Spectacular colour? Reconsidering the launch of colour television in Britain
Chromophobia and the problem of colour
In 2000, the artist David Batchelor published a persuasive book on what he understood as the problem of colour, or ‘Chromophobia’, in which he argued that
In the West, since Antiquity, colour has been systematically marginalized, reviled, diminished and degraded […] Colour is made out to be the property of some ‘foreign’ body […] [and is] relegated to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic.
(2000: 22–3)
This book has become significant in the recent flurry of work on colour in film, not least to explain the relative lack of attention that has been paid to colour within film scholarship. Whilst there are a number of other attendant arguments which explain the dearth of work on film colour (about the subjective nature of colour perception, the potential unevenness of reproduced filmic colour in different settings and media and so on), Batchelor’s work points us towards what might be seen as an underlying snobbery against a consideration of the aesthetic qualities of colour in cinema. Certainly this is how it has been interpreted within film studies.
Chromophobia, or a deep suspicion about the meaning and propriety, even, of producing works of art and culture in colour, can also be found at the heart of the history of television’s move into colour. It is found, for example, in the policy documents which surround the setting up of the first colour television service in Britain, on BBC2, in 1967; it is also found in the attitude of British broadcasters to colour broadcasts elsewhere in the world, as is shown in their public and private documents. However, one cannot underestimate the impact of colour on television screens, its vividness and luminosity, and the contrast that must have been so startling when television shifted from black and white to colour, first tentatively, on BBC2, in the summer of 1967, and then, by the end of the year, across the majority of the channel’s programmes, and two years later, across BBC1 and ITV. The rhetoric surrounding the coming of colour, in the promotional material of the BBC and in reviews, editorials and letters from the public, speaks loudly of this contrast, and will be explored in this examination of the coming of colour to British television. The chapter will concentrate primarily on how colour television was conceived of before and during its initial appearance on British television, meaning that the focus will be on the BBC2 period alone. In this story of colour’s arrival, particular attention is paid to both the internal discussions about colour technology and its capabilities within the BBC, but also to the ways in which this discourse was interpreted and expanded upon within the marketing of colour television.
Whilst others have given a more detailed technical history of the coming of colour, placing the ‘race for colour’ in its properly international context,1 this chapter sketches the key points of this technical history only briefly, and offers an international history only in the sense that this leads to the question of the tone and style of the colour television that the BBC was seeking to produce for Britain (particularly as opposed to that which had been produced in North America). Thus this chapter shows that a ‘restrained’ and genteel colour palette, as opposed to the ‘brashness’ and ‘gaudiness’ of American colour, was written into television policy in the mid-1960s; it also looks at how this was interpreted as a search for authentic, realist or ‘natural’ colour by BBC management and programme makers, as opposed to a more ‘spectacular’ version of television colour. By analysing programmes, production files and listings guides that document the creation and broadcast of early colour programmes on British television, the success, or otherwise, of producing what might be seen as a chromophobic form of colour television in this early period can be assessed. In order to test these ideas, the impact that the coming of colour had on the production of television drama in particular is explored. It is clear that colour was assessed as having specific implications for drama producers, directors and designers: whereas, on the one hand, colour had the potential to add new layers of meaning to a production of television fiction and could therefore be used in expressive, and eloquent, ways, on the other hand, it might also be seen as producing a more superficial ‘prettifying’ of the television drama, offering an increased sense of spectacle and an attention to the surface of the image rather than producing greater depth of meaning.
The recent proliferation of writing on the role of colour in film has all begun by acknowledging that colour has been, until recently at least, an under-researched and misunderstood area of film scholarship. For example, Sarah Street has argued that ‘For much of its history, commentators played down colour’s contribution to film, emphasizing instead its function in underscoring dramatic narrative trajectories, neither drawing attention to itself nor acting as a distraction’ (2010: 379). Three years earlier, Wendy Everett had been even more strident in claiming that film studies had a colour ‘blind spot’ and that within this field of scholarship ‘there is no suggestion that colour might play any role in the construction of meaning’ (2007b: 13). Whilst this must surely be seen as an overstatement, it is true that colour is, on the one hand, difficult to talk about in relation to film, and, on the other, is often understood as being of lesser importance than other aspects of mise-en-scène within a good deal of film analysis. This sense of difficulty, which also arises as an issue in art criticism, rests on the fact that, as is well documented, the perception of colour is subjective and culturally specific. For example, the naming of colour has been highlighted as a major issue for the film and fine art scholar alike, and reference to the Maori’s ‘3,000 colour terms’ (Everett, 2007b: 13) as opposed to the Filipino Hanunóo people’s four has become a critical commonplace in representing this particular ‘difficulty’. As Everett argues:
Whereas it may be tempting to think of certain colours as possessing universal meanings that are reflected in their use as symbols and codes, it is important to bear in mind that any relationship between colour and meaning is essentially arbitrary.
