BBC2 Goes Colour 25th Anniversary | David Attenborough, Wimbledon Final, Apollo 10 1993
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 12 ส.ค. 2018
- David Attenborough Controller of BBC2 was determined to be the first colour TV channel in Europe starting with the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Championships in July 1967.
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Colour Cameras
It was a great success and history was made although the availability of colour cameras limited the BBC starting with only four production cameras. Later in 1967, 17 were delivered from Marconi to provide BBC2 with a full service. Given most homes had black & white receivers, these cameras had to be fed into a new transmission system to broadcast in both black & white as well as in colour.
Video Tape Machines
Prior to the start of Wimbledon in 1967, the BBC received 12 high band colour Ampex video machines. The first week of the Lawn Tennis Championships was unofficially transmitted in colour and used this as a test period for colour and post production editing. Apparently 12 modifications were made to the video machines with10 adopted by the manufacturer. Some related to allow tapes to be edited, (physically cut and spliced!)
Technological Advancements
Unlike BBC1 and ITV, BBC2 was broadcast only on the 625 line UHF system, so was unavailable to viewers using 405-line sets. This created a market for dual standard receivers which could switch between the two systems. Set manufacturers ramped up production of UHF sets in anticipation of a large market demand for the new BBC2, but the market did not materialise. The early technical problems, which included being unable to transmit US recorded video tapes due to a lack of system conversion from the US NTSC system, were resolved by a committee headed by James Redmond.
PAL System
On 1 July 1967, during the Wimbledon Championships, BBC2 became the first channel in Europe to begin regular broadcasts in colour using the Phase Alternating Line (PAL) system, which was based on the work of the German television engineer Walter Bruch. The thirteen part series Civilisation (1969) was created as a celebration of two millennia of western art and culture to showpiece the new colour technology.
Transmitters
BBC1 and ITV later joined BBC2 on 625-line UHF band, but continued to simulcast on 405-line VHF until 1985. BBC1 and ITV simultaneously introduced PAL colour on UHF on 15 November 1969, although they both had broadcast some programmes in colour "unofficially" since September 1969.
In 1979, BBC2 adopted the first computer-generated channel identification (ident) in Britain, with its use of the double striped, orange '2' logo. The ident, created in house by BBC engineers, lasted until March 1986 and heralded the start of computer-generated logos.
Digital
As the switch to digital-only terrestrial transmission progressed, BBC Two was (in each region in turn) the first analogue TV channel to be replaced with the BBC multiplex, at first four, then two weeks ahead of the other four UK channels. This was required for those relay transmitters that had no current Freeview service giving viewers time to purchase the equipment, unless they had already selected a satellite or cable service. The last region for BBC Two to end on analogue terrestrial television was Northern Ireland on 10 October 2012.
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Technical
Source media: Super VHS
Video format: PAL 4:3
Audio: Mono (sorry, should have uploaded the digital version!)
Location: London
Transmitted: 1993 - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
Have to admit as a kid in the mid to late sixties I used to hold coloured transparent sweet wrappers to the tv screen to give a colour effect. 'Quality Street'™️ wrappers were particularly effective, especially at Christmas!
You weren't the first lots of people did it I've been told some used lucozade bottle wrappings.
I did exactly the same. Wrappers from tins of Quality Street I think. I remember sometimes choosing a sweet that wasn't one of my favourites just to get the right coloured wrapper. Funny the things you remember ain't it!
My Dad worked for DER, so we had colour Tv as soon as it came out one of the perks of his job and we suddenly had lots of new "friends" in the neighbourhood .
Our colour set came on 30th October 1967 - on my tenth birthday - not as a present, but I took it as such !
The first colour set we had arrived on my 19th birthday in 1974. It was a Phillips, excellent picture it was and very reliable. We rented it from British Relay and in all the years we had it never had to call the repairman once. Probably had it over ten years. The first progamme we watched on it was Tarzan, starring Ron Ely. Saturday morning on LWT.
My mum & I went to Scotland from Australia in 1974, and colour T.V. was just starting there, no one had colour tellys yet.
When we returned 4 months later, it was a bit torturous watching black & white again
The other problem is, we had a disadvantage in that we had the choice of the German standard PAL, the French standard SECAM and the American standard NTSC. We went with the PAL, the German standard.
Also, we scrapped the British 405 line standard and went with a foreign 625 line standard. I think we did test all of the colour standards on 405 line, but decided that the best solution was PAL on 625 line.
We also got stereo TV later than most of Europe. Because we went with a digital standard for stereo (NICAM) instead of an analogue standard like Zweikanalton or FM stereo.
Sat whatever you like,but I think we went with PAL because it was better than NTSC, but more NTSC compatible than SECAM.
