April 14, 1967. The Beatles release Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, my mother is still in high school, and channel 2 in Iowa begins broadcasting in color for the first time.
The live switchover from black and white is interesting, but so, too, is everything else about the broadcast:
The scripted nature of every word spoken, absent any attempt by the reporters to sound natural or off the cuff. It’s almost as if they want the audience to know that they are reading from a script.
The slow pace of the switchover. The producers seemed to understand that something should be said as the reporter moved from one studio to the other, but they didn’t script enough dialogue, leaving this long period of silence as the reporter finished his walk and a sound technician affixed a microphone to his jacket.
Also the lack of teleprompters.
The weirdness of the sets, with books on a shelf behind the reporters in both studios that surely aren’t ever used.
Even the joke that the reporter offers is so oddly worded:
“I feel double doubly honored to have been chosen to be the first one involved in our big change because there are so many much more colorful characters around here than this reporter.”
It’s not a terrible joke by television news standards, but boy did the reporter choose an odd collection of words to land it.
When I was growing up, we had a small, black-and-white television, but we also had a color TV, which is a sentence that also sounds bizarre today.
We once defined a television by the colors it was capable of projecting.
I never thought of color television as a technological marvel of any kind. Since we had a color TV, I simply thought of the black and white TV as a small, cheaper version of television.
The color TV was in a wooden box that was large enough to be adorned with nicknacks and other decorative items. It was essentially a piece of furniture with a television screen affixed to the front.
VHF and UHF attentsas. No remote control. When you turned it off, the screen dissolved to a pinprick of light before turning off entirely.
When I first moved out of my home and started living on my own, my friend and I also had a black-and-white television that we set atop an old baby changing table. It was quickly replaced by a color TV, but for a short time, back in 1989, I was once again staring at images projected in back, white, and varying shades of gray.
Later, we would define televisions by other qualities:
Rear projection. Flat screen. High definition. LED. QLED. Plasma. Eventually, televisions moved from the floor to the wall. Expanded in size. Connected to the internet.
I think that if Bob and Doug were still alive, they would be fairly astounded by what television are capable of today.
But back in 1967, “full spectrum color” seemed like a pretty big deal to them.