(ibid.)
It is also true that even within cultures, we cannot be sure that colour perception is uniform. Therefore, scholars might be seen to shy away from using colour terms with authority and struggle with reading and understanding the meaning of colour, given the contingent and ambiguous nature of colour as a signifier.
The other major issue for film scholars has been the stability of film’s colour. In short, if colour varies in reproduction from print to print, copy to copy, cinema to cinema, how can one write with certainty and conviction about it? Of course, if this variability is a problem for the study of film, it is infinitely more difficult and problematic when it comes to television. From the very first colour television sets, the ‘look’ of the image could be adjusted individually, ‘to suit individual tastes’, and sometimes in rather outlandish ways. Many sets allowed viewers to adjust brightness, contrast or tint and colour settings, and all sets had to be set up by a trained engineer who would adjust the colour reception internally before leaving the viewers to their own adjustments.2 Furthermore, variation in the broadcast signal (often caused by viewers’ distance from their nearest transmitter) had an impact on the stability of television colour, as did the transfer of programmes between different colour systems (i.e. NTSC to PAL). This issue of colour’s variability was remarked upon in the reviews for the very beginning of BBC2’s colour broadcasts, and the coverage of Wimbledon which kicked off colour in the UK, when Maurice Wiggin in the Sunday Times remarked that whilst ‘we can rely on the BBC to put out good, lifelike colour […] what we see at home will depend on things beyond their control’ (Wiggin, 1967). Indeed, commenting on the Wimbledon coverage, the Sunday Mirror’s reviewer said,
What a time I had fighting those two knobs marked Tint and Colour. At first the Centre Court looked like a sick greengage jelly in a sea of blue haze – which was the stands. Poor old David Attenborough, who introduced the programme, seemed to have chocolate blancmange all over his face. I fiddled and fiddled desperately with those knobs. And at last I got the trick of it.
(Anon., 1967b)
A few days later, in the Guardian, Stanley Reynolds wrote that
You may adjust the colour if you fancy surrealistic blues or greens or purples or if you wish to make some favourite television personality appear ridiculous. On BBC1 and ITV you can get a sort of sepia colour by twiddling the colour knob. The colour on our 25 inch set is very natural, more like real life than Technicolor, and with none of the green blur some have complained of.
(Reynolds, 1967)
Clearly, then, reviewers of television were attuned to the variability of colour reception, and the fun that could be had in playing with television’s colour – in essence ‘mucking about with’ colour in order to draw attention to the colour of the image and perhaps to render it more spectacular. The BBC was also worrying about this issue in their assessment of their own programmes; the Weekly Review of Programme Presentation minutes from 28 November 1967 documents a discussion with Barry Learoyd, the Co-ordinator of Colour Familiarisation, who wondered whether an area of greenness during the programme Three of a Kind (BBC, 1967) occurred ‘because he lived on the fringe of the receiving area for colour television [and] if this was the case then he felt that it should be borne in mind when producing for colour since a major part of the general public would be viewing from a fringe area.’3 What all this suggests is that like scholars of film who are concerned about the trueness of the colour they analyse in the particular print, video, DVD or download they are working with, television historians must, in dealing with colour, acknowledge that they are working with a version of a reproduction of television colour, rather than a guaranteed facsimile of what the viewer would have seen or what the director intended them to see. Nevertheless, with these caveats, it is possible to describe, analyse and evaluate the different uses of colour seen at the start of the colour television service in Britain; indeed, in all likelihood, the historian will be dealing with a version of television colour which is closer to the intended colours of the programme as broadcast than the colour that was received in homes across the UK in 1967 and 1968.
