Colour Comes to Canada

[edit of Thursday, June 23, 2011)]

Colour TV comes to Canada
 

So much happened in the fall of 1966 to keep us excited while waiting for promises of 1967---The Montreal World’s Fair and our country’s Centennial--- to come true. O glorious year with so much in it!  A thrill to be alive, and to be fifteen was very heaven. 1966 was Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel, held to celebrate his hit book In Cold Blood.  He ruled that guests must dress in black and/or white, an edict so counter to the prevailing trend of polychrome psychedelia, it was beyond chic.

Although by 1965 fully forty percent of new films were still in black and white, those of us not among Capote’s four hundred were content to glory in colour. Colour movies, of course, at the local and at downtown movie houses, but also colour toilet paper, pastel men’s dress shirts,  colour vinyl go-go- boots. And colour TV. Candy your eyes could taste. Empty carbs for hungry orbs. In 1966 it came to Canada.

Then, and not without fanfare, two national networks announced the coming of colour in the late summer.  We only had our old black and white set, and no plans to trade up, but anticipation was strong for an advance we wouldn’t be able to see in our own home for years to come. It was the very idea of colour, as an expansion of a known medium, as eye-pleasing, visceral gratification, that held us and inspired faith. Faith in a reward deferred, faith in technology we couldn’t afford, faith in the future.

We who lived in Montreal knew of it, of course---American colour. On our set colour broadcasts from south of the border had long flickered with grey snow,  still in monotone, no different from anything else beamed from Station WPTZ Burlington, Vermont. Only, each show in colour began with a hushed murmur, as if to bestow a privilege humbling to ponder: “The following program. Is brought to you. By Enn-Bee-See,  in… Living Color.”  Living, rather than just existing, the fate of those resigned to no-colour. (And that would be the American version of “programme” and “colour”; even their spelling was compact, modern, New World-efficient.) Under this breathy intro was heard a harp glissando while a cartoon peacock fanned his tail. In his stylized feathers, a gamut of greys, we saw no rainbow; we inferred it instead. Our hearts were lightly lifted, but also made covetous.

In the early Fifties, before Canadian colour was dreamt of, and  even American colour was reserved for specials like Hallmark Hall of Fame, Montreal convenience stores sold sheets of rainbowed cellophane to slip over your picture tube to offer a heightened-but-cheap experience. Patches of colour imbued the tube, with fidelity to naught but a vague notion of pretty.  As children were treated to this phenomenon for the annual telecast of Eaton’s department store Christmas Parade. Floats and marching bands suited this poor-man’s colour, suitable for the unsophisticated, or anyone under six.

Now, more than a decade after such risible efforts, Canadians were getting their own colour.  The CTV network in August, 1966 showed a preview of a new sci-fi series, Star Trek, weeks ahead of its September 8th premiere.  Older American shows that had already been in colour for years would now be seen that way in Canada, if you had colour TV. We were have-nots, but watched breathless anyway, as our 1954 Firestone rendered the highly sophisticated blue, red and green signals as a scale of grays.

Never mind. That didn’t stop the faint tingle up my back and arms as I watched Ed Sullivan and Get Smart, certain they were somehow new. TV Guide said so, and wasn’t it true that colourcasts were less distinct on a pre-colour set? Of course: that’s how you could tell colour was colour, even without the equipment to catch it. Contrast was suddenly poorer. Foreground and background slid together; you laboured to discern depth. (Meaning itself was muted: Dorothy’s wonder at Oz went unshared.)

No matter. Colour media, even in theory, was magic. Colour was Life, even if it had to be presumed. Dreaming made it precious. Trained in credulity, we accepted its glory as something mystic, unrevealed, holy. The Catholic Church was good for that; it taught you to take things on faith alone.

But the promised tingle of tinted TV--- dreamt of, believed in---was as nothing to actually being in a room where a  colour receiver was in operation. Colour TV wasn’t just inebriation. It was new happiness in a familiar vessel. Mood-altering, mind-expanding, a promise fulfilled every minute you were in its presence. To partake in the sacrament of colour TV meant first of all being somewhere not your home. Being in Betsy Hurley’s house, for instance. Or at Eatons.  Or in a motel.

At a motel in Skowhegan, Maine, the cabins didn’t have Colour TV but the “lobby” did---our hearts leapt up at the jolly shingle boasting this perk. Inside, guests were oddly indifferent to The NBC Saturday Night Movie, Ingrid Bergman in Joan of Arc, on view for free: The blue Paramount sky, the glint of aluminum armour, the cream cheese foundation on peasant cheeks…  Joan, alongside ads for Florient and Pillsbury, more than made up for our cabin’s shabby shower stall and musty carpet. 

In February 1965, Danny Kaye, hosting a broadcast of The Wizard of Oz, was at pains to prepare kids not just for the heart-stopping horror of Margaret Hamilton in greenface but to placate parents, too, over one conceit that had CBS execs worried: The story’s framing bookends are set in dull, monotone Kansas. Only the greater, central part was made in Technicolor. Fret not, your set ain’t busted, was the message Kaye delivered to ward off calls to the station.

Receivers were fussy, temperamental things in the days before tuning was automated. Colour sense is subjective, and idiosyncratic. People tolerated, knowingly or not, the vagaries of reception and display. For years it was not unusual to visit someone and find she was watching a poorly tuned set. A new form of tact emerged in pretending not to see that famous faces had turned George Hamilton-orange or crapulous green. Forbearing to notice was kinder to your host and easier  than listening to denials.

Memories of colour telecasts include the April, 1970 Oscars, preceded by a hockey game, which was memorable for being the first time I, a non-fan of the sport, understood that now you could actually distinguish one team from another. 

And while Grandma’s set in Sudbury was in for repair, we were kindly taken to her neighbour’s Magnavox to see an elephant shit on Ed Sullivan’s stage, followed by Julie Harris guest-starring as—what else?---a schoolmarm on Bonanza, in a cobalt blue skirt and whiter-than-white shirtwaist. Again, being in company for colour meant having to hide an embarrassing, if genuine, awe at being in the presence of that ordinary thing, television, now heightened by a saturated rendition of light on faces, costumes and sets that offered a sort of reality-plus,  one that approached truth but was so novel and dense with additional meaning as to suggest a parallel universe. Or heaven. [END]