Black and white TVs are a lo-fi rebuke to a world gone wrong

When Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson released the first world war documentary They Shall Not Grow Old last month, viewers were entranced by the newly colourised 100-year-old black and white images of old soldiers.

Jackson, ever since his 1994 film Heavenly Creatures, when he made clay models seem to walk and talk, has revelled in the Pygmalion effect – making the inert touchingly human. With They Shall Not Grow Old he breathed life into the Imperial War Museum’s images, making the troops seem like us rather than distant figures from a scarcely remembered conflict. “They suddenly become real human beings, they’re not Charlie Chaplin,” said Jackson. “They’re real people with all the nuances and subtleties of human beings.”

Colour, then, is better than black and white.

So why on earth would anyone have a black and white telly in 2018? A report by TV Licensing this week shows that, more than half a century after colour broadcasts began, over 7,000 people still watch television in black and white.

Colour TV started in Britain in 1967 with the broadcast of Wimbledon. My family got its first colour set in time for the 1970 World Cup. I remember watching the satellite-beamed images of England taking on Pelé’s Brazil: Mexican sun and the electrifying palettes of soccer shirts burned my retinas. In hindsight, it was as though we were leaving the austerity years of ration-book Britain for a psychedelically bright future. This perhaps was what Harold Wilson meant by “the white heat of technology”.

And then there was a period in the 1970s when Britain was divided between those who watched the Generation Game in colour and those who watched in black and white. A colour TV in those days was a measure of social status. That’s what makes the following remark by the snooker commentator “Whispering” Ted Lowe, not just droll, but socially significant: “Steve is going for the pink ball – and for those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green.”

Why do some still opt for black and white? They can’t all be cheapskates who would rather pay just £49 a year for a black and white licence compared with almost £145.50 for a colour one. Black and white TV is like black and white photography and cinema: for some it’s aesthetically superior, more potently expressive. If you colourised a Mapplethorpe, a Weegee, a Fay Godwin, that glisteningly beautiful black and white of Alexander Mackendrick’s film Sweet Smell of Success, or indeed most of the great Hollywood genre called film noir, you should be arrested for cultural vandalism if not murder, since, in a sense, you would be sucking the life out of them.

One champion of black and white, TV historian Jeffrey Borinsky, asked rhetorically yesterday: “Who wants all this new-fangled 4K ultra HD, satellite dishes or a screen that’s bigger than your room when you can have glorious black and white TV?” Viewed thus, black and white TV is like craft beer, lo-fi reproof to a world gone wrong.

It’s a good point. Technological “progress” often just gives us more of what we don’t want. Endless choice is misery-making rather than liberating. No wonder the 7,000 rebel against colour TV’s gimcrack lunacy of red buttons; endless channels screening nothing worth watching; the binge-based death-in-life of modern viewing, and the whole lie that having access all the time to everything will make us happy rather than confused and sad.

The report doesn’t break down the demographics of those 7,000 into lavishly bearded, vinyl-collecting, folk-loving, vegan hipster devotees of the slow movement; but it’s my guess that this group is well represented.

And there’s another reason for the persistence of black and white telly. Nostalgia. Just as oldsters like me yearn for the old-timey whomp of record-player needle-into-LP groove. We miss simpler times, forgetting that those simpler times were – imagine! – even more racist, sexist, homophobic, dentally challenged and generally rubbish than 2018.

That said, while the nostalgia-fuelled vinyl boom has prompted the manufacture of record players and 12” discs, the last black and white tellies were made more than 20 years ago. In fact, the 7,000 are a dying breed. In the year 2000, there were 212,000 of them. Black and white TV viewers? They shall grow old. And then become extinct.

In retrospect, though, I wish I’d urged my now wife to hold on to the crappy black and white portable we used to squint at in her bedsit in the 80s. It had a Coal Not Dole sticker on the side and, as I remember, we watched it in tears as Grimethorpe colliery band marched miners back to the pit after the 1985 strike was defeated. We could have made a mint today flogging it on Gumtree or eBay. It’s probably landfill now. Never such innocence again.

Stuart Jeffries is a freelance features writer

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