The pictures are better – but the programmes are rubbish
The colour, pomp, and pageantry of the 1953 Coronation was a turning point for British television.
Viewers enjoyed the pomp and pageantry, but they missed out on the colour bit. The BBC pictures were of a grey, monochrome event.
From then on, everybody wanted a telly. A black and white telly, with a tiny screen, and lousy resolution. That's all you could get – and it was magic.
Nobody who crowded round the sets to watch the Coronation thought to themselves "If only somebody was to invent colour television" any more than people today stuck in traffic jams think to themselves "If only somebody was to invent a dematerialising transport system, like on Star Trek."
What you don't have, you don't miss.
It was much the same in the greatest event in the history of the entire world. Except it didn't happen on this world, but on the Moon. Neil Armstrong made that one small step in great big space boots in fuzzy black and white.
Colour television was by then available in Britain and, of course, America, but for a project which cost zillions of dollars, when it came to the cameras for the live pictures, they used black and white, although in fairness it was not a matter of cost, but something to do with bandwidth.
So we all saw a grey Moon, which is what we probably expected. Only when the colour stills came back did we see that space was a place of glorious colour. We might mention, ahem, that the Shropshire Star was one of the few British newspapers at the time capable of publishing pictures in full colour.
Watching 405-line television was exciting. Quite often, the image was self-scrolling. There was a knob at the back to turn to hold it steady, and another for contrast. Then we got 625 lines and the pictures improved.
Black and white pictures influence how we perceive things and events. We put them in a box labelled "old" and feel somehow disconnected – as evidenced by the way seeing pictures of Great War soldiers which have been digitally turned into colour images transforms them and makes them vibrant and newly alive.
One thing to be said about having a black and white telly is that when you finally got a colour one it was sensational.
Today everybody has colour tellies and they have nowhere to go but bigger. They tried 3D, but nobody wanted it. You can get HD, but you don't really need it.
Yes, the pictures are better, but let's face it, a lot of the programmes are rubbish.
