The Radio Times, that most confusingly maze-like of all journals of information, opened its pull-out magazine section to a suitably McLuhanesque fanfare: "Probably the most exciting thing ever to happen in this building…" Colour, of course: the rainbow medium is the "most exciting" message, but the effect of the article was to suggest that, from last Saturday at 6.30pm, the nation's screens were flooded with colour.
It's true they felt obliged to acknowledge the existence of a few unfortunates: "Those who have no colour set," they concluded soothingly, "may like to know that their black-and-white picture of a colour transmission will be better…", and the inference was that even that pathetic handful of old-age pensioners and ruined crofters had gained something. In fact, it was all for our benefit, a 20,000 privileged minority, including most critics, and like evangelists promising a reward hereafter, we must all reveal our beatific vision to the unconverted. Only the news, with a certain symbolic aptness, remains in sombre grey and that temporarily. A whole evening's colour and every evening! The grass is greener in the TV critic's living room. Subjectively, though, here are my reactions.
I'm glad I didn't really start watching at 6.30 last Saturday because, over the past few months, I have at least got over the tendency to sit staring at the test card, but even after the honeymoon, it's quite true that to switch over to black and white is to feel a momentary disappointment, irrespective of content. It is momentary: a good play is soon more interesting than a documentary on how they make plastic beakers (a subject in which we colour-set owners are becoming rather expert), but it is powerful while it lasts, and once the manufacturers have caught up with the unexpected demand, I fear that a large number of people will never use their channel control at all, or at any rate not until BBC1 and the opposition are in colour, too.
Why fear? Over the past few years a majority of the more worthwhile programmes in every field have originated on BBC2, and the coloured bait could be used to hook a mass audience and fulfil a genuinely educative role. Yet to judge on last week's showing this won't happen. Already the emphasis is changing and the importation of the slick but vapid Black and White Minstrel Show (bête noire of the white liberal) is a pointer to the future.
A further misgiving: what about all the important pre-colour material in the archives? Will it ever get shown again? What about the early films the companies own, among them a proportion of masterpieces. It would be a real tragedy if everything not in colour was to disappear completely or, at best, was consigned to an equivalent of television All Our Yesterdays. When there are more channels I tentatively suggest that one of them, for at any rate a few hours a week, should become the equivalent of the cinema's "art houses".
Misgivings aside, what did we see? Billy Smart's Circus for a kick-off and very beautiful it was, too. A point about colour TV that I haven't noticed anyone making (which, of course, doesn't mean it hasn't been made) is that it is not always the same. It can vary deliberately from pop primaries to the most subtle near monochrome, from realism to expressionism, and this programme somehow managed to achieve the quality of a Victorian poster. Pinks, silvers, midnight blue and an extraordinary greeny yellow transformed a banal, often boring entertainment into what most of us believe we felt about the circus as children. The spangled ladies looked unbelievably glamorous, the polar bears enormous and dangerous. All my contemporary reservations about trained animals, my conviction that circus is tired and moribund, vanished because the colour and the imaginative editing turned it into a dreamlike period spectacle.
Strangely enough, a sense of period was what the opening instalment of Vanity Fair seemed to lack and I had a feeling that colour was in part to blame. I'm sure it was accurate – the Victorian penchant for varnished shades of soup has turned the Regency decorative panache into a permanent surprise – but it didn't convince and the general impact was like an expensive "Coaching Days" Christmas card.
It wasn't only the colour that was to blame, though. The sets looked extremely stagy, and I got the impression that Crawley Castle was the recent Wuthering Heights kitchen slightly tarted up. Yet the real disappointment was Susan Hampshire's Becky. I can see how her marvellous performance in The Forsyte Saga made her seem born to act the part, but the 100-year gap defeated her. Whereas she managed Fleur's angular boyish 1920 gestures to perfection, her Becky was so skittish and kittenish as to make it impossible to believe in the bitch beneath the skin.
In fairness almost everybody else hammed it up too and towards the end it did begin to improve. I can only hope that Miss Hampshire, whom I admire tremendously, can slough off her wriggles and pouts as the series develops, and show her claws.
This episode also contained what ought to become a textbook example of how not to use colour. At Vauxhall, when Becky dropped her bouquet, the camera moved in for a long lingering look at it. This had the most tenuous dramatic reason, if any at all, but then a bouquet is made of flowers, and flowers are all different colours.
Most of the programmes on BBC2 are better for colour, but only incidentally. Variety shows glitter more but it isn't the colour that makes Kenneth Williams's Molly Bloom-like introductions to the acts in International Cabaret so inventively outrageous, or helps that splendid comedian Dick Emery to overcome his rather poor material. Man Alive's creepy but fascinating look at two hip priests – one RC, the other C of E, and both nightmares – gained nothing except the presumably false illusion that they were wearing lipstick. Hugh Leonard's solo tour de force, with Cyril Cusack as a drunken Irish failure, in a fine little play called A Time of Wolves and Tigers might even have gained from being in black and white, but this was the only case.
For the most part, colour is an advantage if a marginal one, but it can be central too. In The Private Life of the Kingfisher, for example, it was colour that turned an interesting documentary into a work of art. You really missed something there all right: but next week, back to content. It's only fair.