Not only is this fascinating, but also clarifying! I live in the US and it's very difficult to find older British dramas. I managed to find the original Upstairs Downstairs to watch through unofficial channels--but a few episodes in, everything suddenly became black and white. I rationalized this as the uploader editing the episodes to avoid copyright strikes and I regretfully stopped watching the show because I wanted the original versions. All this time, it turns out that *was* the original version! Thank you so much for making and uploading this video! Now I can finally go back to watching that show with peace of mind✌😂

It was arguably the perfect strike: large, looming impact on the company, minimal impact on the people. The '79 action was far more unpopular with consumers.

4:20 - NOT 4 lenses. The EMI 2001 and Marconi Mk7 had 1 lens, 4 pickup tubes. The Philips cameras, EMI 2005 and Marconi Mk8 had 3 tubes and 1 lens.

Most fancy colour TV's were rented back in the 70's and were taken away at the flick of a switch, usually with a puff of smoke too 😉😂

I aquired a colour set around 1974 -- it was smashed when the person stealing it from a nightclub was discovered and threw it (a 26" console model) down a flight of stairs. I was given the carcass and repaired it. There was no way I could have afforded to buy one. These early sets were not just colour but also dual standard -- 625/405 line models capable of receiving both the colour UHF transmissions and the older VHF b&w service. The complexity this introduced into the set design had to be seen to be believed, it was essentially two sets in one with a huge solenoid driven switch reconfiguring the set for each system. The set used a mixture of valves and transistors -- all discrete components. I don't like to think how much it had cost new, but obviously it was so expensive that a thief was prepared to tuck the equivalent of a small chest of drawers under his arm and try to climb a set of stairs with it.

The information in this video is confused! The cameras with a turret of several lenses were used to provide various shots, for example, wide angle and close up (before zoom lenses). The lens turret would rotate, to select the required lens. Separate lenses were NOT used for each of the primary colours. Inside the camera, the image coming from the selected lens, was split and focussed on three camera tubes (red, green, and blue, and some cameras had four tubes). In the case of the colour strike, a colour signal could be converted to Black & White, by removing the colour information. A bit like turning the colour down on your old CRT TV!

There's an interesting effect of the colour strike on ATV's Timeslip as two episodes were recorded in monochrome during the strike. The original colour tapes were wiped or possibly were too degraded to broadcast, and aside from one colour episode all we have to watch now are monochrome telerecordings. Most of these have an ITC frontcap and endcap but with the ATV In Colour Zoom music playing over the frontcap. There are two episodes where you can hear the alternative ATV Not-In-Colour Zoom music. So it's easy to tell which episodes were made during the strike even though 25 of 26 are monochrome only these days.

I've recently been rewatching Upstairs Downstairs, so this has been on my mind lately. Did you know they filmed two endings to the first episode, when they reshot it, one which matched the black and white version's ending, and led into the black and white episodes, and one where Sarah does not stay, that leads into the first of the colour episodes. If someone just wanted to broadcast the colour ones they'd use that alternate ending.

As mentioned, the irony was that the majority of those watching at home still only had black and white TV sets, anyway, so this strike would prove to be largely ineffectual in forcing the TV companies to submit to their demands. Most people weren't able to buy their own sets, by the way, but instead rented them from such companies as Rent-a-set, Radio Rentals, etc.

Our first colour TV was a Radio Rentals set that arrived in Feb 1979. The day it arrived was one of the most exciting of my childhood.

With technology having moved on in leaps and bounds, colourising 5 EPs of Upstairs, Downstairs for DVD/Bluray is not beyond reach. I do remember watching repeats of On The Buses and did wonder why it jumped from colour to black and white and back again

The quality of the colour images of President Eisenhower from 1958 is amazing...

My Uncle was an early adopter. I remember us all piling round to his place in 1970 to watch the F.A. Cup final in colour. It was so annoying that Leeds were in the final as they played in all white kit. I know one of my favourite series of the time, Timeslip, was affected by the strike but this has been compounded by the fact even the episodes that were shot in colour have gone missing. The entire series is available but only one episode survives in colour.

My grandmother used to visit her neighbours because of their colour TV. She was taken aback by how immersive and cool it was.

