# When Did You Watch Colour TV for the First Time?



## Dave (Oct 7, 2012)

Springs post in this thread...
http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/538187-your-first-science-fiction-film.html


springs said:


> ...with all my family, cousins and all, gathered around my groovy uncle's telly.


...reminded me of the first time I saw colour TV. We all went around to a neighbours house to watch the FA Cup Final on their new colour TV. The room was packed with people who only had B&W TVs. I can tell you precisely when it was because it was the Leeds versus Sunderland Cup Final on 5 May 1973. 

It amazes me now that we didn't have colour TV before that. We didn't get _Star Trek_ in the UK until a couple of years after it was produced, but I never saw it in colour until the mid-Seventies.

Then again, we played Ping-Pong arcade style computer games on the TV and thought they were a wonderful innovation too.

"But you try telling that to the young people of today and they won't believe you!"


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## Moonbat (Oct 7, 2012)

I'm afraid that, as I was born in 1978, the first TV that I remember watching was colour.


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## Metryq (Oct 7, 2012)

I don't recall the first time seeing color TV, but we were always the last house on the block to get "hot" technology, like UHF (on a black-and-white set) with all the cool channels.

Then one Summer during high school I had a stack of equipment at home from the AV department. I was transferring all the school's reel-to-reel videotapes over to the slick, new VHS format. My dad wanted to watch a broadcast movie on the color monitor I had borrowed. Thankfully, it had a built-in tuner. While watching the movie, I remember my dad musing out loud, "Gee, it would be nice to have a color TV..." By Christmas, the house had its first color set.

As for the first time I saw _colour_ TV, I'll never forget that. I had seen lots of standards converted video (all the weird frame matching artifacts on imported DOCTOR WHO), but I had never seen PAL directly until college. The campus media center where I was working had multi-standard VCRs and monitors, including conversion equipment. I knew PAL had a slightly higher vertical resolution and a slightly lower frame rate, but nothing prepares a life-long NTSC viewer for the red-blue flickering of PAL. The lower refresh rate is partly responsible for the problem, and then there's the color (or colour) system flipping the phase for each field. The effect is most pronounced in the bright areas of a picture. If I had grown up in a PAL country, I probably would not have chosen a career in video. The color flicker is just too unsettling. (Yes, I can see the "buzz" of fluorescent lights, too.)


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## The Ace (Oct 7, 2012)

We watched colour TV at my Grandparents'.

I remember watching the Scotland v Wales World Cup Qualifier (1977) at theirs because we only had B/W.


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## Teresa Edgerton (Oct 7, 2012)

I can remember _where_ I was when I saw a color TV for the first time:  in a department store, where they had one playing.  I was pretty young, so that must have been in the late fifties.  I don't believe that I saw one in anyone's home until years later.  

By the mid-sixties, most of the people I knew had one, and that's probably when we bought ours.  For us, it was rather a breath-taking extravagance, but our family was going through one of our more prosperous periods at the time, and all the big television networks in the US were regularly broadcasting in color.


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## AnyaKimlin (Oct 7, 2012)

I was about five and it was the Smurfs in Welsh or possibly a Shirley Temple movie in Welsh lol   A very early one was Quincy which sent me on my early dream to be a forensic anthropologist (I wanted to combine archaeology and pathology, so the study of bones was a natural progression).   Oh and brain surgery on a Saturday morning was also a popular choice.  I was one odd child.

I cannot speak or understand Welsh but as a small child was inexplicably drawn to the two Welsh channels that we could get in Liverpool.


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## Boneman (Oct 7, 2012)

A friend of mine's father won a colour tv in the very late 60s, and we used to crowd round for match of the day...


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## dask (Oct 8, 2012)

Early sixties, neighbor was watching Password.


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## billhafan (Oct 8, 2012)

Early seventies, on my parents first colour TV - a philips if I recall correctly, that had more channel buttons than we had channels, back then  We sat mesmerised on that first day when a cartoon came on, and the colours were so vivid. Used to still get a lot of test-cards back then, too ... with awful royalty free music playing on loop


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## Metryq (Oct 8, 2012)

billhafan said:


> We sat mesmerised on that first day when a cartoon came on, and the colours were so vivid.



And now we're back to "black and white" again:

*Stop the Madness*

*All The Same*

*Orange/Blue Contrast*

"The more things change, the more they stay the same." —Snake Plissken

Now in 3D.


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## Gordian Knot (Oct 8, 2012)

Don't know if it was the first or not, but the first one I remember was the second season of Lost in Space, in 1966. That was also the first season of Star Trek which was in color.

I'm not sure why you would have seen Star Trek in black and white. It was shot in color from the beginning.


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## Snowdog (Oct 8, 2012)

For me it was at a friend's house. We still had black and white but his family had got a colour TV and the first time I saw it it was showing horse racing. I remember those horses had the most amazing coats it was so vibrant. That was in about 1972-3. I think we got our first colour TV in 1975.


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## steve12553 (Oct 8, 2012)

Gordian Knot said:


> Don't know if it was the first or not, but the first one I remember was the second season of Lost in Space, in 1966. That was also the first season of Star Trek which was in color.
> 
> I'm not sure why you would have seen Star Trek in black and white. It was shot in color from the beginning.


I, for one, did see Star Trek in black and white. My parents had divorced and the first Colo(u)r TV I remember was at my Dad's. The year they pushed Star Trek to Friday night I finally got to it in color when we visited on the weekend. The funny thing for me is the amount of old black and white movies and even TV shows that I seek out.  Some of the classics just wouldn't be right in Living Color.