The other thing is 405 line continued to exist on VHF, but colour was in 625 line standard on UHF. 405 line standard on VHF never went colour, although the Irish used 625 line on VHF as well as UHF. Ireland also used 625 line and PAL colour, the same as the UK. It's just that they used 625 line colour on VHF as well as UHF. Whereas we onlyy, used colour on UHF and saved VHF for black and white old 405 line TV. l
My mother was a Dress maker. One of her clients had a COLOUR T.V. from day one. Wimbledon 67 on B.B.C.2.
Colour Me 2! Wonderful! I've been itching to see this again ever since I threw out my off-air of the whole evening!
I arrived here after listening to Sir David reading his autobiography *_Life on Air._* He devoted a good portion of one chapter to the difficulties of bringing colour to television.
Brilliant! Have only just found this, & it's brought back many memories.
I was a T.V. engineer at the time, and as one of very few, was extremely busy, especially over the Wimbledon fortnight.
One customer even invited me, on my day off, to come over for lunch, so that if a fault developed, I could fix it while he waited!
We had an early colour set, 1970. On the base of the set were four or five boards about 250 x 120mm which got replaced a fair bit. Solid state, our Engineer even soldered in new components.
One of the most annoying faults was prevelant on Saturday night when A Man Called Ironside was screened. The bright red background shown during the opening credits appeared to pulse in time with the siren playing in the soundtrack.
I was told not to boast about the set at school, a decade or more later I was still playing dumb about colours in Star Trek.
My mother joked that we gave the TV man the front door key he was here so much.
I adored The World About Us as a kid. Peculiarly, I thought we were late to colour tv, but I saw the Mexico Olympics in colour, the Apollo Moon launches from No. 10 or 11 onward.
I used to watch the BBC Trade Test colour films on our monochrome set, when I came home from school, so Giuseppina, for example was in b/w until about 15 years ago when obtained a DVD. And it is lovely, with oodles of nostalgia.
We skipped the vacuum tube colour TV, which the USofA went through in spectacular fashion. It lasted more than a decade, almost two - depending on who you ask.
But for the entire experimental period tube cameras and tube TVs were the norm. Those were very unstable devices, changing tint, saturation and white balance as the hours passed.
When the colour transmissions finally begun, solid state devices (with exception of the vidicons) were becoming the market standard; the PAL standard ensured a better viewers experience; our colour TVs hadn't an "hue" adjustment knob - like the US TVs did. But the complexity remained phenomenal. LCD screens arrived way too late; here took two more decades to reduce the unacceptable high number of dead pixels on new screens to the almost zero of today.
No we didn’t. All except Thorn started out with mass-produced colour TVs that were a hybrid of valves (vacuum tubes) and solid state!
The narration is quite true, but the iillustration of the *degree* of color inaccuracy due to the early camera instability and optics is quite exaggerated.
When we look back at the BBC output when David Attenborough was controller you can see why it was the envy of the world. With a complete set of programmes for a wide audience, in both originality and content.
Colour was available only on BBC2 at first - it is not that surprising that many waited for all three channels to be in colour (1969 in the major areas, by 1971 in parts of each region, except the Channel Islands where they had to wait until 1976), and the number of households having a licence for colour did not overtake those with only monochrome until 1976.
The Channel Islands didn’t even get BBC2 in black and white until 1976 and colour came with the UHF transmitter, the only way to receive BBC2
@@betaman7988 Indeed, that is true.
Fascinating
Cool!
The BBC colour trade test films I remember most were Boolong and Bola and Guisapina (probably spelt incorrectly) Both made by oil companies!
Evolion on on on on ...
It’s amazing how the invention of colour tv was considering absolutely ground breaking back then
Or as Smoke Too Much would say, "Bolour."
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Hard to believe it took so long for the UK to have regular broadcasts in colour from 1967 , considering that Scottish inventor , John Logie Baird , demonstrated it for the first time in July 1928 ( 40 years earlier !! ) much like the abysmal choice of official radio stations before 1967 as the first radio transmission by Marconi took place on the Isle of Wight in 1895 ( 70 years earlier !!!!!! ) with no UK based commercial radio till 1973 !! , how is that possible ?. I'm sure most of the delay was due to government legislation & the post office controlling the use of radio with all its restrictions at the time stifling growth.
The wait for colour TV was because the UK and Europe wanted a colour encoding system that was better than the NTSC system used in the states. NTSC had the problem that the colour hues were unstable and had to be frequently manually adjusted with a hue control on the front of the TV. The system finally adopted here was the PAL system which was a joint project between the BBC, Telefunken (in Germany) and other contributers. It gave much more stable hues. While Baird did have a colour system it worked by only transmitting one primary colour at a time and switching between frames using filters at the transmission and receiving ends, so it was a relatively simple modification to his black and white (or more pink and white) system. It was difficult to watch however because of the colour cycling. Adding colour to an electronic format was always going to be far more complicated but worth the effort.
