To colourise or not to colourise – that is the question.
It’s a thought at the forefront of Doctor Who fans’ minds at the moment, after reports that the BBC are looking into colourising old black-and-white episodes as part of the series’ 60th anniversary celebrations.
But why now? If this idea had been floated 30 years ago there would have been uproar, such as in the 1980s when the company Color Systems Technology screen tested 10 minutes of colourised footage from Orson Welles’ monochrome masterpiece Citizen Kane.
There was similar spluttering when festive fave It’s a Wonderful Life was given a digital paint job, with one of its surviving stars, Jimmy Hawkins, saying, “I like the black-and-white version, because that’s the way it was shot and meant to be. The depths of the black and the white, a lot of work went into getting that look.”
Of course, the technology that was available then is a universe away from what’s around now. Where some of those colourised films from the ’80s looked like a child with a crayon set had gone to work on the negative, recent colourisations, such as the WWI footage from Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old documentary, have been stunning in their verisimilitude.
But it’s not just the technology. There seems to be an acceptance now that these colourised versions won’t oust or eclipse the black-and-white originals.
When it was announced that Gold would be colourising two episodes of Hancock’s Half Hour, there was barely a whiff of outrage from the comedian’s fanbase. If you want to see The Blood Donor and Twelve Angry Men in their original grey tones, they’re not going away. But if there’s a chance that some monochrome-phobes might give these freshly painted episodes a try, then surely it’s worth a shot?
Those black-and-white Doctor Who stories that we have now are already far from the versions that were first put out on VHS in the 1990s. Now, software can restore the original video look to these smudgy old tele-recordings.
With our televisions getting bigger and the resolution becoming sharper, these vintage episodes from the ’60s are beginning to look ever more anachronistic, like listening to a scratchy Noel Coward 78 next to Kendrick Lamar’s latest. It’s difficult to find any black-and-white movie or TV show on Netflix and even BritBox seems wary. While it welcomes plenty of antique TV, it has precious few non-colour series in its vast archive.
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Not that colourising old black-and-white Doctor Who is entirely new. Some Jon Pertwee episodes, first broadcast in colour, for years existed only as black and white tele-recordings (the original colour tapes having been junked). Until 2013, the only copy of The Mind Of Evil that survived was in black-and-white, until it was discovered that it was possible to recover the original colour by decoding chroma dot signals within the picture. Only when it was being readied for DVD release was it discovered that episode one didn’t have any chroma dot information, which meant it had to be colourised from scratch.
SVS Resources and Stuart Humphryes, who uses the alias Babelcolour, were entrusted with the job, with Humphryes painting – over an 18-month period – 7,000 frames, while motion-estimation software interpolated the colour into the intervening frames.
Humphryes tells RadioTimes.com: “When working on re-colourising footage, I’d adhere as closely as possible to authentic colours for settings and costumes and lighting. It’s important to match any surviving extant colour footage in the serial.”
He believes adding a splash of colour to an older story can give it a fresh lease of life.
“I think, if done with artistic merit, colourisation can be a positive transformative process which brings a new life and perspective to an old work. The originals should always be freely available, too, in tandem with any enhancements, but these stories have been watched and re-watched innumerable times over the last 60 years and fans know them backwards. Seeing them in colour can be like experiencing them for the very first time, seeing something new in an old friend.”
Humphryes reveals that, back in 2013 for the show’s 50th anniversary, soundings were made from within the BBC about colourising the very first Doctor Who episode, An Unearthly Child, only he and SVS Resources were too busy on The Mind Of Evil to commit to it. “The deadlines would have been too impractical to meet in time for the anniversary,” he says.
RadioTimes.com has contacted the BBC and BBC Studios for comment.
Humphryes says he hasn’t been approached to work on anything for the 60th anniversary festivities, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Advances in technology and in AI software colourisation are becoming quicker and cheaper, and if Gold can cough up the cash for two episodes of Hancock’s Half Hour, then surely the BBC colourising something with the international and commercial clout of Doctor Who doesn’t seem so fanciful.
1960s black and white Doctor Who isn’t Nosferatu or Citizen Kane – it never won gongs for its dynamic expressionist cinematography. It is really so profane to present it as the camera crew of 1963 saw William Hartnell and co? It’s simply an alternative way of looking at the show and, providing the BBC don’t do a George Lucas and squirrel the original away, that can only be a good thing, right?
Doctor Who is available to stream on BBC iPlayer with episodes of the classic series also available on BritBox – you can sign up for a 7-day free trial here.
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