How Sweden LIED About Colour TV | An AMTV Documentary

The year is 1962, the USA and Japan have debuted COLOUR TELEVISION to their eager audiences, whilst Europe lags behind... But in SWEDEN, it seems that colour TV has come early! A brand new technology has been discovered, one that will grant any viewer a colour picture with existing black & white sets... sounds too good to be true, right?
In this AMTV mini-documentary, we travel back to 1962, and find out just what happened in Sweden, and just what this miraculous new technology was...
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#sweden #colour #television

[@v1nag3r]

Color introduction to TV channels is something I find very interesting, it's sad that some countries did not take the measures to archive their color.

[@caw25sha]

It's now well known that the BBC wiped large amounts of what are now considered classic programmes to reuse the expensive tape. Many of the early Dr Who episodes for example.

[@v1nag3r]

@@caw25sha Not only countries like the UK but also the U.S, a lot of Asian and European countries and the majority of African ones too.

[@petefluffy7420]

How can you archive colour?

[@v1nag3r]

@@petefluffy7420 What I mean by archives, I mean archiving the transition from B&W to Colour.

[@petefluffy7420]

@@v1nag3r That doesn't strike me as anything worth remembering. I can't see descendants sitting on anyone's knee listening with rapt attention to tales of television screens becoming coloured. More like being bored out of their wits being told "back in my day it was all in black and white" and asking, only out of politeness, what is black and white? Magpies kid, magpies.

[@simbastra]

My parent´s generation spoke about this hoax for decades afterwards. Some of them had evidently fallen for it, but still looked back on it with great amusement. It goes down in Swedish history as probably the greatest April fools joke of all time.

[@milyrouge]

Yes, my mother still talks about it. She swears they didn't fall for it, but I'm not so sure! 😊

[@macjonte]

My grandparents tried it. :D They still talked about it while they were around.

[@PlaceholderforBjorn]

My parents talked about it as well. This is the biggest April's fools joke ever. For certain in Sweden

[@BolinFoto]

They are still talking about it and the papers run an article about it every 1st of april. My favorite was On SVT 1988 when we could see how a grower in Småland invested in planting and growing telephone poles - twig-free too :P But that sock is all we hear about :P

[@threegoldmartlets]

My future wife and her mother did indeed try it. After all Kjell Stensson was well known and respected.

[@svenrosvall755]

Growing up in Sweden I heard this story many times. Most people say they did actally fall for the prank. Part of this was Kjell Stensson's appearance. He was a famous scientist who appeared on an early science show "Fråga Lund". So his authority contributed a lot to this prank. Good of you guys to dig out this video. I am too young to have seen it myself.

[@rimmersbryggeri]

washing shirts in coffee whitener is another swedish classic.

[@TobiasHarms]

I didn't know that he was part of fråga Lund but that does explain a lot regarding why people fell for it.

[@nissekram]

​@@rimmersbryggeriWith the difference that that actually worked ...

[@rimmersbryggeri]

@@nissekram yeah it did because it was optical whitener basically.

[@rickybuhl3176]

I think a fair few of us would have fallen for the same if David Attenborough had delivered an English version.

[@Gulamaja]

This is a classic in Sweden and is still talked about as a legendary prank.

[@PlaceholderforBjorn]

State funded pranks

[@Fibonacci64]

But now we have SD fooling everybody@@PlaceholderforBjorn

[@Bawamba]

SD is the best thing that have happend to Sweden. Just look how horrible Sweden is atm due to the Socialdemocrats and their likes. They have destroyed Sweden. Thank God we got SD in, and may they be the biggest partie next election, for the sake of the future of Sweden@@Fibonacci64

[@kvasir8931]

@@Fibonacci64 "Hey look at me, Im special, im gonna insert politics into everything, herp derp"

[@snubbedpeer]

My late grandmother told me about an April fools joke on Norwegian radio long before television. They said to place a mirror in front of the radio, and then a towel in front of the mirror. On a given signal people were supposed to remove the towel and then they would see an image. And everyone did 🤣🤣

[@jannejohansson3383]

Science! We aren't much brighter today, in deep lines of people.