Setting up colour television and selling it
In brief, the facts of UK television’s launch of colour are that the BBC launched a limited colour service in July 1967 on BBC2 only, which was already being delivered in the higher definition 625 lines system. After many years of experimentation and discussion (the Colour Policy files at the BBC Written Archives Centre go as far back as the start of the service in 1936), the UK adopted the German PAL system invented by Dr Walter Bruch of the Telefunken Company. Colour television had, however, begun in the US in the previous decade; CBS had introduced colour broadcasts as early as 1951, and whilst their colour broadcasting system was quite successful in technical terms, it was not adopted by other networks and was abandoned later that same year. NBC was then the first network to adopt the alternative NTSC colour standard, named for the National Television Standards Committee, in 1954. However, the take up of NTSC colour by other networks happened slowly across the next decade, with CBS, ironically, being the last to adopt the system in 1966, just a year before the BBC launched their colour service. Colour broadcasting in the US had had a shaky start: the NTSC system, referred to in the press and in the industry as an acronym for the phrase ‘Never Twice the Same Colour’, was seen as unreliable, and as producing gaudy, unnatural-looking colour. David Attenborough, who was Controller of BBC2 in the colour launching period, refers to the ‘staggeringly garish quality of the first colour programmes shown in the United States’ in his memoirs, and argues that ‘I was sure, from watching the test transmissions, that ours would be in a different class, full of tonal subtleties and wholly comparable from the point of view of colour reproduction, with any printed colour pictures’ (Attenborough, 2002: 212).
Attenborough’s memories of the significance of this comparison are wholly accurate: a great deal is made in the Colour Policy documentation from the launch in 1967 about ‘not doing it like the Americans’. The initial launching of the colour service in the UK was comparatively low-key, but with a larger number of colour programmes spread across the week, many of which were quite ‘unspectacular’ in their design; for example, Late Night Line Up (BBC2, 1964–72), a panel discussion/arts programme made in Studio H, the first fully equipped colour studio, was the first daily series to be broadcast in colour, and became something of a colour testing ground and ‘flagship’, despite its apparent lack of spectacle. In the month before colour was launched in the UK, in their document entitled ‘The Colour Service’, the BBC General Advisory Council reported on this quandary of whether to start with a ‘few glittering colourful hours a week, set in a basic monochrome schedule’ or produce the ‘maximum amount of colour from the available equipment’ (BBC General Advisory Council, 1967). This document noted that the Americans had opted for the former strategy and thus
Producers and engineers […] were faced with having to learn their skills on productions which would have been complex in monochrome but which in colour caused gigantic problems. Colour television thus became synonymous with complexity and difficulty [in the States, with engineers becoming] so obsessed with colour that it frequently came to dominate their production plans. As a result the crucial programme values – the wit of a comedian, the dramatic quality of a play, the balance of news coverage – became of secondary importance.
(ibid.)
In comparison, the General Advisory Council argued,
Our aim will be to produce not a few isolated colour programmes, but a complete colour service […] Thus, programmes of all kinds – discussions as well as operas, science documentaries as well as light entertainment spectaculars – will be produced to this new standard. There will be no question of putting only ‘colourful’ productions into a colour studio or of striving to add pretty colours to a programme where they are irrelevant or inappropriate.
(ibid.)
The BBC thus strove to produce colour television with a ‘more subtle’ tone and style than the Americans had done.
A crucial difference between film and television colour is that as soon as a film is made in colour, everyone sees it in colour, whereas the shift into television colour required financial investment on the part of the viewer, in the form of purchasing a new colour set and investing in a TV licence, which was £5 more expensive than a regular licence per year. For those still watching in black and white, colour television could be viewed as black and white, so the reception of television in colour was far more gradual than that of film. According to Andrew Crisell, a colour set would have cost £350 in 1967 (the equivalent of around £5,000 in 2012 when adjusted for inflation) (2002: 122). This was, therefore, no small investment, and accounts for the fact that only 17 per cent of households were equipped with colour TV by 1972 (Lury, 2005: 36), though this number rose rapidly throughout the 1970s, thanks largely to the hiring and hire-purchasing of colour sets through companies like Radio Rentals and Rediffusion. Whilst Radio Rentals had ensured that the TV critics were viewing in colour by sending them free colour sets,4 Maurice Wiggin reported in the Sunday Times in the first week of colour that there was only an estimated one to two thousand sets in operation across the country.5 Thus the BBC found itself at the forefront of promoting the purchase of colour television, and worked closely with BREMA, the British Radio Equipment Manufacturers’ Association, to ensure that there were enough viewers purchasing new sets, and therefore the new, more expensive, licence, to cover the increased costs of moving to 625-line colour programme production and broadcasting.
