Colour Strike Colour Strike The Colour Strike was an industrial action by technicians at all ITV companies from 13 November 1970 to 8 February 1971 (although some shows made during this period in black and white were having their first transmission as late as December 1971) who, due to a pay dispute with their management, refused to work with colour television equipment. At that time ITV had recently switched to colour transmissions, requiring the individual companies to invest heavily in new equipment. Early colour television studio cameras consisted of four tubes to relay the picture: three were receptive to colour (red, green
Colour recovery Combining the video-recorded colour signals with the monochrome telerecordings is a non-trivial task, requiring digital processing (for example matching up the different screen sizes of the two recordings). Thus, it wasn't until the early 1990s that cheaply available, sufficiently powerful computer hardware and software made this task particularly practical at that time. Black & white TV systems predate colour, and so subsequent analogue colour broadcast systems have been designed with backwards-compatibility in mind (known as a "compatible colour" system). Thus, the chrominance (colour) signal is typically 'shoe-horned' into the same channel as the luminance (brightness) signal, modulated on a fixed