The reason for the slow uptake of colour TV's in Britain, at least in my experience, was not down to the cost of the TV's as they were just a one off payment that you could by on credit or rent quite cheaply, it was the cost of a colour TV licence that put a lot of people off because it was a yearly charge and quite expensive comapred to a momchrome licence, about four times more expensive. We never went colour in my house until 1988 due to that very reason. It was me who eventually got a colour TV in when I left school and started working.

I hadn't heard of this strike. Ulster going colour afterwards meant it probably went unnoticed in NI, especially since we were turning into a war zone by then, which would affect broadcasting in other ways. An interesting story, seeing a strike which was basically invisible to viewers, compared to other bigger ones, such as the much more famous one in '79.

I remember not having a colour telly in my house until 1974. My Mum & I didn't want colour and told my Dad we would switch it to B&W only (which you could on those early sets, the colour was adustable from zero to massively over-coloured!) to watch our favorite shows...... although of course we didn't and watched things in colour from then on.... apart from all the B&W made repeats of course.... lol

8:35 - the colour equipment didn’t go unused for months, it was being used but either with the 4.43MHz PAL colour carrier from the camera CCUs being switched off (on 3-tube cameras) or with the colour tubes removed (on 4-tube ones).

I know the BBC broadcast experimental colour transmissions in the fifties when Crystal Palace transmitter opened, but were not satisfied with the NTSC system. It was when the PAL system came along that the BBC and ITA agreed that this was the one to use. As a kid,(on holidays), I used to watch all those BBC2 Trade Test Colour Films shown during the day, but in BW, as the likes of us did not have colour sets. "Giuseppina", "The Home Made Car", Coupe des Alpes", Beauty in Trust", "The Cattle Carters", and many other titles, mainly made by Shell and BP. For normal tv viewing, our family used to turn the turret tuner knob on the telly to channels 1 for BBC 1, or 9 for ITA,(VHF 405 lines) as it gave a clearer picture.We had three aerials, a Band I for BBC, a Band III for ITA, picking up from Beulah Hill, South Norwood, and a crude Group A aerial for BBC 2.

I'm just glad the workers got their pay raise. Striking for 5% and getting 4% is pretty successful, good on 'em.

Where has this channel been all my life? Great content, well produced. My marathon rabbit hole is set for this week

Just stumbled upon your channel, and already loving the information and production/editing quality! I remember my Mum telling me about when _her_ Mum bought their first colour TV; My Mum would get headaches from watching it because her Mum *insisted* on having the colour set to MAXIMUM _(as if to make it obvious to any visitors that _*_she had a colour TV_*_ )_

I remember renting a colour set in 1971 for a few quid a month

My parents didn't rent a colour TV until 1983 anyway, we actually had a video recorder before we had a colour TV!

That "Oh" in the into just cracked me up.

Another great documentary Adam, super interesting hearing about the transition to colour TV and some of it's issues! I'd be interested in seeing a documentary on the technician disputes of the 70s (the ones that affected Shada)

In the Republic of Ireland, RTE Television took a long time to expand their colour service, nearly all down to money problems, as RTE was always one of the most poorest national broadcasters in Europe until around the late 1980s. RTE colour imported programming started in 1969, with proper colour service launching in 1971 with the Eurovision Song Contest in Dublin the starting point.

Fascinating - I'd never heard of this. I was born in 1970 but was in the Border TV region so my parents wouldn't have noticed (my dad was an early colour TV adopter, but later on he backed the wrong horse with Video 2000 ;- ). Great stuff!

Heard a story on radio years ago about a child who wanted parents to buy a colour set but parents would not budge. Child poured glass of water down back of B&W TV to force the issue. 'The man' was called to fix TV and repaired TV quite easily but noted to mum there was water in the back. I cannot remember what happened next.

As a former broadcast engineer, I appreciate your work

Would like to see the 1967-1968, 1980 and 1991 ITV Franchise Rounds put into separate documentaries.

I’d never heard of this strike before. Interesting stuff

My Parents did not get a Colour set until 1974. We had a push button 625 Line Monocrome set between 71 and 74. One of the first shows we saw in Colour was Upstairs Downstairs.