The jewel in the crown of the BBC and BREMA’s joint efforts was the travelling exhibition, Colour Comes to Town, which is described by the BBC’s Publicity Service as being ‘comprised of 14 manufacturer’s stands and four BBC stands […] a total of 308,000 people visited the Exhibition at its eight venues’.6 The exhibition opened at the Fairfield Halls in Croydon on 25 September 1967, and the BBC employed three ‘Colour Girls’ – actresses/singers from London, Skipton and Glasgow – to host the exhibition in the relevant regional centres, answering visitors’ questions, introducing celebrity guests from the world of television and keeping an eye on the mobile colour TV demonstration unit which was displaying colour showreels at the exhibition, and a back projection unit showing a continuous selection of slides illustrating colour programmes. For many people without the capital, and without rich enough friends and neighbours, Colour Comes to Town was their first experience of colour television, just as the large-scale mid-century exhibitions had introduced visitors to television for the first time. Following the buzz (and high attendance figures) of this mobile exhibition, the BBC and BREMA sent a scaled-down version of Colour Comes to Town round to tour holiday camps the following summer. The BBC Board of Management minutes for 22 July, 1968, report that this venture had been ‘a considerable success [and that] It appeared that 90% of those visiting the exhibition had never seen a colour television picture’.7 The same Board reported in the following month that
at the end of that week [the holiday camp tour] would probably have reached 25,000 people […] [and] at one camp about 150 people had sat through a performance of Cosi Fan Tutte [being broadcast on a colour set in the exhibition].8
Alongside BREMA, the BBC had also mounted an exhibition in the fifth-floor exhibition lounge of Austin Reed’s in Regent Street during Wimbledon Fortnight in 1968, and, teaming up with Kodak, had simultaneously mounted an exhibition entitled Colour Comes to Television in Harrods’ ‘Fashion Theatre’.9 Thus the BBC aimed to cover all of their demographic bases in collaborating with set and film stock manufacturers, as well as TV rental companies, to promote colour television within a variety of public spaces during the launch period. The ‘show business’ tone of this promotion, and its emphasis on the spectacle of colour TV, are interesting because they sit slightly at odds with David Attenborough’s insistence that the colour launch would not be spectacular, but rather should be seen as the natural progression of television form and style, and as an increase in fidelity rather than a recourse to showier aspects of the nascent colour service. It is this quandary to which we now turn.
On the question of ‘spectacular colour’ vs ‘realist colour’
Francis McLean, the BBC’s Director of Engineering, opened his lunchtime lecture in March 1967 by asking why the BBC was switching to colour. In answering his own question, McLean said:
Well, the Government has told us to do it, and of course we wanted to do it for various reasons, like keeping up with the Joneses, helping the export trade, and so on. These are all important, but I think the real reason is that it is the natural thing to do. By a sort of curious inversion of logic, we have come to regard black and white television as a normal thing, and colour as abnormal, whereas in life the natural thing is to see everything in colour.
(McLean, 1967: 3)
McLean went on to say that
It is sometimes said that colour is an extravagance and that we could do without it. This is of course true – we can do without a great many things […] but experience shows that human nature does not work this way. Colour is such an essential part of human living that it would be an unnatural deprivation to do without it.
(ibid.: 15–16)
The rhetoric used here is indicative of the BBC’s drive to produce ‘natural’ colour, to see it as an essential, and not unnecessary, progression of the television image, as something that would augment the BBC’s ‘core values’ of providing truth and extending cultural experience, rather than something which would detract from this. In short, the coming of colour was, according to management-speak at least, to be precisely un-televisual, using John Caldwell’s (1995) understanding of that term to mean ‘excessively styled’ or exhibitionist in its aesthetic. A month after McLean’s lecture, the trade publication Electrical and Radio Trading reported that ‘the very word colour, Mr Attenborough said, was a misnomer. It puts a false emphasis. We should say natural television. Monochrome has been an impoverished and debased picture. We shall now provide a more accurate picture’ (Anon., 1967a).
BBC management went to great lengths to deny colour television’s more spectacular functions or properties during the launch period, as reflected in Director General Charles Curran’s statement that colour should not ‘simply [be] a decorative addition to the screen’ (1969: 7). Whereas the term ‘high fidelity’ colour often replaced ‘realist’ colour within BBC policy documentation, the meaning of this was certain. The term faithfulness was also used to denote a realist approach to colour: the Controller of Programming for Television, Ian Atkins, argued that ‘faithfulness to the original is obviously the ultimate criterion of colour pictures’ and adamantly stated that ‘This new dimension that has just been added to the television picture will not be exploited for its own sake’.10 This rhetoric runs contra to the histories of British television which argue, as Crisell does, that the ‘obvious effect of colour was to make the medium of television immensely more vivid and picturesque’ (2002: 122). Furthermore, when one looks at the reception of what Karen Lury describes as a ‘homegrown spectacular’ (2005: 36), that is, the BBC’s colour coverage of Wimbledon in 1967, what becomes clear is that the reviews of this suggest it was both eye-poppingly spectacular and at the same time stress the realism of the colour coverage (the grass is actually green, the tennis whites, white and so on). In Attenborough’s summing up of these reviews in an editorial for the Radio Times, the superlatives used (‘Marvellous, awesome, true-to-life, epoch-making, a new dimension’; Attenborough, 1967: 5) speak simultaneously to colour’s potential to be both spectacular (marvellous, awesome, epoch-making), but also closer to the real (true-to-life, a new dimension).
