It's black and white...

I was a little surprised to hear on the news last night that there are a whole bunch of people who still watch black and white televisions, more than 11,000 of them apparently. Where do they get them from and in this digital age just how do they get them to work?

Strangely, it seems to be more of a Northern thing with Bradford having 90 licences, Leeds 165, Sheffield 111, and an awful lot of the others North of the Watford Gap. Well, it is grim up North and maybe it suits that gritty Northern attitude. Of course it could be that Northerners are just canny (this translates as tight for you Southerners); a black and white license is just £49 compared to £145.50 for a colour one.

This difference struck me as disproportionate; after all it’s the same signal and programme, and when colour first came along in 1968 it was actually a ‘colour supplementary fee’ of just a fiver on top of the existing monochrome licence. Sound like a bargain? Not really, it doubled the licence fee from a fiver to a tenner, or around 150 quid in today’s money - so nothing much has changed.

Interestingly there’s been no BBC supplementary fee for high definition or 3D yet. Mind you the airwaves have changed such a lot since 405 lines with the digital switchover; Sky and Freeview, Pay for View, Catch-Up, Downloads, TV on demand, laptop, tablet, smartphone and made for internet only viewing. It’s so confusing and light years away from my old black and white, up-to-the-minute, eighteen-inch portable.

I’m not even sure if ‘proper’ television exists anymore, it probably won’t sometime in the next ten years or so. Of course the whole issue of the BBC charging a license fee is debatable; I wouldn’t want to lose radio 4, but the ‘no choice and/or get prosecuted’ stance of the BBC must surely change soon.

Let’s leave that one for now though.

It’s hard to believe that there was once a time when there was nothing on TV. No, really nothing – well except for the test card – and just two channels that didn’t start until late afternoon with Children’s Hour (apart from The Woodentops, Andy Pandy and Bill and Ben at lunchtime) and finished with the National Anthem long before midnight. Horizontal hold, vertical hold, valves and knobs, a good thump to sort it out and that little white dot that got smaller and smaller until eventually disappearing with a ‘pfft’ when you manually turned the set off because there was no such thing as a remote control.

Daytime TV? All the men were down t’pit and the women had t’step t’scrub and t’range t’polish.

I can’t remember the last time I watched a black and white only TV. A long time ago I guess, although there were still over 200,000 black and white licences issued in 2000. I do remember black and white fondly though, and I have to admit to shedding a sugar-coated, nostalgic tear for it sometimes. These days it isn’t easy to watch in black and white, and to be eligible for a mono license requires almost as much technology to ‘undo’ all the technological progress as watching in HD 3D colour with all the bells and whistles (or whatever the high-tech equivalent may be).

Of course there’s still the opportunity to watch black and white in colour sometimes and I still watch black and white films on television when they are on. It makes me feel a little sad for simpler times when there was a Radio Times for the BBC and a TV Times for ITV. Mind you, I also still listen to radio plays and there are no pictures at all with that – except in my head.

Maybe that’s it. Maybe black and white imagined colours are like the faces of the characters in those radio plays… whatever you want them to be.

How liberating.