[@joelouis-arena4061]

They still experiment with that in Norway 😉

[@alexandravladmets8206]

@snubbedpeer I suspect you are Norwegian and @jealous-arena4061 a Swede 😁

[@Evansmustard]

i would have 100% fallen for this if i was around back in the day. no shame

[@uplink-on-yt]

I would have fallen for it right now, on my iPad, if I had any nylon stockings around. It's so ridiculous, I couldn't dismiss it off the bat.

[@ttaibe]

Same, easy.

[@tonycasey3183]

We are almost always willing to believe we can get what we want for free or little effort. Remember the app that made your iPhone waterproof, and the number of devices that were ruined when people tried it?

[@ttaibe]

@@tonycasey3183 no, that really happened. I am guite gullible at times. I often forget it is April 1st. But I would not have fallen for that one. Not paranoid enough I guess

[@SofaKingShit]

I would have loudly denied that such a thing had ever happened to me whilst l was out in public, and only ever mentioned it rarely indoors, and always in hushed tones.

[@ulfehrning7009]

This is one of the by far most elaborated and best April fools I have ever seen. More or less everybody in Sweden was talking about this for years afterwards, sometimes even today. I think quite many nylon stockings were sacrificed that evening all around Sweden. Kjell Stensson was well known for the TV-viewers for participating in several radio and TV shows, easy explaining new and complicated technology. He was also operational manager at the national Swedish Radio and TV company.

[@freeculture]

You should get some stats on the sales of nylon stockings after this day 🙂

[@vwestlife]

There were color filters you could buy to put in front of your TV screen which were tinted blue at the top and green at the bottom, so that a landscape scene showing blue sky and green grass would come out looking similar to a color image. And then there were the Col-R-Tel and Colordaptor, two kits to add a spinning color disc to a black & white set to produce a true color image, but they took up a lot of space, required electronic skill to install, and generated an uncomfortably flickery image.

[@richardw3470]

I remember those plastic sheets; attached to the front of the TVs. My grandmother's friend three doors up had one. It was all over the street she had color TV! She turned the TV so it faced out the window and half the neighborhood was on her front porch or sidewalk. What a gyp. Pink and yellow (?) bars between the blue and green - really hilarious.

[@shaun5552]

A lot of arcade games from the late-1970's and into the 1980's used that basic approach. A B&W picture, displayed on a B&W screen which had a plastic overlay with different colours. Since arcade games of that era only displayed characters in a series of pre-determined places on the screen, the basic idea worked well enough so long as the coloured overlay was correctly aligned.

[@hellmalm]

I’m not surprised at all, that you British people would enjoy this kind of humor. We have found your slightly dry humor extremely close to our own, one of my personal favorites from BCC back in the day was Blackadder. Thank you for this video, much appreciated!

[@jsollien127]

My grandfather fell for it, still laughing while retelling the story in the -80s. I think nylon stockings were getting popular at the same time, adding to the effectiveness of the joke.

[@squidcaps4308]

Nylon stockings became popular in 1939, but then the production ceased during the war, and then sky rocketed right after the war. By 1962 nylon stockings were just everyday, normal thing.

[@butlaoctu4464]

Very similar thing happened in Poland. Not with color but with TV at all, in newspaper there was an extensive article on how to convert your radio to view tv with screen made of white cloth. And a significant number of people tried to do it.

[@butlaoctu4464]

Cloth should be linen, cut to be 625 threads long as this will be standard of television. Screen you have to soak in mercury solution of recipe below

[@swedishspymuseum]

What's often forgotten in this history is the backlash. Stensson was seen as one of the most trustworthy science reporters at the time. For him to "stoop" the a Aprils fools joke, was simply unthinkable. Therefore many people contacted the Broadcast organisation with complaints. Also forgotten is that the price of a pair of Nylons at the time was 30-50 Euros by today's money, sometimes more for the recommended model, hence making this prank very costly for those who tried it. In short, it wasn't well received at the time and reading the outcry in the press is hilarious today.

[@TitaniusAnglesmith]

It's a shame we don't do things like this on state TV today. It encourages critical thinking.

[@birrextio6544]

I saw this joke live and since the TV had the central position in the home, the whole family saw it at the same time. We where laughing hard and was amazed when we heard that some people actually believed it was for real.

[@-Devy-]

@@birrextio6544 Uh huh... "some people"

[@bjorreb7487]

Kjell Stensson was a very popular TV host with programs about tecnical things. People belived in him. My mother cut her nylon pantyhose while my dad tried to not show his laugh. He knew what day it was. It's still one of the best april fool on TV here in Sweden.