Three "Benny Hill Shows" were produced during the "colour strike." Two routines wound up in different places - the period sketch "Love Will Find A Way" made it to both "The Best of Benny Hill" movie and into U.S. half-hour syndication; and part of the "Uplift" sketch - where Lesley Goldie as "Joanna Bakewell-Tart" was interviewing Benny as malaprop-prone East End poet St. John Bossom - was featured on the "Words" side of his LP "Benny Hill: Words And Music." It was from the first of those three shows that he first performed "Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West)," a year before released as a single. The sketches on those shows were head and shoulders above the later remakes from the '80's whereby he and his cast began mailing in their performances. Incidentally, it was because of the colour strike that Benny that year turned out five specials - after the strike was over, he finished the 1970-71 series back where he started - in colour.

Brilliantly done. I always wondered why certain episodes of on the buses were in high quality b&w...now I know ! Perhaps you might do a video on the gradual switch to nicam stereo. That was quite a slow process to get all channels and eventually all shows made in stereo

Just discovered this channel and have no clue how it doesn't have over a million subs! Awesome video.

My family was the last in the street to get colour tv, we didn’t get it till 1979!

6:13 My guess is that PBS, despite a huge number of US viewers who still had monochrome TV sets at the time, thought that broadcasting black and white TV shows would hit their prestige and their standing with Congress; those who wanted to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would have pointed to those episodes and claimed that PBS was lagging behind, even with government support. Black and white television was seen as obsolete in the 70s and no major programming was being produced in that format. The success of Nick at Nite, a block on Nickelodeon that aired older (including black and white) television shows, in 1985 and the 50s and 60s nostalgia that occurred in the late 80s led PBS to buy those black and white episodes.

I rented a colour TV in the late sixties, when only BBC2 was available in colour, but I'd forgotten about the ITV colour strike.

Watched this one on holiday while in Turkey. Always enjoyed Adam's work as one - he is so researched - two - his voice makes a good storyteller and - three - he approached it with a sense of humour but knows to tell the story and make people come back for more. Keep it up Adam 8-)

Been looking for a video on the colour strike for a while. Thanks for covering it!

I really like how the Wizard of Oz's iconic scene was shot, incorporating both color and black and white together so seemlessly. You'd think it was done with some visual effects work - perhaps shoot it twice, once with B+W film and once with the color, then use a traveling matte to combine them. But the technical issues for that were a major challenge - the precision needed to match camera movements. How about shooting it in color, then transfering the color on to B+W to get a color mix, and feeding that into the matte? That would work, but it would need so much delicate work manually making an absolutely perfect matte. No, they found a simpler way. It's all color. They just painted the set interior side in grey! Then they doused Dorothy's stunt double in grey dye as well. During the instant when she steps out of frame, the Dorothy wearing the grey-painted dress steps aside and a new Dorothy in a colorful outfit steps forward in her place.

This is great. I’d love to see your take on the many eras of school broadcasting - an area I enjoy looking at

Superb documentary! Interesting topic and very well made.

Another excellent video. I was hoping you'd cover this after the you did the ITV strikes, and mentioned that then. Another great example of a programme affected was On the Buses.

I'm British and this is amazing. The info, the opening, the AMTV Productions logo, all perfect. And don't forget you found the oldest colour recording found in the US! The dedication is amazing and I wish you made even more. So far, you made 2 more documentaries and they are BOTH superb.

Fantastic video, I love how tv has developed over the years, also tv idents are pretty iconic

A fun fact about B&W television is that in Romania, Dallas was aired in monochrome, because the colour system was not yet adopted and still was a very popular show.

Cool video Adam I can remember in the itv colour strike 1970 Coronation Street Xmas episode was showed in monochrome

Hello again Adam , i have just watched this again.............Beautifully Narrated....filled with FACTS.........which makes a change............you have my utmost respect for all your work so far..............

Great documentary. I’d heard about this but good to have a deep dive 👍

So true i recall this of TV in as a boy growing up in 70's & 80's & following 90's tv History programmes , for many years many people had B & W tv, and many 60's Tv programmes shot on Colour film had to wait years to see be transmitted to mass audiences ( Good examples : Thunderbirds , The Champions , The Avangers, Star Treck...) For many years after ,colour TV licenses were expensive too, and the 405 Line monocrome lower definition service for BBC 1 ITV Only still broadcast till 1985 ! Enjoyed this thanks for valuable details

Another Great documentary Adam. Can't wait for the next one.

Thanks for this! Australia didn't get colour TV until 1975!

I knew nothing of the colour strike until I watched Upstairs Downstairs and discovered the b/w episodes. We never had a colour tv till the mid-1980s so the strike completely passed us by!

my dad had the first tv set in his village way back when.but we never swapped to colour until 1980!

