monochrome is the future

Home > Society > monochrome is the future

Apparently, there are 7161 people in the UK who are currently registered as owning a black-and-white television. Now, from Schindler’s List to The Artist I love black-and-white films and I fully concede that, by eschewing much of today’s tech gimmickry, I do live a little in the past, but a black-and-white tele, come on peeps get with the programme, literally and metaphorically. Notwithstanding the lower licence fee, £49 as opposed to the more colourful counterpart’s £150.50, what’s that all about, is it not a curiously high number and completely fascinating?

The return to grace of vinyl has shown that retro-hipsters can have an impact on public perception and have the generously hirsute of Shoreditch decided to go all old school and ditch their Netflix subscription in favour three golden channels, the test-card and a dodgy aerial? Nah, I doubt it and this would have them choking on their organic craft beer and copper-still-produced sarsaparilla gin. It is also widely accepted that, even though a licence is still required for any iPlayer device-downloading, fewer and fewer young millennials have an actual, physical television set so they’re unlikely to be within this 7000 number. For this belligerent band-of-brothers it’s a hard-core all-or-nuffink. Honest, your Honour.

Television and radio technology historian Jeffrey Borinsky throws some light on this phenomenon: “There are several hundreds of collectors like myself who have many black and white TVs. Not everyone wants new-fangled 4K Ultra HD, satellite dishes and a screen that’s bigger than your room when you can have television in glorious black and white. Thirty years ago, you could still buy excellent black-and-white TVs, mainly small portables, and it’s reassuring to know that people still use them.” Ah, there we have the truth, estranged collectors enjoying a sepia-hued dotage along with your great aunt Audrey who still celebrates Virginia Wade’s 1977 Wimbledon win every year. Bit of a disappointment really.

However, the black-and-white television remains something of a time machine. It’s a nostalgic nod to how things used to be, to whatever imagined past serves our drink-addled memory best. A black-and-white past versus the quasi-dystopian Black Mirror present in which even the creator, Charlie Brooker, couldn’t have predicted how disturbingly close to the truth many of his predictions within the tremendous alternate-future series would become. Thankfully, the trough justice of a fictional PM copulating with a pig, featured in the pilot episode, remains somewhat elusive…though let’s not forget the idea germinated from David Cameron’s alleged artiodactylia excesses within the Bullingdon Club.

Notwithstanding the fact that the past never really equated to great programming, I have to admit there’s a certain appeal to this quaint view. No channel-hopping, no multi-tasking, distractions and declining attention spans, no losing another weekend to the night-long binge-watching of the latest must-miss US box set. Back to a time when the tele was occasionally even turned off for a little quiet contemplation. Back to a time when we grasped the opportunity to fill our mind’s reservoir with creative, imaginative and optimistic thoughts. Hey, those 7000 cathode-ray-revivalists are truly the outriders for a better knowledge-based tomorrow!