[@eken81]

I live in Sweden and when the topic April Fools jokes comes up this one is often mentioned first. I am not old enough to have lived at the time of this joke, but would likely have fallen for it. I have been told that my grandmother did.

[@rogeratygc7895]

A few years later there was a joke that black and white television broadcasts would begin in South Africa, but that the (apartheid) government had ruled that the black and white parts of the pictures must be viewed on different sets....

[@TobiasHarms]

Unintentionally entertaining is that you when you said Swedish words , "sveriges television" for instance, managed to be spot on doing it with a Finnish accent ❤😊 It was so spot on that my wife (a swedish tescher) actually thpught thay you were from Finland 😊 Swedish language is hard so absolutely no shade. Im just easily amused 😊

[@jakob3044]

I mean, you could probably spell it in a more engl-ish way and the pronunciation would be way closer

[@pappardn7660]

There was another famous April Fools-joke i Sweden during the sixties. They informed on the news that they have discovered a way to identify those who hadn't payed license fee for their television set, and that they could turn of the picture on their televisions with the sound remaining. Then turned off the picture for everybody. They got a lot of angry calls from people who actually had paid, and also a lot of calls from people who reported that they owned a television, and wanted to start pay.

[@joelouis-arena4061]

Tack. Aldrig hört om den. ☺️

[@TeleviseGuy]

I remember I read somewhere that in my country, Israel, there used to be a time before color broadcasts officially launched, and the government had a law banning color broadcasts - their excuse was that the military used the frequencies or something like that - so one guy made a special device that removed the restrictions that were built into TV sets sold in the country so that you could see a color image, and it became very popular. Eventually, as the government realized that the law was useless, that ban was lifted, and the Israeli Broadcasting Authority broadcasted their evening news program in color for the first time, with the iconic phrase "...and this evening, we are in color".

[@lightbearer313]

I remember a similar story to this in my country (Australia) decades ago. Like Sweden, TV started here in 1956, but we didn't get colour TV until 1975, but many of the TV programs were transmitted in colour prior to 1975. This is also a major difference between the world of then and now in that new consumer technology basically arrives in most nations about the same time nowadays.

[@eyeball226]

Wait, so if there was a built in restriction that could be disabled then the TVs must have actually been colour ones. Why would anyone be selling or buying colour TVs when there are no colour TV broadcasts? And also what would be the point in disabling the restriction unofficially if the broadcasts weren't in colour? I must be missing information here because it doesn't make any sense like this.

[@AL5520]

As someone who experienced it, it is true but inaccurate. The Israeli government, mostly the prime minister Ben Gurion, refused to introduce tv broadcasting as it is low quality and distracting entertainment that will corrupt the youth. In 1966 the government agreed to start educational transmission for schools and in 1968 full transmission for the generalm7public started. Transitions began in black and white but during the 70' newer equipment and foreign programs were in colour and people also watched broadcas from our neighbours, mostly Jordan (they even had news in Hebrew on channel 6, that was in English), some from Lebanon and in northern coastal areas with a good antenna even from Cyprus. This was considered as wasteful since colour TVs were expensive and imported so the government instructed IBA (Israeli Broadcast Authority) to block colour transitions. What the did was to erase from the broadcast signal the colour synchronisation channel, and without it tv sets defaulted to black and white image. An electrical engineer named Mooly Eden (later became Intel's CEO) invented a device that adds to the incoming signal the missing sync channel (it was an estimation so results weren't always great. My friend had one and the first colour program I saw was an episode of Little House on the Prairie. First free colour broadcast was the song selection show for the 1979 Eurovision that was in jerusalem, and the Eurovision itself. From 1981 more content escaped colour erasing and the first official colour, including the 1982 world cup, broadcasting was the news in 1983.

[@samgunn12]

…and that was the last Swedish joke ever. Satisfied they had cracked humour and created a masterpiece of international proportions they returned to their ordinary lives and ate crispbread and herring.

[@eriklagergren7124]

This is a classic in swedish culture. My grandma has talked about it several times

[@tfritzon]

My grandmother fell for it and to her embarrassment jad to admit to my more tech savvy grandfather that she'd ruined a pair of nylon stockings, which wasn't entirely cheap back in those days. It's still considered to be the gratest April fools joke in Swedish history.

