On This Day: March 7th

On 7th March 1968 the BBC broadcast the news for the first time in colour on television – Newsroom, presented on BBC2 by Corbet Woodall from Studio A at Alexandra Palace in a new early-evening slot.

BBC2 had broadcast its first colour pictures from Wimbledon in 1967. By mid 1968, nearly every BBC2 programme was in colour. Six months later, colour came to BBC1.

David Attenborough, then controller of BBC2, was responsible for overseeing the new colour service. He notably took advantage of the new technology to introduce television coverage of snooker.

However, not everyone had a colour set, leading to commentator Ted Lowe's immortal quote

"...and for those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green."

One of Attenborough's most significant decisions was to order a 13-part series on the history of Western art to show off the quality of colour television. Written and presented by art historian Kenneth Clark and broadcast to universal acclaim in 1969, Civilisation set the blueprint for landmark authored documentaries that would follow.

The thirteen programmes in the series outline the history of Western art, architecture and philosophy since the Dark Ages. When first aired, and in later transmissions in Britain, the US and other countries, it reached an unprecedented number of viewers for an art series. Clark's book of the same title, based on the series, was published in 1969.

The TV series remains available on BBC's iPlayer here.

By 1969, BBC1 and ITV were regularly broadcasting in colour. The number of households owning a colour TV licence rose from 275,000 to 12 million by the early 70s.

In 1971 the first outside broadcast was made in colour for Ireland's RTÉ Television, when the country hosted the Eurovision Song Contest in Dublin.

This article is from our news archive. As a result pictures or videos originally associated with it may have been removed and some of the content may no longer be accurate or relevant.