However, it was variety programming, even more so than sport, that was seen as one of the key beneficiaries of the shift into colour, relying, as the genre did, on spectacular sets, costumes, lighting and choreographed set pieces. Furthermore, it was the variety programme which took the BBC closer to the garish American colour palette which Attenborough et al. had been so keen to avoid, seen so vividly in the acid-bright, primary colours of sets, lighting and costumes of the Black and White Minstrel Show. In his report, ‘Colour Television: a Report on Progress’, Secretary to the BBC Kenneth Lamb states that ‘The only concession to colour’, in terms of a shift in programme policy, was the transfer of the highly popular variety show, The Black and White Minstrel Show, from BBC1 to BBC2. He argues that ‘This was necessary because BBC2 had no light entertainment “spectacular” through which to demonstrate the potential of colour when used in productions of this kind’.11 However, this is not strictly the case, given that BBC2 launched its full colour service with 1 hour and 15 minutes of Billy Smart’s Circus (BBC2, tx. 2/12/67), a spectacular variety event programme, and, in the first weeks of the full colour service, broadcast either the Black and White Minstrel Show (BBC1/2, 1958–78) or variety/comedy vehicle, The Charlie Drake Show (BBC2, 1967–8), on Saturday evening, and Once More with Felix (BBC2, 1967–70) on a Sunday evening. Whilst the latter was based around the folk singer Julie Felix, it still had the format and design of a variety show, and its innovative use of coloured lighting was praised highly by the Head of Television Lighting, Phil Ward.12 Of the Charlie Drake Show, the producer Ernest Maxim said in the Radio Times that
The word ‘spectacular’ sounds as though we’re letting off fireworks. In a way, it’s true […] It will certainly be colourful. The costumes are marvellous and we have lit the sets like a Hollywood film. A black and white show, when completed, can give certain satisfaction, but a colour show 500 per cent more.
(Anon., 1967c: 11)
The colour design and prominence of these BBC2 variety shows in the schedule, also referred to as ‘Spectaculars’ within policy documents produced in the 1960s, sits at odds then with Attenborough et al.’s suggestion that BBC2 would launch a more subtle colour service than the Americans that would not seek to ‘showcase’ this new technology with ‘excessive’ production values but rather to use colour as a ‘natural progression’ towards a greater sense of verisimilitude. Whilst it is clear to see that the colour spectacular did not lend itself to ‘natural’ or ‘subtle’ presentations of colour, the extent to which this was achieved in television drama production is explored below.
Making meaning or ‘looking pretty’
In considering whether some dramas should continue to be produced in black and white after the launch of the colour service, David Attenborough drafted a letter to Kenneth Adam, Director of Television, in 1966, with the following thoughts: ‘There may be strong aesthetic reasons why some productions should be shown in monochrome. This will doubtless apply to many plays, for colour, unless used with great skill, can turn the dramatic into the merely pretty’.13 Whilst Attenborough changed his ‘many plays’ to ‘some plays’ in the final draft of this letter, the fear of producing the ‘merely pretty’ television drama remained plain. In her writing on the ‘pretty’ in cinema, Rosalind Galt argues that ‘prettiness’ is frequently at the centre of ‘the resilience of “empty spectacle” as a figure of critique in film writing from journalism to high theory’ (2011: 2) and goes on to say that
Pretty things do not have the status of beautiful ones […] because pretty so immediately brings to mind a negative, even repugnant, version of aesthetic value […] Many critics hear in the term a silent ‘merely’ in which the merely pretty is understood as a pleasing surface for an unsophisticated audience, lacking in depth, seriousness, or complexity of meaning.
(ibid.: 6)
Galt’s etymology of ‘pretty’, and the ‘merely pretty’ more specifically, is useful in understanding precisely the formal elements Attenborough feared colour might bring to television drama: the production of decorative or attractive drama which lacked depth, seriousness and complexity, an emphasis on (tele)visual pleasure over the construction of meaningful narratives.