[@marktubeie07]

As a child, I remember a _'colour television test'_ performed here in Australia in the late 60s. It was actually an optical illusion of an AMPOL petrol logo flashing rapidly, resulting in an illusion of the red/blue/white parts of the logo appearing. It did actually, sort of, work! I would kill to see footage of this today as I remember it clearly. If anyone out there knows where I could see this online? It's probably now 'lost media'. (FYI, aired on Sydney's TCN9 & was hosted by Brian Henderson to promote Ampol).

[@bascomnextion5639]

I too remember that.

[@chrisantoniou4366]

Yep, I remember it. It was based on the persistence of vision and the colour depended on the frequency of the strobing (I think).

[@MorgoUK]

There was a similar thing in the UK about ‘67? It was on a science programme (but not Tomorrow’s World, I think). It was just a spinning disc with sectors on the screen which magically appeared in colour on our 405 line b&w set. I swear I could see red, green and purple rings, my brother saw red, yellow and pale blue. Edit: the TV show might have been “How”

[@darylcheshire1618]

I remember a Graham Kennedy sketch where he said that viewers can watch colour on their B&W TVs and went to show penguins and magpies etc.

[@marktubeie07]

@@darylcheshire1618 😂😂😂😂 Kennedy was brilliant !!

[@LostsTVandRadio]

1st July 1967 was proudly trumpeted by the BBC as being the launch date of colour TV in Britain, though programmes such as Late Night Line Up were already being broadcast in colour during spring 67. As you say, some European broadcasters were transmitting colour tests in late 66 - I recall seeing a BBC2 trade test film in colour around Christmas 1966 in a department store. Everyone was agog!!

[@Sacto1654]

I believe both PAL and SECAM started their rollouts in 1967.

[@newforestpixie5297]

My elder sister looked after children at a large house where I saw my first colour tv . I would’ve been about 5 & although impressed by the screen showing coloured boxes & stripes I recall thinking watching Catweasel or High Chapperell in black & white was better…

[@Fiery.Dragon]

The intro to this video is the slowest playing of Rhythm is a Dancer I have ever heard~ Kudos!

[@RebeccaPhythian]

This video is fascinating. Sweden had a totally different approach to us and his verbal explanation was... quite something 😂 I like how they explained the science behind it though, so everybody could have an idea of exactly how the colour transmission was formed ❤

[@fusionsub]

Never knew about this. This was honestly quite an interesting watch

[@astrecks]

One of the most memorable April fool pranks on TV for me was back in the 1980s, made by a regional news program here in the UK; the prank was showing a new technology for sleeping: a microwave bed that gave you the equivalent of 8 hours of sleep in 2 hours! Amazing! I could party until 6 a.m. and still get enough sleep for work at 9 a.m. 😁

[@QPRTokyo]

NTSC was crap compared to PAL. I remember American students being surprised how better the colour was with PAL system. I had a Sony TV in England, when I moved to Japan I was shocked by the low definition and dreadful colour. I had the same type of Sony TV in the UK and Japan. Majority of channels were VHF still in Japan I was shocked. A Japanese friend of mine who went to the UK in the early eighties and said I was correct and admitted it was a mistake to use the American system. Naturally Japan pushed to get rid of NTSC and go for a more advanced system. Japan became a pioneer of HD television. Now of course most countries have great television technology.

[@joshuarosen465]

NTSC came out a decade before PAL, it was brilliant for the time. NTSC was backwards compatible with the existing black and white user base so broadcasters didn't have to send out two signals. PAL was better because it came later so they were able to correct the flaws in NTSC. But you know what's better than PAL, 720P HD and whats better than that is 1080P and what's better than that is 4K. You get my drift, technology gets better as time goes by.

[@5roundsrapid263]

It’s a moot point now since practically everything is HD. PAL looked better, but NTSC had a higher frame rate.

[@paulohagan3309]

I had a friend in the 70s at a British university studying electronic engineering and he was always going on about how the Americans had gone too fast and should have waited to get in a decent system.

[@jayrogers8255]

@@paulohagan3309then don’t tell him about the CBS Colorwheel system!!!

[@theworkshopwhisperer.5902]

The BBC spaghetti tree incident is definitely my favourite example of a broadcaster having a little fun with his audience.

