It\u2019s a thought at the forefront of Doctor Who<\/a> fans\u2019 minds at the moment, after reports that the BBC are looking into colourising<\/a> old black-and-white episodes as part of the series\u2019 60th anniversary celebrations.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019 monochrome masterpiece Citizen Kane. <\/span><\/p>\n There was similar spluttering when festive fave It\u2019s a Wonderful Life was given a digital paint job, with one of its surviving stars, Jimmy Hawkins, saying, \u201cI like the black-and-white version, because that\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Of course, the technology that was available then is a universe away from what\u2019s around now. Where some of those colourised films from the \u201980s 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\u2019s They Shall Not Grow Old documentary, have been stunning in their verisimilitude.<\/span><\/p> But it\u2019s not just the technology. There seems to be an acceptance now that these colourised versions won\u2019t oust or eclipse the black-and-white originals. <\/span><\/p>\n When it was announced that Gold would be colourising two episodes of Hancock\u2019s Half Hour, there was barely a whiff of outrage from the comedian\u2019s fanbase. If you want to see The Blood Donor and Twelve Angry Men in their original grey tones, they\u2019re not going away. But if there\u2019s a chance that some monochrome-phobes might give these freshly painted episodes a try, then surely it\u2019s worth a shot?<\/span><\/p>\n 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. <\/span><\/p>\n With our televisions getting bigger and the resolution becoming sharper, these vintage episodes from the \u201960s are beginning to look ever more anachronistic, like listening to a scratchy Noel Coward 78 next to Kendrick Lamar\u2019s latest. <\/span>It\u2019s difficult to find any black-and-white movie or TV show on Netflix<\/a> and even BritBox<\/a> seems wary. While it welcomes plenty of antique TV, it has precious few non-colour series in its vast archive.<\/span><\/p>\n Not that colourising old black-and-white Doctor Who is entirely new. Some Jon Pertwee<\/a> 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<\/a> 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\u2019t have any chroma dot information, which meant it had to be colourised from scratch.<\/span><\/p>\n SVS Resources and Stuart Humphryes, who uses the alias Babelcolour, were entrusted with the job, with Humphryes painting \u2013 over an 18-month period \u2013 7,000 frames, while motion-estimation software interpolated the colour into the intervening frames.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n![\"""\"](\""https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/3\/2020\/03\/doctor-who-the-first-doctor-ef9706a.jpg?quality=90&crop=30px%2C0px%2C1163px%2C775px&resize=620%2C413"\" "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
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