The first long-running colour dramas on BBC2 during the colour launching period were American imports: these included the anthology drama Impact,14 which featured high-end actors like Simone Signoret, John Cassavetes, Dana Andrews and Shelley Winters, and aimed to bring the values of Hollywood colour cinema to the small screen, and the westerns The Virginian (NBC, 1962–71) and later High Chaparral (NBC, 1967–71). In an article entitled ‘My Verdict on Colour TV’, Shaun Usher in the Daily Sketch described The Virginian as ‘the dullest, wordiest, most pompous Western series ever screened on television’ (Usher, 1967), but then argued that, in relation to its broadcast in colour, ‘all of a sudden I wouldn’t be without it for the world […] For whenever the action palls, my eyes wander to the scenery – green pine trees, vivid blue or sunset skies’ (ibid.). We see here an account of a show doing exactly what Attenborough had feared of colour drama: lacking in dramatic value but providing a rather more ‘shallow’ sense of visual pleasure in colour not tied to the creation of meaning. This review, then, sees colour landscapes being viewed as salve for poor drama, rather than, as Technicolor pioneer Natalie Kalmus proposed, colour being utilised to ‘convey dramatic moods and impressions to the audience, making them more receptive to whatever emotional effect the scenes, action, and dialog may convey’ (2006: 26).
In preparing for the start of the colour service, the BBC’s own producers, directors and designers of television drama, along with all other technical staff, needed to be trained in the specific issues and problems of producing TV fiction in colour. It was decided that this training had to be done in such a way that the makers of television drama (along with all other genres of programming) would produce full programmes, as if for broadcast, to test out the new equipment. This training, dubbed the ‘Colour Familiarisation Course’, was described by its co-ordinator, Barry Learoyd, in a memo to director Rudolph Cartier’s assistant:
There are precisely three weeks from [the start date] during which the production team must prepare, plan, design, rehearse and, in the studio, bring to a successful final run your team’s 20–30 minute programme […] The object of the course is for you to obtain as much practical experience of colour and its compatible black and white picture as possible, in the time […] Simple programmes with a simple use of colour are likely to be more successful until the Service as whole has gained experience […] Colour is accentuated on the screen. Pictures can easily become ‘gaudy’. Most successful pictures are composed largely of subdued colours.15
Ian Atkins later said of this course that the working teams ‘were encouraged to experiment and if they got it right first time we asked them to try it another way. We believed that they would learn as much from their failures as from their successes’.16
The training took place in Studio H and Cartier’s team produced a production called Three Essays in Colour featuring three literary adaptations (Chekov’s The Bear, the fantasy mystery novel The Master of Judgement Day by Leo Perutz, and Akutagawa’s Rashomon) and experimented with, amongst other things, the use of back projection in colour production and also highlighted the major problem of shifting between studio and footage filmed on location: this had always been seen as a problem for the production of dramas, but even more so in colour. From the documents pertaining to the colour familiarisation course to the files of ongoing series and serials once colour production began in earnest, there are repeated issues about the disjuncture between these elements of productions: actors’ hair appearing to be two different colours in the same scene, weather and lighting changing starkly from shot to shot, etc. Coming out of this process, there was a repeated insistence within the BBC on an increased need for teamwork and collaboration among the directors, producers, designers and costume and make-up designers of TV drama; as Kenneth Lamb argued, ‘colour demands that all the separate creative processes of production should be considered in relation to each other’.17 This is also evidenced in a document written by Head of Classic Serials, David Conroy,18 which sets out a five-step process of collaboration in a series of ‘Colour Co-ordination Meetings’ between the director and all other members of the design and realisation team on each programme. Given that colour programming was around 20 per cent more expensive to produce than black and white,19 and that the differential costs for the classic serial were slightly higher at 23 per cent, Conroy was wise in carefully laying out the processes of colour production for all who worked on the classic serial, for it was the classic serial which was to launch the BBC Drama Department’s efforts in colour.