[@TheEulerID]

The string vest reminds me of Raymond Baxter appearing in just such a thing (and his underpants) in an episode of the Goodies called "It Might As Well Be String" in his Tomorrow's World persona extolling the many virtues of string, including using it to substituted for copper cables "it's safer and cheaper because it doesn't work!".

[@ElectromagneticVideos]

What a fabulous video! I have always been fascinated by the history of color TV around the world but have never come across that "breakthrough". The Swedes were years ahead of the rest of us :) Actually I was thinking of the BBC spaghetti tree report as I was watching your video - glad you showed a clip of it. I'm sure its hard for the younger viewers to imagine what the world was like before the internet and people were vulnerable to believing what they saw on TV. Hmm - maybe things haven't changed that much after all. Regards from Canada!

[@IrisGalaxis]

A tradition in my country is, on New Year's Eve (or New Year's Day, can't remember at the moment), the daily news broadcast consists entirely of bloopers made by the news announcers and journalists while recording for news during the year.

[@DieselDahl]

I believe a similar April fools joke were broadcasted in Norway, not sure which year though. All you had to do was to turn off all the lights so it was completely dark, except for the glow of the TV of course.

[@Phiyedough]

There was a thing on Blue Peter where they showed something in colour on a black & white broadcast. It was a disc with different colour segments and by rotating that disc at a certain speed (related to the screen refresh rate?) you would see it in colour. It was pure optical illusion but it did work.

[@paulohagan3309]

I remember something similar on 'Tomorrow's World' in the 70s.

[@jkmac625]

Technically the national broadcaster of Sweden at the time of the colour switchover wasn't called SVT but SR (Sveriges Radio TV). At least they were still using the SR logo on the end credits when Abba won Melodifestivalen in 1974. It would appear the name changed to SVT in 1979 having been previously Radiotjänst (1956-1957) and Sveriges Radio TV (1957-1979). The name Radiotjänst continued to be used as the name of their TV licencing body until the TV licence was scrapped in 2019.

[@KarlT1999]

To add salt to the injury nylon stocking was so prohibitively expensive at the time. It's like saying to people that smashing a iPhone screen will enable hologram display function of the said smartphone.

[@valle2601]

i was born like 40 years after this and still hear about it. My great-great parents allso thought the people on the TV could see them so they allways dressed up to see the news

[@melasnexperience]

I'd love a video on the spaghetti harvest - that one always makes me laugh.

[@WhatTheHellIsGoingOnIn]

Another great documentary Adam!

[@AdamMartyn]

Thank you!

[@The2wanderers]

I think this is great because it basically describes how a colour LCD screen works. White backlight modulated through a crystal and then passed through a polarized filter screen to get rid of the undesired wavelengths.

[@Andrey_Gysev]

So we can use CRT as a backlight and put a thin mesh of liquid crystals controlled by tv box or something on its screen?

[@EasterWitch]

I remember my dad trying to redo this exact prank on us kids when our colour tv broke and we had to use the old 60s tv set for a few months. I don't recall us actually finding any nylon stockings though.

[@Eaglebrace]

Fellow swede here, I heard bout this story from my father, Had quite a good laugh and still a very funny tale. But i do appreciate too see this my self first time like my parents did. The prank is truly a legendary one . And i am so happy that you made a little documentary bout it so the rest of the world can have a little laugh of this and learn the story too.

[@kaitlyn__L]

Despite the title. Even knowing that a diffraction grille produced changes in brightness, with only some minor rainbow fringing on the edges. By the end, I was beginning to wonder if you really could get the changes in brightness to correspond with colours as in the “test” card with just the right density of stocking and if you did get your head placement juuuuust right. The power of deadpan delivery! That is, until the overexposed daffodils which should’ve been yellow yet were white as far as the “test card” was concerned. Then it fell down again for me 😅

[@bernardevans1]

Plastic covers to simulate coloUr Television, using a similar principle were widely sold in the Early 70’s. In one episode of Coronation Street, Stan Ogden lost the money for Hilda’s colour television and Eddie Yeats (Twiggy in Royal Family) bought Hilda the screen cover as compensation. They were cheap and gimmicky and people bought knowing just that!

[@squidcaps4308]

Yup, and really were just based on sky being blue and ground being dark orange, aka brown. So, putting blue on top and orange at the bottom some pics look like they are in color..

