For those watching in Outer Hebrides, it’s black and white

NEARLY 50 years have passed since the BBC ushered in the age of colour television, with the corporation beating the Germans to the technological breakthrough by a matter of weeks and broadcasting the Wimbledon tennis championships in glorious colour.

But while most households today could not be without a high-definition flat-screen colour television, a small minority of 9,000 families are still watching on a black and white set, according to figures from TV Licensing, the body charged with collecting the licence fee.

In keeping with its huge population, London has the highest number of black and white sets, with the NW10 postcode area, which covers Willesden and Harlesden, boasting 51 monochrome TV homes. But when calculated as a percentage of households with black and white televisions, an unexpected area tops the chart.

The Outer Hebrides, the archipelago off the northwest coast of Scotland that includes Harris and Lewis, is the region with the greatest percentage of homes owning black and white televisions, with 0.16 per cent of all households, around 20 homes out of approximately 12,500, holding a monochrome licence.

In Belfast, second on the list, 0.13 per cent of household have a black and white licence, roughly 200 homes from a total of 155,000.

Ian Fordham, chairman of the Outer Hebrides Tourism Industry Association, said: “The demographic here is skewed towards the young and the elderly. So maybe the older generation explains it.”

There is, perhaps, a more prosaic reason. A monochrome licence costs £49, against a colour licence at £145.50. The remoteness of the islands may lead residents to believe they have little chance of being caught if they falsely declare what kind of set they own.

Colour television was introduced by Sir David Attenborough, the naturalist, while he was controller of BBC Two in 1967.

He told the Christmas issue of Radio Times magazine: “It seemed to me I owed it to the British people. When I heard that the Germans were going to introduce colour television, I said, ‘Hang on, we can’t have that.’ And we got on the air three weeks before them. It was fairly childish, but it made me laugh.”

It took 10 years for the number of colour sets to overtake their black and white counterparts, but at the turn of the century there were still 212,000 monochrome licences in force. That figure has fallen nearly 20 per cent every year.