THE SPECTATOR

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In praise of colour

PATRICK SKENE CATLING

Colour television is often more vividly beautiful than the reality it represents. I hired my first colour set in order to watch Kenneth Clark's splendid series on Civil- isation and certain images- made such a profound impression that I can still call them to mind, and sometimes they appear unbidden on that inward screen that is the bliss of solitude.

In a recent Magnus Magnusson pro- gramme till 'The Electronic Village', in Twentieth-Century Focus (BBc 1), Mar- shall McLuhan said that television is 'an x-ray'—one of his more successful meta- phors. The luminosity of the medium causes television pictures to penetrate deep into the eyes, and colours enlighten the mind in a satisfying . way. Kenneth Clark showed enlarged details of mediaeval illuminated manuscripts that were even more spectacularly decorative than the actualities and paintings that supernatur- ally glowed. At about thirty-five shillings a week, a colour' receiver may be the greatest cultural bargain of all time.

Colour richly enhances good shows. such as The Six Wives of Henry VIII (nnc 1) and Sense and Sensibility (nnc 2); even if they weren't so *ell written and well acted, they'd be worth watching as moving ornaments. The sets and costumes are ad- mirable in black and white; in colour they are superb. And colours arc useful: they clarify meaning. In sonic instances they are virtually indispensable. Without them, some sports events can be visually .confusing, occasionally even meaningless. Monochrome football uniforms and jockeys' silks can be very difficult to identify. When pop groups are dressed in grey one is compelled to concentrate on the music, which is also sometimes greyish and desperately needs flamboyant clothes.

Colour adds gaiety to the sometimes rather prissy shows for children and sig- nificance to shows intended to inform. When you see a newsreel fire in red, orange and yellow, you feel the heat. Grey flames might as well be ectoplasm. A tropical sky without colour looks like Manchester in February, almost too gloomy to contemplate.

As noted in a recent special edition of the European Broadcasting Union Review devoted to colour television, nnc test trans- missions in colour began fifteen years ago. The first live colour broadcasts began in this country in November 1956. Both the 'Inc and [Tv use the PAL colour system, which was developed in West Germany. Judging by the colour television I've seen abroad, I'd say PAL is the best system of all. There are colour sets in more than 25 million American homes, but the colour is not nearly as true as the colour here. Sad to say, American colour often makes human complexions look like accidents in the embalmer's workshop. Did you notice the colour of the moon in the Apollo 14 photographs? It looked pale green even at the moment when one of the astronauts described the moondust as 'like brown talcum powder.' Pictures of any quality at all were little short of miraculous, but really it would have been nice to have had PAL up there.

The introduction of colour has greatly increased the complexity of television pro- duction: Richard Levin, head of the BBC's Television Design Group, in a Review article on the creative use of colbur, wrote that people in television have had to learn a new technical language. They now speak of Munsell references (a system of colour definition based on the hue, saturation and lightness), luminaires, Kelvins, lumens and vertical apertures.

`Gone,' Levin wrote, 'were the old fam- iliar names in our paintboxes—yellow ochre. burnt sienna, ultramarine vanished into a new and unfamiliar language which had to do with . . . chrominance, ance, dichroics. saturation and desatura- tion, fringing and fall-off. Some of us wondered "where had all the flowers gone?" ' In one conference a couple of years ago. he felt that engineers and tech- nicians had left the deSigners and artists uncertainly floundering, 'rather stunned by it all'. 1 think it seems as though many of them still are. 'Lights for colour are hotter, brighter and more numerous,' Levin pointed out, 'each one has to be finely positioned, each one has to be neck- breakingly looked at—a long and tiring job rather like playing multi-level chess on a board thirty foot high.

'In variety, ballet and music, the lighting director has a new and interesting involve- ment in the use of colour filters for en- vironmental lighting. Unfortunately the inheritance from the music hall still per- vades most of these programmes, which seem universally cliché-ridden both in style and choice of colour. 'The old secur- ity of moonlight blue and magenta is, how- ever, slowly being shaken up by the daring and stylish brashness of the pop scene; somewhere between the two; new styles born of the disciplines of television will emerge.' There is a lot more to colour tele- vision than wearing a gaudy tie.

But it is not as yet possible to rely heavily on colour to establish atmospheres and moods, for the simple reason that most people still have monochrome sets. There is a danger of over-reliance on effects that cannot reach most of the audience.

The opening of Dr Who 1) is brilliant in colour, immediately making it clear that one is about to see some spooky goings on; in black and white the threats are milder. In a recent episode in which an evil machine was used to conjure up hallucinations emblemising victims' worst fears, an unfortunate American senator was mortally maddened by a vision of a Chinese dragon. It was blood-red, and the most terrifying thing about it was its red- ness. Its redness seemed to throb with pain.

`Darpana : Arts-Lab of Ahmedabad'. in Music on 2 (nac. 2), made good use of colour. Produced .and written by Margaret Dale, the programme was about the Dar- pana Academy of Dance, Drama, Music and Puppetry. in India. and One learned a great deal about the performers' sensitivity and imagination from the colourful subtle- ties of their costumes.

James Mossman always demonstrates a sound grasp of the meaning of colours. I lk programme on the arts, Review Ow 2) is one of the reliable pleasures of tele- vision. It is in the tradition of Huw Wheldon's Monitor, but Mossman pro- vides a bit more light relief from the solemnity of artistic creation. I enjoyed For Your Pleasure, a short film he presen- ted about a Constable landscape's desec ration by buildings and roaring traffic. At last, this painting and all the others beside it were as ugly as the city surrounding the art gallery. He also showed some classical Japanese prints, with sonie lovely pale colour washes.

At the end of the rainbow there is a television set.