[@disketa25]

Fun fact: the similar technique was actually tried for real in USSR, in search of a seamless B/W-to-color transition path. They tried attaching a grid filled with colored glass grains in a specific pattern - which, when combined with a similar pattern embedded in signal brightness, would make image appear in color. The test was successful, but the resulting image was somewhat unstable (any degree of interference or noise in analog signal would cause some degree of color shift) and resulting in only a quarter of horizontal resolution (1/3 remaining for obvious reasons, and some more on top of that for redundancy). Not to mention brightness issues and required scanline-perfect mesh manufacturing vertical precision. So, in the end, it was a dead end and a tremendous failure, which, alongside to the failure of their own independent color TV standard development (which tried to squeeze color in the existing B/W infrastructure), was the reason USSR joined SECAM standardization initiative.

[@autizmo7051]

Never knew this was an April fools joke. I just heard form people in my family that people at one point thought putting nylon in front of a tv would make it color.

[@hakansundberg5105]

About this april fools joke, it is one of them we remember most vividly! Very popular. Nice of you to catch attention to it!

[@gamingwithhui4707]

my parents used to tell me how my grandads on both sides of the family fell for this and cut open pairs of my grandmas' nylon stockings and they thought it was hilarious to see the shameful looks on my grandads faces when they realised what they had done

[@trainjacobsweden]

I like that you used the 1980-2001 logo for SVT, I miss it so much!

[@robfritz841]

As kids, we had a Magnavox Game System that had translucent plastic color ‘skins’ that we Scotch-taped over our old B&W tv. Circa 1973, PONG!!

[@ryttyr14]

As a Swede I have obviously heard of this, but I had no idea that it was specifically a Swedish thing.

[@swededude1992]

That prank still lives on here in Sweden among the younger generations, that only ever had collourtv. :)

[@richardw3470]

I've told people about the spaghetti harvest. Some have actually believed there are spaghetti trees. There's one born every minute.

[@AndersJackson]

I am born 1964, so I obviously missed this. My mother and her family watched it though, and she was 15 years then. She got excited about the idea and rushed our top get some stockings, but my grandfather (morfar) laughter man har realised what day or was, so she never got to cutting it up. They all talked about this with a great smile. Even my mother, that is still alive.

[@Holammer]

This is one of the April fools' legends along with the BBC's spaghetti tree harvest prank (which was mentioned towards the end).

[@nunodn]

I don't know if this has happened in other coutries, but in Portugal there was a time that scammers phoned people to do a satellite mammography. And they would go to a window for the scan to take place... Gosh...

[@viktorstrand4431]

My grandmother told me about this. She said that the excitement and the expectations were so high that people actually believed there was a bit of color on the screen. She told me that she exclaimed "I can see the colors" once they put the stocking infront of the screen

[@hanswalltin]

This is by far the greatest April fools prank of all time!🤣

[@sykoteddy]

As a Sweden this is hilarious, I've never heard of this and wouldn't have guessed we had color tv that early, I'm born in 81 btw :P

[@karl-erikmumler9820]

Det är ju en klassiker! Skäll ut dina föräldrar ; P

[@nancycurtis7315]

Used to love the Auntie Jack show. I remember the night colour TV commenced with this particular program. Greetings from Dimboola, in Victoria, Australia 🇦🇺.

[@anumeon]

The Swedish colour tv joke. Basically our version of a "War of the worlds" broadcast in terms of making fools of people.. :D

[@FalloutUgglan]

My mom has told me a few times about this specific incident and how my grandpa took the bait line and sinker

[@baileyhaggan4]

This was another great video documentary I actually read about this when I was looking into this for my media course about hoaxes and it was really interesting that alot of people believed it I honestly can't wait for the spaghetti trees video when ever that will be I love colour TV series I would see one about south Africa and Cambodia since they didn't get Colour TV until 1976 and 1986 respectively

[@caw25sha]

South Africa didn't have TV at all until the mid 70s. Probably the last country.

[@reddwarfer999]

How ironic that South Africa under the Apartheid regime being so obsessed with colour, didn't get it on their TVs until 1976.

[@SeverityOne]

One of the best April Fool's pranks must be the flying penguins from the BBC.