The BBC launched their full colour service on BBC2, with a five-part adaptation of Vanity Fair, adapted by Rex Tucker and directed by David Giles. The adaptation was strongly promoted: stories about its production appeared in a weekly colour supplement of the Radio Times in the five weeks running up to the broadcast of the first episode, and its star, Susan Hampshire, appeared on the front of the Radio Times in the first week of the full colour service, advertising both Vanity Fair but also the start of colour. Following this, and broadcast in the same Saturday and Thursday evening slots, Jack Pullman’s adaptation of Portrait of a Lady, directed by James Cellan Jones, was produced. In their history of the classic serial on television, Giddings and Selby argue that ‘Colour television […] brought a revival of interest in classic novels which could be set in luscious locations, classy architecture or rhapsodic landscapes’ (2001: 30). The costume drama, and the classic adaptation in particular, is, of course, one of the few areas of television production to have previously been considered in relation to questions of visual pleasure. Whilst analyses of the genre have mainly concentrated on the sumptuousness of costume dramas shot on film and on location from the 1980s onwards, I have previously argued that the studio-based costume drama might also be understood in relation to similar notions of visual pleasure, and particularly the pleasures of heritage detail found in costuming and set dressing (Wheatley, 2005). This is certainly the case for both Vanity Fair and Portrait of a Lady, which were both shot mainly in the studio, with some location-filmed inserts for exterior shooting: their costuming and set design fit Kristen Thompson’s description of colour in film as described by Brian Price: ‘excess[ive], a source of abstract visual pleasure and perceptual play that resides somewhere above’ questions of meaning (Price, 2006: 6). Vanity Fair was commissioned by Shaun Sutton, Head of Serials in the BBC Drama Department, because:
(1) It is a Classic, but not too heavy or demanding a Classic […] (2) It has a splendid girl as its leading character. A girl who is wicked, but not too wicked and (3) It is good colour. A cool, elegant period in architecture, very pretty women’s dresses, attractive men’s clothes and uniforms.20
Whilst Sutton tempered these comments, found in a memo to the Controller of Television, by following them with ‘Of course I agree it is the content, and only the content, that matters in the end. Scenery in television is the thing that stops you seeing the studio walls’,21 his initial emphasis on Vanity Fair being an ‘unchallenging’ play that offered the opportunity for ‘good colour’ is telling.22
Vanity Fair is a sprawling tale of the Machiavellian manoeuvrings of Becky Sharp, a young woman intent on social climbing who befriends and betrays the family of her kind and innocent school friend, Amelia Sedley, amongst others, in her pursuit of fortune and social esteem. Sharp, played by Susan Hampshire, is an interesting figurehead for colour television: a vain and deceitful figure, she is repeatedly shown to be obsessed with the appearance of things. Beautiful in comparison to her much plainer friend, Amelia, Hampshire plays Becky as a coquettish but fiery red-head (despite Thackeray’s description of Becky as ‘sandy haired’), perhaps literally embodying what colour technology was capable of showing. This reading of Becky as an embodiment of colour is also evidenced by the fact that Becky’s costumes are an array of colours – pinks and purples and greens, – as opposed to the whites and pale blues of Amelia’s. When approaching a colour-centric reading of Vanity Fair (or any other piece of television, for that matter), we seek out some evidence of colour being used in meaningful or expressive ways, looking for what colour brings to the creation of meaning in this production or lent to the symbolic aspects of storytelling. In the contrast between Becky as a kind of peacock, an embodiment of Batchelor’s ‘chromophobia’ in which the colourful is also the deceitful, dangerous and shallow, as opposed to the purity, innocence and truthfulness of Amelia, we do see this symbolic use of colour, to a certain extent.
However, what is far more striking about the use of colour in Vanity Fair is that it is frequently figured as an enhancement of the decorative elements of the mise-en-scène of the classic serial: this novel, chosen for adaptation for its series of balls and gatherings of men in colourful military uniform, offers the programme makers ample opportunity to showcase colour, with a parade of contrasting costumes running through the entire colour spectrum. Short montage sequences, such as the moment in the first episode when a number of characters prepare to attend a party in Vauxhall, present a spectrum of colour: the characters, dressed in a range of colours from the deep purple velvet of George’s jacket to the bright red of Captain Dobbin’s military dress, and, of course, Becky’s sugary-pink gown, are shot in medium close-up, facing the camera, which briefly lingers on the richness of these fabrics. There then follows a filmed insert of a night sky bursting with fireworks, and then a tracking shot around the Vauxhall party, with coloured streamers hanging down all around the group as they arrive. Here, as in many of the dance and party sequences of Vanity Fair, we see colour being strikingly used for its decorative properties. An array of colour is offered but without any obvious sense of symbolic meaning: it is colour to be looked at, to be enjoyed, rather than to be understood. The colour design reflects the gaiety of the sequence and the characters’ lives at this moment, but more than that, it expresses a joyousness in colour itself. As Becky dances in circles, filled with excitement and enacting this sense of deep joy, we see a moment, like many moments in Vanity Fair, when the pleasure of colour is foregrounded – perhaps not entirely ‘merely pretty’ drama, but in terms of the definitions set out in the colour policy discussed in this chapter, perilously close to it. This sense of the pleasure to be taken in colour which is emphasised by Vanity Fair is reflected in a viewer’s letter to the Radio Times from a Mr Cecil Williams of Wendover, Buckinghamshire:
I cannot praise the BBC too highly for the quality of their colour programmes. Vanity Fair took on a new beauty. The elegant richness of the costumes and the detail of the settings were revealed as in a new dimension […] Having first had TV in 1950 when it was fairly rare, we have seen many and varied programmes and have become selective. This colour is something which exceeds our expectations in every way.