It is said that the past is strange land; they do things differently there. With most innovations, it sometimes take a generational change before the objections and influence of the old guard diminish.
Even worse in Australia. March 1st 1975. with Aunty Jack
@@garrysimpson1395 July 1 1984,Turkey...no gimmick, the tellies turned to color all at once
TV from USA (news about the Vietnam war for example) always was in a shade of green... Not sure why.
Most NTSC converted to PAL was more or less in yellow well into the 90s.
we had ntsc from 1954. it was completely compatible with black and white so it took a while for people to switch as it was quite expensive in those days. however, as rca and nbc... who invented color tv..... had almost all of the color programs and made all of the color sets in the 1950s. then bonanza started in 1959. the first hour long full color western show on nbc. color tv sales went through the roof. hey,who doesn't like little joe and hoss,huh? so for the most part.... nbc was almost all color by 1963..... and cbs and abc followed soon after. and the color sets you wanted were either rca,zenith,or Sylvania..... we had an rca..... what a picture..... what shows..... good time to be a kld.... in florida in the 1960s.......
In the USA, when did the number of colo(u)r viewers first exceed the number of black and white viewers?
@@anonUK 1972 I believe.
at 2:40 That looks like an RCA plucked from NBC.
The looks are similar but it's actually Marconi's version of the RCA TK-41 design www.tvcameramuseum.org/marconi/mk3colour/p-1.html which they used for their closed circuit experimental 405 line NTSC colour tests in the 50s
Wasn't the pink next to the green???
Australia didn't get color television until 1975.
Hmmm, I just watched a colour broadcast from 61; wimbledon tennis, ladies final Truman vs someone!
Colour film probably, not colour TV originally
My late nan didn't go colour until 1981! she resisted paying more for the TV licence.
That surprises me as the cost of a colour TV itself put most people off. The colour license at that time was £46 (about the same as now in real terms) but a colour TV was about £250 which was a huge amount of money then.
@ Christopher Hulse: My parents also went colour in 1981.
The 1966 F.I.F.A. World Cup could have been in COLOUR.
Even more frustrating when you realise the earliest surviving UK colour video tape of a British show dates back to March 1966: The London Palladium. Sadly it was in NTSC as a test, rather than the PAL format adopted later. I believe ITV were interested in NTSC in the early 60's with a view to selling shows to the US, but it was never to be. th-cam.com/video/yiIqhY5-SKY/w-d-xo.html
@@TheGramophoneGirl Indeed. Many thanks for the link. My laate and wonderful mother was a dressmaker. Here in The New Forest B.B.C.2 was in Colour from the Rowridge transmitter.. One of my Mother"s clients had a Colour television from day one. I watched the first day of Wimbledon 67,then a Colour trade film then the first edition of the long running World About us programe on red valcano ash in Venzulia. Then I switched over to B.B.C.1. to watch Dr. Finley"s case book in Black and White.Not bad as I was only 3 and a half. I also remember watching a Colour edition of Gardners World from September 1970. Our parents could not aford a Colour television of thier own until September 1976.. God rest thier souls. HAPPY DAYS!
@@garrysimpson1395
Those trade test films were terrific. Algerian Pipeline
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I can’t believe at 08:25 people in blackface.... disgusting!
Yes it is disgusting but that’s just how the world was then and sadly, we can’t change the horrible past.
Oh Lordy Lordy!
To think they kept that crap and wiped the only live Beatles appearance on Top of the Pops in 1966.
Always enjoyed the black and White minstrels as did the whole family.........I well remember my mum buying me a Golliwog when I was young Happy Days.....I believe the BBC will be making a new series of it but this time no make up will be required and it will be called The Black and Black minstrel show
also we have never had to purchase a television license..... always been free here..... however the price for that is adverts..... better for poor people. so poor people in Britain have to live without tv? how exactly does that work?
TV sets were often rented before the early or mid 80s. This meant that the weekly fee was affordable for most people, even though the overall amount spent worked out as far more expensive. Also, if it went wrong and it clearly wasn't your fault, you could exchange the rented TV for another rented TV.
A black and white licence is cheaper. There are still a lot of people in the UK with B/W tv's
Simple, there were a lot fewer poor people in Britain at least up until Thatcher and Blair. Yanks call it "socialism", the Brits called it the Post-War Consensus, based upon the economic theories of William Beveridge.
@@tlatosmd 'there were a lot fewer poor people'...Have you any idea how stupid and wilfully blind that statement is? We got massively richer before, during, and after Thatcher, Blair, and every PM since the war.
@@jdb47games Correction: Few people got richer than ever before. By making *A LOT* of people much poorer.
Isn't it nice to see David Attenborough not droning on about ecology.
If we weren't treating the atmosphere like an open sewer he wouldn't have to
Oof black face