In 1979 I bought a Sony Trinitron colour TV, about 14 inch, for, as I recall, £300. Imagine that in today's money. £3,000? I must have been mad.

My phone has a "bedtime mode" that will switch the screen to monochrome late at night. It kicked in while I was watching this video and it took me several minutes to realize, which I thought was hilariously on point.

Border was still transmitting local output in black and white until the mid-seventies. Its first network series of Mr & Mrs was made at Tyne Tees, as a co-production, to comply with an edict from the IBA that no black and white output was to air in daytime.

Such an informative and entertaining video, well done really enjoyed that. You have great knowledge and your videos are well put together. Just subscribed!

My country Argentina didn't had color until the year '78 so we were way waay behind. Interesting video.

“This is AMTV in color. Oh.( goes to black and white again)”😂😂😂 0:00

brilliant documentary! i've subscribed :)

Well, you learn something new every day!

The oldest tv I remember using growing up was a CRT tv playing PlayStation 1. In many different modern camera's and phones the black and white or grey color is used only as a filter so It still has some fans out there. Cool video. ^_^

Interesting. I lived through this period and wasn't even aware of this strike. But, there again, we had black and white until the mid 1970's.

I used to love watching that Colour TV Engineers Guide cartoon. I remember the engineer waggling his degaussing ring in front of the screen. Happy days.

0:05 *the ident fades to monochrome color* Adam: oh

Great documentary, but a small technical point - cameras only ever had one lens. The group of four seen on earlier cameras is a lens turret, which was how they changed focal lengths before zoom lenses were introduced at around the same time as colour cameras (you can actually see it moving in an earlier clip) and has nothing to do with colour reproduction. Cameras had multiple *sensors* for different colours, which would have been vidicon or plumbicon tubes at the time. Three tube cameras mixed the outputs of these tubes in a certain proportion (roughly 59% green, 11% blue and 30% red) to produce a black and white picture, four tube cameras worked as described in the video. Fortunately analogue television is designed to treat colour as a sort of optional extra, so they could simply disable the colour subcarrier part of the signal and carry on working as normal. Incidentally, this three-sensor design is still in use, right up to the latest 8K broadcast cameras.

Fascinating! I wonder how many colour TV owners were slapping the side of the telly to try and get colour back? 😅

Great video Been looking forward to this ☺️

My uncle had a color RCA in the late 50s. Amazing that the UK was so behind.

yes. Many itv shows were affected by this, Coronation street, On the Buses, and many other comedy and drama shows dvd box sets on the reverse, give the reason why colour series had some black and white episodes.........!!!!! Another quality effort Adam, your videos stand up to repeat viewing.......that is really the main point......WELL DONE AGAIN, i , like you am a stickler for detail, and things being thorough, And in order.

Well that was fascinating! 🤩

My Parents owned and ran a TV, Radio sales, hire and repair shop in East Sussex so we were very lucky as kids as my dad would bring home for weekends new products, from colour TV to VHS/betamax and I remember the video disc too, they ran the shop through the 70's and shut it down mid 2000's when they retired. I don't remember the colour TV dispute, I was only a few years old at the time.

I remember that my mom got a licence for black and white TV, even though she had a colour TV. Just because it was cheaper than a colour licence. She had it for years until the 90s, when TV goons came round to check.

Missed the premiere, oh well still enjoyed it!

Our family rented a colour TV in 1970. But only kept it for a short time, because the thing was so unreliable, and having to call the Radio Rentals engineer out every few weeks. Then we went back to a black and white TV until 1974.

Love the music @1:00

10:20 - the BBC didn’t have a full colour service until the late 70s. Many regional news programmes were in black and white until 1975/76. Some children’s programmes like Blue Peter and Zokko remained in b&w for a while.

I love this your documentary...BRILLIANT.

I had a black and white tv in my room when I was younger. I got the old one when my family got a colour tv downstairs

Playing back your MATV intro and outro music sounds like rhythm is a dancer when you change the playback speed to be faster haha!

Upstaris Downstairs had to rewrite the storylone to write out Pauline Collins's character and then bring her back again, because of the continuity problems involved in the B&W episodes not being transmitted overseas. Personally I can't bear the character and wish she had stayed gone. Corrie celebrated colour with a coach crash: the location scenes are in B&W while the studio scenes are in retina-scorching colour, all within the same episode. Thank you for this docco. Really enjoyed it, and I have subscribed. :)

Cool documentary, also I'm doing an Commercial Contest for my Character Elimination 3 series!

