My mother was on a local Montreal game show in the 1960s called It's Your Move, where contestants did charades, and IIRC she won at least one trip to Europe and our Maytag washer and dryer that lasted at least three decades.
I think my mother also won a bunch of RCA Victor LPs, but not one bit of rock and roll. Mostly movie soundtracks and Broadway musicals.
Once color became the de facto prime time standard, it still needed to spread elsewhere. Daytime was slow in adopting color, news programs too. And the poor independents only had access to old movies and old TV shows, virtually all in black and white. A year later, even FAILED color shows were eagerly bought in syndication so that the independent stations could have some color content. I recall a local independent that bought a package of color movies - all foreign with dubbed voiced in English. Real shlock.
That's very cool. A former sister-in-law took her sister to a taping of The Price Is Right in the 70s, intending to just drop her off and come back later to get her. The sister cajoled her into going in with her and despite the fact she was hardly dressed for a TV appearance, she gave in. Wouldn't you know she got picked to "Come on down!" and ended up winning a car!
Among them, My Mother The Car. WNEW-TV in New York ran it for a bit in the late 1960's, probably into 1970.
We got our first color TV around 1972 - a Zenith 25 inch console. The tuners were controlled by dials. The VHF tuner clicked into place for each channel, but the UHF tuner didn’t (like a radio dial), so we were always fine tuning that UHF dial. My thrifty father had bought a floor model (as pointed out above, those sets were expensive), which turned out to have a defective UHF tuner. So those UHF stations were almost always in B&W with a line running up the screen. Occasionally, you could move that UHF knob to the left or to the right and you’d get a clear color picture for a while, but then it would revert to B&W with that line. My theory is that there was a crack on the circuit board and moving the knob pushed the two sides of the crack together temporarily. Unfortunately for us kids, most of the programs we wanted to watch - sitcom reruns and cartoons - were on UHF stations. Our network affiliates were all VHF stations and they didn’t show cartoons or sitcoms during the afternoon or early evening - it was all talk shows or game shows. So it was rare for us to see “The Flintstones” or “The Brady Bunch” in color. We could receive a smaller, out-of-market VHF station via our rooftop antenna, and they carried “Gilligan’s Island” and “Petticoat Junction”, so we at least got to see those in color. In the early 80s, my dad finally bought a new TV and we could finally get all the color we wanted. Unfortunately by then, we had outgrown most of those shows that we had wanted to see in color! But at least there was a clicking UHF tuner, which was a big improvement. We had a second B&W TV well into the 80s, for those times when we couldn’t all agree on what to watch.
We didn't get a colour telly till '72. Lucky me; just as a the really important Glam-Rock bands were exploding across TOTP. Gary Glitter, Bowie, Wizzard, T.Rex, Roxy Music, Mott The Hoople - all in mind-blowing colour. A good time to be 14 years old. However, my mate's dad was a manager/supervisor at the local Co-op. They had a colour TV a few years before us. I used to go down and watch 'Match Of The Day' and Yorkshire TV's 'Soccer Sunday' with them and get really excited. On our tv you couldn't tell teams like Everton and Man Utd apart as their strips all looked the same in black & white. Downside, his family were ITV people. I had to sit through an astonishing amount of tat-telly, gameshows and stuff, all looking even more kitsch and garish in colour. But I was grateful.
One thing I used to hate about color TV was the way it often imperfectly handled black & white. When color was filtering into prime time, there was still an awful lot of the broadcast day filled with black & white material. Most of the time, the stations would turn off their color circuitry for large blocks of black & white time, but there were other times, when an old black & white sitcom was sandwiched in between two color shows and the color circuitry was left on, and what we's see was a greenish, brownish hue all over the black & white picture. I would often go up to the TV and turn its color intensity knob to the lowest or off position to return the black & white to what it should have looked like, but then I always wondered if I was missing the color on a commercial/ Today, I sometimes notice that same effect on certain "retro" channels. Like when I recorded all of the 12 O'CLOCK HIGH series from MeTV. Certain episodes had that funny green color cast to them and once again, when I watch them, I often turn off the color to make the black & white more correct.
I think we got ours in the late 1960's. The first shows I remember were Laugh In, The Wonderful World of Disney and Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom.
When I was a kid and we had a black and white TV, I could not understand when the credits said the show was in living color why I couldn't see it in color. I would complain to my mom and she would try and explain that we didn't have a color tv and I would say, "but it says the show is in color and it's not." We got a probably got our first color tv around 1966 or 1967. I think that was about the time we got our first air conditioner too.
Our first color TV was a 27¨ german Loewe Opta (made by Körting); a huge upgrade from our 20¨valvular B&W Westinghouse.
Cartoons and game shows were the most fun to watch due to the garish colors and eye-popping sets on the latter. Batman, too. The '69-'70 TV season was the first I got to see in color. For some reason, the local ABC affiliate didn't carry all their shows so another station picked up what was left including The Brady Bunch. The only problem was this particular station had not yet made the switch to color broadcasting so I never saw the Bradys in color until the following year when the ABC station took back the show. The B&W station did go to color by the following season so I also got to see the Roller Derby games in color, too. Good times.
I never thought that B&W TV shows had the proper contrast ratios on color sets that they did on the B&W sets. I liked the high contrast of shows like The Outer Limits and the old horror movies, like Frankenstein. To this day, I think that horror movies look so much better when done in B&W rather than color. When they did all of those Hammer horror movies from the 1950's in color, I never thought they had that creepy factor of the original B&W versions. I think that color brought out the cheesy effects and make up, that B&W covered up (to an extent). Also, the color films could not use dramatic high contrast lighting that B&W films use.
BTW that was in '82; Argentina didn't have its first color TV broadcast until '78, for the football World Cup, and we couldn't afford a color set until 4 years later !
A 2018 MeTV thread lets you flip between black & white and color on some opening credits images: Flip photos to watch classic TV shows transition to color from black and white
Dad got our first color television in 1971, right after my fifth birthday party. That's when I started learning curse words like "Goddamn that set!" The color drifted all over the place so much that Dad set up a mirror on the other side of the living room so he could adjust stuff with the back of the set open while it was on (he was a radio technician). I remember orange skin tones which drifted into green, and the tint control only fixed some colors while messing up other colors. When we were going to have company over, we would have the television on for hours before people arrived. It needed to be baking hot to be stable enough to watch without becoming an embarrassment. I was young enough that color television wasn't a big deal. What was a big was when our small town cable system started adding television stations via microwave that were in big cities hundreds of miles away. That's when I got to see shows in syndication like Star Trek.
I remember having a TV—I think also a Zenith, and probably made a bit later than you’re talking about—where the UHF tuner had a main knob that clicked into place but then you had to turn a disc behind that knob for fine tuning. Luxury!
There were a lot of inexpensive televisions back then that didn't have a UHF channel selector. It was just a knob that you turned until the UHF station you wanted came in, just like a radio. Many areas only had one UHF station that people watched, so they just tuned it to that one station and turned the VHF channel selector to "U" to watch it.