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## Daisy-Boo (Oct 30, 2012)

South Africa only got TV in 1976 and my mother saved up to buy a colour TV so we got our first TV in 1980 or thereabouts. I had watched TV before that but I think our TV was the first colour TV I'd watched.


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## Juliana (Oct 30, 2012)

I was born in 72, so I grew up a color TV child...

However, I do remember the "miracle" of VCR - the whole family would gather at my gran's, as they had a VCR, to watch films. Massive fun!


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## cyrusDCmonster (Oct 30, 2012)

born in '86 had colour the whole time.  had a vcr too. and a nintendo.


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## Venusian Broon (Oct 30, 2012)

Dave said:


> ...reminded me of the first time I saw colour TV.


 
Probably about 1977 and I remember watching a nature program with David Attenborough narrating (of course!). Big red crabs are burned into my brain because of it. The whole family were gathered around looking at this amazing technology in stunned silence.



> Then again, we played Ping-Pong arcade style computer games on the TV and thought they were a wonderful innovation too.


 

My Granddad had a video game system (it had Ping-pong, 'squash' and 'hockey', so must have been pretty rad for 1975 or so) but was so old and unsophisticated that to keep score you had to put marbles on specially made dimples on the console, as the computer couldn't keep a tally.



> "But you try telling that to the young people of today and they won't believe you!"


 
Too right


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## Vertigo (Oct 30, 2012)

I honestly can't remember except that there are quite a few old programs that I had definitely originally watched in black and white but when I see them repeated I realise they were in colour. We didn't have a lot of money so I suspect we got our first colour tv pretty late on.


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## steve12553 (Nov 3, 2012)

My first TV as an adult was an old black and white portable that my Dad gave me when I moved out on my own. I was more concerned about acquiring a stereo phonograph after that than a color TV because there were only 5 or 6 channels available and it just wasn't that big a thing.


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## Einstein's left ear (Jun 2, 2013)

It was in July 1962 at the Royal Agriculture Show on Newcastle's Town Moor. Tyne Tees Television were doing live broadcasts from it and were giving a demonstration of colour TV on a closed circuit. I was amazed at how green the grass looked in the main arena.  

The next time I saw colour TV was in 1967 at the Radio Society of Great Britain's annual radio exhibition which was held at Royal Horticulture Society's hall near Victoria Station. I remember they were showing some of the colour trade test transmission films as seen on BBC 2.


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## clovis-man (Jun 2, 2013)

I was at a friend's house late in the evening in around 1960 (give or take a year). We were watching the Jack Paar show (precursor to Johnny Carson). I remember someone on the show had on a brown sport jacket and opened it up to display a bright reddish paisley lining. I was amazed. I was thinking: "How did they do that?"

I didn't own a color TV until the early 1970s. I remember the last black & white TV I bought was from a Goodwill shop. It was a 25 inch console model in a Drexel cabinet. I thought to myself, "If I can't have color, at least I'll have a nice piece of furniture". Ah, the salad days!


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## chrispenycate (Jun 3, 2013)

metrique said:
			
		

> As for the first time I saw colour TV, I'll never forget that. I had seen lots of standards converted video (all the weird frame matching artifacts on imported DOCTOR WHO), but I had never seen PAL directly until college. The campus media center where I was working had multi-standard VCRs and monitors, including conversion equipment. I knew PAL had a slightly higher vertical resolution and a slightly lower frame rate, but nothing prepares a life-long NTSC viewer for the red-blue flickering of PAL. The lower refresh rate is partly responsible for the problem, and then there's the color (or colour) system flipping the phase for each field. The effect is most pronounced in the bright areas of a picture. If I had grown up in a PAL country, I probably would not have chosen a career in video. The color flicker is just too unsettling. (Yes, I can see the "buzz" of fluorescent lights, too.)



And doesn't the fact that the LEDs on practically everything are flashing all the time?

The first time I saw Never The Same Colour (twice) I was shocked by shows where the cameras were so badly set up that in successive shots of the same performer his face would go from orange to purple, at telecines rendering football teams to multihued aliens, at going into a department store and seeing a range of different TVs all giving different opinions as to what 'color' actually was (and the programming, of course – I'd never been anywhere with more than four or five channels in (supposedly) the same language). And they weren't in my line frequency 'notch', so I could hear them whistling at me. Each one adapts to his habitual imperfections.

I know that, when I went to university (1966) there was a big colour TV in the students' union lounge, but I don't remember being all that amazed about it, so presumably I had already some previous experience. I had already done some work in a TV repair shop, in exchange for components and advice, but don't remember colour there; all live chassis, valves (tubes) and enormous volages. But in '66 the TV at home was still B & W (at least it wasn't black and green), and so were most friends'.


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## Einstein's left ear (Jun 3, 2013)

chrispenycate said:


> I know that, when I went to university (1966) there was a big colour TV in the students' union lounge, but I don't remember being all that amazed about it, so presumably I had already some previous experience. I had already done some work in a TV repair shop, in exchange for components and advice, but don't remember colour there; all live chassis, valves (tubes) and enormous volages. But in '66 the TV at home was still B & W (at least it wasn't black and green), and so were most friends'.



Not only that, some sets I saw in the early days of colour, the convergence was so badly adjusted, the picture looked more like one of those 3D pictures before you put the glasses on. A colour picture wasn't so bad, but when in black and white it was horrible. And what about when a tube needed degaussing? One part of the picture could have a blue hue to it, the other part a green one.


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