Thread 16 - TalkLair: "Well, I'm not exactly quaking in my stylish-yet-affordable boots, but there's definitely something unnatural going on here."

[Kucinghitam]

(Previous thread 15).

Another year over, a new one just begun...

In the TalkLair, the hearth is glowing, the walls festooned with tinsel, books by non-approved authors line the shelves, rugs are down on the floors, the tree is twinkling with fairy lights (and possibly being clambered on by cats). The denizens of the lair are a welcoming bunch though, always eager for general chit-chat on all manner of topics.

We just won’t mention the gnawed bones of our prey Christmas roast beast over there in the corner of the cave…

Imagine Columbo on Isla Bryson’s case: “Just one more thing, sir….” He’d never have got away with it for so long.

I did think it probably wasn’t in black and white for normal people but everything was in black and white in our house so hard to know for sure. I clearly should go back to it for the excellent 70s colour palette!

Colour TV didn't come in "properly" until November 1969 in the UK, though I think there were some earlier test broadcasts that hardly anyone could watch! By Nov 69 I'd left home for That London and no TV at all (a tradition I continue). But at home we always had multiple ancient B&W TVs (all but one in the garage) because my dad was an army Signals officer on the techie side and would bring broken ones home to nurture back to life (like gerbils with a tummy ache) and pass spare ones on to whoever wanted them.

This has just reminded me of the TV we had in Catalunya, which was useful for news and language learning. I remember watching Monty Python, in English but subtitled in Catalan. Apparently the subtitlers simply translated what they heard, with no regard for meaning, so that in the dead parrot sketch the line "It has ceased to be!" appeared as "Ha agafat una abella" - he/she/it has seized a bee.

We didn’t get a telly at all until Christmas 1971 and that was black and white (as was my first telly after I’d left home, a little portable). Technology has changed so much in my lifetime.

Is the man in blue the dad from The Brady Bunch? I can see what he had for breakfast in his trousers!

I adore Murder She Wrote but Columbo is probably the best TV detective who isn't a detective from a book adaptation ever. They had the top three of those on The Rest is Entertainment podcast the other week - I think it was a bonus episode for paying members - and Richard Osman endeared himself to me by having Jessica Fletcher in second place and our man Columbo in first place. It works on so many levels and I think for a lot of us watching it back in the day when we were mere children it was all about the class difference even though we didn't know it then what we were loving was the so-called underdog getting on over on the criminal who thinks that he's the dogs bollocks and that Columbo in his grubby mac is a thicky. And then "Just one more thing" and criminal is so wrong it's hilarious. If I'm a bit low and find Columbo while I'm channel hopping my mood is lifted.

I adore Murder She Wrote but Columbo is probably the best TV detective who isn't a detective from a book adaptation ever.

I'd give a shout to Andy Sipowicz. I thought he was a great character in a brilliant series. Columbo is great, obv.

My word- those trousers don't leave much to the imagination, do they?!

Unlike artant, I somehow managed to watch everything in colour - despite us not actually getting a colour television until well into the 80s.

I think we got ours in 1974, we definitely had it for not too long before my daddy died which was 1975.

The first programme I saw in colour was Scooby Doo. It was magical!

I'm struggling to remember when my parents got their first colour TV - my dad died in 1972, aged only 58, and I think they had one before then. I was married by then and we had an ex-rental B&W that cost very little, but the tuning knob was missing and if you wanted to change channels you had to grip the spindle with a pair of eyebrow tweezers. And if, as it did occasionally, it started flickering, you had to hit it two inches from the bottom on the left hand side, which solved the problem. We were students still, at that point, so we had no money for anything better!

That's reminded me of something similar from my childhood! English language programmes were (still are) subtitled in Malay. Sometimes the translator would mishear or not understand the metaphor or both.

Can't remember the programme, but the dialogue was "All hell's gonna break loose!" and the subtitle said "All the bells are going to make noise!" ("Semua loceng akan berbunyi!")

My mother still remembers my brother, aged 3, hurtling into the kitchen when we got our first colour TV in 1972, shouting "Mummy! Humpty's GREEN!" the first time he watched it...

About the time of the start of colour tv I remember having some dreams in black and white. Anyone else?

I stopped living with a TV in the mid 70s and only had b&w before then, so when I (eventually) grew up and started re-educating myself via DVDs the colours in Star Trek were a delightful surprise.

That bloke's blue trousers were only the half of it, his patterned shirt had extravagantly wide and flowing sleeves gathered into long, close-fitting cuffs. All round fancy dandy (he was also annoying and homicidal).

My Dad's boss got one of the very first colour TVs, in 1969, and we were all invited round to watch it. We sat, totally in the dark, watching The Black and White Minstrel Show. Strange times.

Hi, Tene!

Till I was ten (1980) we had a monochrome, with valves. Reception was via a rabbit ear aerial for a long time and aged 6, I was made to hold it up, so that my dad and his cronies could watch the cup final.

He had a big box of valves and whenever it died, with a whiff of smoke, he'd wait for it to cool down and replace the dead valve.

Did you get to see the game too, @SinnerBoy ?

Interesting that two of you are remembering first colour tellies in relation to when your dads died. The reason I remember when we got our first telly (the black and white one; have no idea how long afterwards we got colour, presumably because it wasn’t anchored by a major life event) was that my dad died in 1970 and mum bought one before Christmas in 1971 because she couldn’t face another Christmas without him and thought it might help.

Oh and one house I lived in briefly in about 1990 had a colour telly which only had some of the colours. I recall watching Wimbledon in monochrome red. That was strange.

When colour was still a novelty (so early 70s) I remember some people seemed to feel their status was enhanced by having really low-level colour, so you could see it was colour TV (high status) but didn't flaunt it (even higher status). Most odd, and a terrible waste if applied to Star Trek (they were probably too posh for Trek though, so not a worry).

As a child, Star Trek in colour was a revelation, it was so bright!

I remember the people who flaunted having colour, they'd adjust the set so that the colours verged on fluorescent. We weren't really low level colour but never did the bright stuff.

Star Trek colour was a joy and gave the - eccentricities of William Ware Theiss's costumes the visibility they deserved.

It was, I loved all of the original series. I used to watch it at my friend's house after we'd been to Brownies and it was the highlight of my week.

I think it was a Deep Space 9 episode, but there's one called "Trials and Tribble-ations" where some of the crew go back to the past and it's all beautifully spliced with "Trouble with Tribbles". One scene shows them before they set off and they're all in the original uniforms. Dax hams it up by mentioning her short dress and how the tricorders are done with 'black leather, silver highlights'. Love that episode.

And responded to Siskos' explanation of the colour codes: In the old days, operations officers wore red, command officers wore gold.

With: And women wore less. while doing a little twirl in her scant uniform.

Yes, that's it. Wonderful stuff!

I especially enjoyed Sisko getting Kirk's 'autograph' and one of the temporal police saying he'd probably have done the same.