(Williams, 1968)
It is notable that this ‘early adopter’ uses the term ‘beauty’ rather than ‘prettiness’ in describing Vanity Fair, remembering that Galt (2011) argues that the beautiful is more culturally acceptable than the merely pretty.
The Owl Service was the first Granada drama to be shot entirely on colour film and on location in the following year. If we compare its use of colour with Vanity Fair’s, for example, we see a strikingly different approach23. Jealousy, class struggle, burgeoning sexual desire and suggestions of incest are writ large through each episode of The Owl Service: the action centres around the developing triangular relationship between Alison and Roger, step siblings, and Gwyn, the son of the housekeeper of the house in the Welsh valleys where Alison and Roger have been brought for the summer. What is particularly striking about this adaptation though is that the ‘love triangle’ between the three central characters is defined via a symbolic use of colour in the drama: the colour scheme, based around the 1960s wiring system, sees Alison, a sexually charged young adult whose body is the central object of desire, dressed entirely in ‘live’ red throughout, Gwyn clad in black to suggest his relationship to the ‘earth’, and his groundedness in Wales and the Welsh landscape, and the jealous Roger dressed only in ‘neutral’ green as an expression of his frustration and jealousy. Here colour is deeply meaningful (almost hysterically so), rather than ‘merely pretty’.
In conclusion, it must be pointed out that the classic serial wasn’t the only genre of drama to be made in these early days of colour at the BBC; as discussed in Wheatley (2006), an anthology series called Late Night Horror (BBC2, 1968) was the first series to be produced in colour by Harry Moore and the directors who had done the colour familiarisation course, including Rudolph Cartier and Naomi Capon, though wasn’t broadcast until 1968. The production files for Late Night Horror show that Moore was keen that his directors exploit the new possibilities of colour to the full, with lots of blood and guts on show (as discussed in Wheatley, ibid.). Furthermore, the long-running anthology series Theatre 625 (BBC2, 1964–8) and Thirty Minute Theatre (BBC2, 1965–73) also began producing in colour towards the end of 1967; as anthology dramas on which a variety of teams worked, they offer a fascinating prospect for the historian researching the impact of colour on drama production. How the teams working on individual episodes responded to and used the new possibilities of the medium might offer us an illuminating and varied picture of colour’s dramatic possibilities, and Leah Panos’ (2015) forthcoming work looks precisely at this history, and, in particular, the episodes of these two series directed by Rudolph Cartier. Beyond Cartier’s work on these series, few episodes remain, unfortunately. It would be fascinating, for example, to see the episode of Thirty-Minute Theatre ‘Lovely in Black’ from 24 January 1968, in which a young woman imagines people visiting her after the death of her husband (who, it is revealed at the end of the drama, is not actually dead). A production note in the file for this episode states that
Olivia’s imaginary life, being more colourful than reality, takes place in an atmosphere almost gay, despite Alfred’s supposed demise. Only at the beginning and end of the play is there the greyness imposed by loneliness and Alfred’s personality. The quality of light can be used to suggest this, and the colour of Alfred’s clothes.24
It is important to remember, ultimately, that these were dramas that were still being made for the majority of the audience to view in black and white: as David Conroy, Head of Classic Serials, stated in a press release for Vanity Fair, ‘This first colour drama contribution to the full colour service will still be “colourful” in black and white. As much care is being taken in monochrome tonal values as is being taken in colour aspects’.25 Perhaps this explains the lack of depth and complexity in the use of colour in the early costume dramas discussed? Certainly, this raises an interesting historiographical issue: whilst our instincts in researching the impact of colour technology on television drama might be to look at the very first productions made in colour, perhaps we might see a more developed use of colour in programmes made and broadcast at the end of the following decade, when most viewers were watching in colour and when directors and designers might be fairly sure that most people would be able to read the colour of their productions? Even if, as argued at the start of this chapter, the meanings of colour can be understood as subjective, even arbitrary, it is clear that the makers of television were attempting to use colour in both spectacular and meaningful ways, as well as bringing a new kind of visual pleasure to television, and television drama in particular, in these very early days.