[@SanoyNimbus]

One of the best April fool jokes in Swedish history. :)

[@VSwede]

I had actually never heard of this occurrence, so cheers for introducing me to this funny lil slice of Swedish TV history XD

[@smartduck904]

Technically have you had thousands of micro RGB colored dots you could use individual scanlines as different parts of the color spectrum and mix them together lower-quality screen but with color

[@09jt1]

Well, I remember this one. Hadn't start school yet. Dont remember the details but from my memory. We were sitting watching tv. Suddenly dad sprung up shouting "Ruth (mom), we need one of your old nylon stockings". Dad took action, cut the nylon sock and taped it on the tv screen. Then we, the tv watching group, try to see any coiour. Remember I said "Perhaps I see some green there?!? Than mom hesitantly enter the room. "Flourus, (yeah, it was dads name) what date is it today?" The fact dad working as engineer didnt slow her laughter the slightest. She stood there really burst out laughing, tear in her eyes, slapping her knees. Dad wasnt so fond of that story. Rememberit i was the time when we believed in authorities and tv. Take care out there. 😅

[@earth2006]

In my little kid hood only the rich people down the block had color TV's.

[@MikeBracewell]

Fascinating presentation & very good pronouncements there Adam!

[@AdamMartyn]

Thank you!

[@James_Knott]

I recall, from many years ago, ads in the back of some magazines for a colour TV adapter. It consisted of a sheet of clear plastic, with a blue tint at the top, pink in the middle and green at the bottom, IIRC, which was then attached to the TV screen. A friend's father fell for that one. 🙂

[@m4rt_]

Norway has had some funny April Fools jokes too

[@rtc9063]

Surely the Swedes didn't fall for this just like Hilda Ogden didn't fall for Eddie Yates telling her he could change her black and white tv to colour. You Tube - The Ogden's get a 'colour television' - January 1978

[@robertsteel3563]

TBH If this was an obvious April fools prank, and everything and everyone was telling it's a prank, I will still fall for it!

[@mvhmk]

My dad, born in the 40s, still tells me stories about when this happened. The stocking frenzy and later confusion when it wouldn't work. It sounded on him like everyone they knew also fell for it. Nice addition with the Swedish national anthem in the end.

[@rajuga07]

As a swede I find your pronunciation really entertaining. It's soo far off that it sound like another language. Good try though and this was a great video!

[@AdamMartyn]

Thank you! I gave it my best shot 😂

[@prageruwu69]

eller hur, "sverres televihon" är roligt som fan

[@phonotical]

The first colour broadcast was made I England in 1926,not only that, the bbc were usihg experimental colour broadcasts in 1956 This example on Swedish TV, broadcast April first by chance...

[@marktubeie07]

For a moment there I thought I was watching an infomercial for stockings and undershirts ;)

[@MrCarpelan]

According to my mom, when this took place, my grandfather went around the house looking for my grandmother's nylon stockings. He did not put them over the TV, however, but over his head instead. It did not work.

[@WhatALoadOfTosca]

Can you imagine if that was nowadays? The internet would be awash with complaints and calls for resignation! And think of the protesters giving off that so many pairs of tights ended in landfill! Imagine!

[@elizabethpeterson1644]

I’m about 1/8 Swedish from my father’s side of family when my father was 1/4 Swedish. When I was a kid that my family had colored and even black & white televisions in the house.

[@Gulleization]

Growing up in a rural area of Denmark in the eighties, we could only receive one channel of television, the Danish national broadcast. They too made April Fools jokes every year and I remember my parents talking about how people would glue a knitting needle onto a frying pan, covering the whole thing with aluminum foil and connecting it to their tv set, then pointing it to the sky in hope of catching satellite broadcasts. 😂

[@Ishanaroya]

April Fools Day is serious business in Sweden

[@CHBerg-ce1hz]

