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 colour programmes were lost. However, in the case of the BBC, many telerecorded black & white film copies of affected programmes survived. These black & white copies were made for overseas commercial exploitation of BBC programmes. For a variety of technical and practical reasons (for example various incompatible international TV standards, and the then-high cost of videotape over that of film), black & white film copies were the preferred medium for selling programmes overseas. This practice ultimately led to many programmes which were originally made and transmitted in colour only existing in black and white form after the practice of