I remember when ITV went on strike I can vaguely remember the colour strike as they wanted more money to film in colour even the sound engineers wanted more money. I can remember when we first got a colour tv in 1969 it was rented from DER, they delivered it on a friday evening when we were watching Its a Knockout and what a change to go from black and white to colour. They were massive cabinets made from wood and so heavy. In the days when tv programs were worth watching :-)

Gosh, Americans got colour in the 50s, UK in 60s... us here in Australia didn't get it until 1975!!

We had black and white tellies in our house up until about 1973, when dad finally decided to “wise up and fork out” (to quote a Transdiffusion article on the subject) and rent a colour set - for decades after that, we were still seeing old black and white films, usually on Mondays and, when there was no midweek racing coverage, Fridays - yes - in those days, you rented sets - the only advantage being that, if it broke down, it would be fixed for no charge - the firm we rented ours from - a company called Birkbeck’s - if their regular repairman, a guy called Jack (not sure of his surname), came over, he could usually fix it in situ - all he had to do was reverse the polarity of the neutron flow with his sonic screwdriver - mo - wait - that was Dr Who - but, if they got the work experience lads in from Redcar, we wouldn’t see it for weeks - they left us a crappy black and white one - one we had, we couldn’t change channels on it without it going ga-ga! Just had a thought - could some of these programmes be re-colourised?

I think one of the reasons why Europe tv stations lagged behind the US and Japan when adopting colour was because those two countries used the NTSC (National Television Standards Committee) standard, which was apparently rushed to market by adapting (IIRC) a technology originally designed for colour closed-circuit tv. The system wasn't particularly well suited for over-the-air transmission, leading to distortions in colour hues, such that the standard was given the unfortunate nickname Never The Same Colour. The BBC and other European broadcasters got together to come up with a proper colour tv standard that actually worked, and like all committees (particularly those comprising of groups speaking multiple languages) the discussions dragged on for a while. An early French proposed standard called SECAM (Sequential Colour and Memory) fixed the American hue distortions and allowed for more stable signals over longer distances. But the BBC and many countries finally adopted a variation of the SECAM system called PAL (Phase Alternating Line, nickname: People Aren't Lavender) that adopted SECAM's colour fixing techniques, but wasn't quite as radical when it came to the signal structure apparently.

Colour TV has such a hold on the British psyche as an item of luxury that the tabloids were still outraged that some UK prisoners had colour TVs in their cells decades after you could even buy a monochrome one.

I do remember this period and the shows concerned. In this period most people were still renting Televisions because of the Up Front costs. We did watch Upstairs Downstairs, but I was a lot more interested in science programs like Horizon. Later I worked in Video Production (at that time B&W was utterly dead) including a small amount of Broadcast. So I remember the atmosphere over union related disputes.

Another brilliant documentary Adam! Keep it up 👍🏻

Love the Culture Beat - Mr Vain vibes in your theme tune

Sorry to be pedantic but colour TV cameras did not have four lenses, they had one - a varifocal lens. This distinguished them from the monochrome turret cameras which had several lenses and required the operator to change between lenses to obtain whichever shot was needed (although some of the last monochrome cameras did have varifocal lenses). What colour cameras had were four tubes, the devices which converted the image into an electronic signal. Three were luminance (for colour - one each for the red, green and blue signal) and one was chrominance (for black and white). These would merge the picture seen by the camera and allowed the viewer to see a programme whatever the status of their receiver. It was the three colour tubes that were switched off meaning the colour camera could only use the chrominance tube to record an image.

Great video.

We got our 1st colour tv in 1972, as a 12 year old watching top of the pops and Spiderman in colour was very exciting.

My grandparents were amongst the first to have a colour TV

First I've seen and it's superb.

Lol this is so interesting. I'm an American millennial born in '86 so needless to say I have never heard about any of this. I plan on informing every nerd I know about this lol.

As I really knew that since the Christmas episode, almost all the episodes of the 4th series of LWT's On The Buses was filmed during the colour strike. (With the exceptions of the first episode of the series "Nowhere to Go" until the fourth episode "The Other Woman" was filmed in colour while airing it in B&W when the strike began.)