Color TV is television in full color, as opposed to black and white TV. During the 1970s, color TV had basically phased out black and white technology. The technology is based on additive color mixing with the RGB scale, where all colors together form white. The first broadcast in Sweden with color TV took place in 1966.[1] The first nationwide color TV broadcast took place in 1967.[1] The word appears in Swedish media for the first time in 1962.[2] The black-and-white TV broadcasts sent out an analog sound signal and an analog image signal, the so-called luminance signal, which contained information about how bright each point on the TV screen should be. The original analog color TV broadcast contained an audio signal, three color signals, one for red light, one for green light and one signal for blue light (RGB). In addition, the color TV signal contained a luminance signal, which was the same as for black and white TV broadcasting. In order to reduce the bandwidth of the radio signal, the signal from one of the color signals was superimposed and mixed together with the other two color signals. In the TV set itself, the third color signal was then separated out again. The original color TV technology was the cathode ray tube (CRT), but since then, among other things, they have started developing flat screens with other types of technology, such as LCD, plasma or LED. Color TV in Sweden In Sweden, the first test broadcast with color television was made on February 3, 1965 and showed a fashion show from a makeshift studio in Philipshuset in Stockholm. In October 1968, there were color televisions in 30,000 Swedish homes.[1] The devices cost approximately SEK 4,000[1] (SEK 35,500 in 2019 monetary value.[3]) At the beginning, only occasional programs were broadcast in color, but in 1968 the government gave the go-ahead to officially conduct regular broadcasts with six hours of color from April 1, 1970 per week.[1] In 1962, it had figured as an April Fool's joke on Sweden's Radio-TV that by cutting a nylon stocking and attaching it over the TV set, you could get color TV.

[@carlam6669]

I seem to remember some experimental TV broadcasts in the early sixties based on the theory that if areas of a black and white video image blinked at particular rates the human eye would perceive faint colors there. Only problem was that different people would see different colors. I remember experiencing this on a black and white TV but was underwhelmed by the experience. There was another experimental broadcast that attempted to produce a 3-D effect on a conventional TV without the need for special glasses or other special viewing equipment. Imagine a periscope device that is placed in front of a TV camera. The periscope is on a turntable such that the end facing the camera lens remain fixed but the other end constantly rotates in a circle. The image thus produced is from a constantly moving perspective. It is extremely annoying to view, induces vertigo, but does produce a three dimensional experience.

[@karl-erikmumler9820]

Just to add to the chorus; my grandparents and parents have told us of this. It's *the* classic April fool's joke (the spaghetti harvest is also remembered here too though).

[@vytah]

I wonder how many people went to work next day and told their colleagues that it worked for them (either to continue the joke, or because they believed it could work and didn't want to appear to be incapable of mere stockings handling).

[@theprinceofawesomeness]

As part of the Swedish youth, i had my teachers tell me about this moment, it was halarius

[@Denamic]

My mother loves talking about this nonsense. She and her friend would experiment with various different colors of stockings, much to my grandmother's dismay, as stockings were very expensive back then.

[@maximusg88]

You should talk about the time the Belgian public broadcasters announced that the country split into two parts 😅

[@mizore9637]

Here in Brazil, my mother always tell that when they were children in the 60's, they would glue colored cellophane paper on the TV screen to "turn it into color". Of course it would just made te black and white picture have a colored tint (of the paper's color of course) but she says that they preferred it and would change the colors by changing the paper often

[@birrextio6544]

Sweden was late with color TV, it was an eternal debate about format and standard. Test programs was made with both NTSC and PAL and after awhile the conclusion was that NTSC didn't work far away from the transmitter, it was called Never The Same Color. When PAL 50HZ was selected, the junk yards had mountains of old TV's and color took off fast.

[@BentleyWilkinson]

I just walked on that street where the first scene from Sweden is recorded just 10 mins before watching this!

[@cauldron938]

Here in brazil most color television channels signed off in black and white and on the first day of color televusion they just signed on in color, showing the festa da uva as their first color program and introducing colorful idents making full use of color, as much of it as possible.

[@svanteuller7928]

Kjell Stensson was highly respected and I'd say loved for his technical knowledge and ability to explain technical issues. He also had a very pregnant voice and dialect. It is a habit in Sweden to try to fool your friends with practical jokes or if you prefer, do hoax, on April 1st. And I and many others think this one is the best ever.

[@GreatgoatonFire]

This fooled my grandparents too. And to make it worse ny granddad worked in a tv factory.

[@NigelDixon1952]

Maybe the Apollo moon landings should have been shown on April 1st! They'd have been much more believable!

[@matneu27]

What really worked later in Germany is 3d television in b/w with glasses that have a green and red foil, of course on a real color TV. At least it was left in a test broadcast for a couple of weeks.

[@macsnafu]

Actually, I've seen old ads in 60's magazines where they would sell screens that do basically this to your black and white TV, so never under-appreciate the gullibility of some people. It *did* produce color, but not in the way you'd want color TV to be.

[@JLo-4music]

Best April's fool day prank ever. People here in Sweden are still talking about that one 😅