few memories from people involved in the TV trade in the late 60's.
Our family got colour television when we moved home in the summer of 1972. From around 1957 we had television with BBC and ITV in glorious black and white. Our family moved to a new home in July 1972 and as part of the move we had a new aerial installed on the chimney and as a result Granada rentals came to our family home and offered colour tv rental, which we took up, and so on Saturday 8th July 1972 we saw colour tv for the very first time and also BBC 2 for the first time.
I was so pleased to see this again. Haven't seen this since I was a TV engineering apprentice almost fifty years ago. Amazingly, I could remember some of the sections before they appeared. :-)
Great to see this again. I remember watching it as a kid around 1967 - it fascinated me and encouraged me to pursue a career in electronics and engineering in later life. Many thanks for posting.
Our family didn't get a colour set until 1974, but, in the early 70's,noticing that one of the houses opposite ours had a colour set, my brother and I set up our telescope in our bedroom, tuned into BBC Radio, and took it in turns to watch football games in glorious colours, until they shut their living room curtains for the night.
It is Michael Aspel and I saw this many times when my brother & his wife bought a colour TV circa 1967. There was also "Building a Car," Guessipina" and a pile of others from BP,Shell, ICI and a few others. I was totally absorbed by real colour pictures!!
I think I've watched 'em all when I was in the trade. Found a few on RU-vid recently which took me back. My favourite is 'Evoluon' made by Philips about their exposition back in the early 70s. Thanks for posting. Cheers!
I remember a colour trade test film being regularly shown on the BBC in the late 60's called Bulong And Bola. It was about a father and young son travelling along a river somewhere in Asia in a motorised canoe like boat and was made by BP I think.
God look at the state of this film. Us Brits never used to look after our media and this is the result. Hard to believe that this recording would have been once crisp and clear.
TV's back in the 70's were so unreliable, big heavy bulky old things housed inside a combustible wooden box, I remember quite regularly waiting for the man in his white coat with screwdriver in his top pocket coming round to fix our TV, you prayed that he wasn't gonna say 'we will have to take this back to the workshop' which meant no TV for a week. We don't worry about that in this day and age TV's have become just another disposable item, we just pick a new one up at the local supermarket, far cheaper than repairing them.
for my mother's 30th birthday in 1965 we got a huge color tv. it was great. we loved it. we were one of the first in our neighborhood to get it. by the end of 1965, everybody else had it too. it also came with a very large Magnavox console stereo. remember those?
I bet this was used to fill the void of television during the day on BBC1 and BBC2. Colour arrived in 1967, so I guess this was made around then. In 1967 BBC1 only had schools programmes, adult education and a news summary for daytime television, this would have been used to fill in the odd blank hours.
But the 50th anniversary was never celebrated two years ago...shame on the UK media for literally ignoring people who know more than just the most popular products.
Black and White television was the old 405 line system through usually VHF and an old style aerial. Colour television needed UHF signals, new aerial and a 625 line system set. So yes, very complex.
Have you ever seen "Protect and Survive"? If you have, that may be why you think it's creepy. Factual media from the whole 1968-1982 period always seems a bit creepy tbh.
This was uploaded from a domestic video tape... probably VHS. So colour quality very poor. The original 16 mm film was good. The optical sound track with its clicks and pops adds to the authenticity.
Hi James Thanks for your post In the early days of colour TV all sets needed to be installed in this way. Some adjustments were made at the workshop before installation but most needed to be done at the customers home. Even moving the set a few feet could cause colour impurities, metal radiators located near the set were commonly problematic. As time moved on and valves were replaced by transistors etc. sets became more stable and only minimal adjustments, if any were required. The advent of affordable flat screens saw the demise of the cathode ray picture tube which needed all the set ups described. Happy days for us engineers! Dave
my grandmother had a valve set in the sixties I remember you had to turn it on ten minutes before the start of the program. It was in a big heavy wooden case weighed a ton and had a screen about the same size as my laptop.
they may say that ntsc is never the same color..... but I saw a demonstration of pal vs ntsc..... and trust me..... ntsc blows pal away...... without question. period. ask any gamer. done. and, by the the way, is the very first color television system. as of dec,19,1953. we got it right.... straight outta the box.... in 1953.... so there.
NTSC suffered greatly from reception disturbances, which led to phasing thus causing colors to shift to the wrong color. PAL tackled that by halving the color resolution (to which our eyes are less sensible anyway, contrast is more important) and then reverse the phase before transmission on every *even* line, then have it phased back again by the tv set after which the average of the odd and even line was shown. Effectively, this meant that color shifts due to phasing in line one was automatically cancelled out by having that shift de-phased in line two. Confused how that works? Let's put that in numbers. Let's say we want to broadcast the color 'blue' and that blue is identical to 13. Got that? Okay. Now let's say there is an atmospheric disturbance with a value of 7. So instead of 13, we receive 13+7 = 20. Wrong color. What PAL does is the following: 1) line one is sent as 13, due to the error received as 20. 2) line two is negatively phased before transmission, so 13 is sent as minus 13. 3) the same disturbance also happens to line 2, so it becomes minus 13 + 7 = minus 6. (the negative phasing obviously does not affect the disturbance) 4) the PAL receiver now re-phases line 2 back to positive, so minus 6 becomes plus 6. 5) the PAL receiver now *combines* line 1 and 2 and *averages* them 6: the result: (line 1 + line 2)/2 = (20+6)/2 is.... 13. We have our original colour back! The phase color shift is cancelled out automatically by having a second phase shift in the opposite direction. Brilliant! You probably saw in improvement from a game console where color phasing would not occur since there's not transmission and you were looking at 30fps rather than the 25 that PAL uses. And NTSC provides the full color resolution, not half of it like PAL does. Again, our eyes are less sensible to colour than to contrast, but youmay certainly have noticed that. The flipside to that is that PAL has more lines and thus a sharper picture. NTSC could look quite good in ideal circumstances like you had, but in the real world scenario's PAL and it's very similar French competitor SECAM were the better solutions, that's why they were used in far more countries than NTSC.
