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Just an odd thing that I was remembering last night.
Programmes that were shot in black and white tended to be darker and brighter, while colour programmes tended to have more middle grey content.
It wasn't infalible, but you could generally make a pretty good guess.
I thought this might interest people who've never seen black and white TV.
That's usually true. But there are some quirks.
High quality black-and-white movies broadcast on TV could have the same crispness and tones of color films shown in black and white, depending on the cinematography.
Many early episodes of Disneyland (which eventually became Walt Disney Presents, and then Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color were actually filmed in color and then broadcast in black-and-white (because color TV didn't exist yet). That's why you can now see Davy Crockett in color. It always had the same "look" on a black-and-white TV that a color program had, even though it was actually broadcast in black and white.
[And, of course, knowing it had been filmed in color was still not the same experience as a watching it in color. I was in college before I understood Dorothy's line in The Wizard of Oz about a "horse of a different color".]
Perhaps this should be spun off into a "little things you young 'uns wouldn't know!" thread? If nothing else, might be a help for people playing / running period games...
You might also notice if it was filmed in colour or not from the dialogue. It wasn't in your face, but if being filmed in B&W the characters are more likely to make comments like 'come on, the light's green' or something. Variant of which was the old snooker narration of pointing out the colours of the various balls on the table all the time.
Sometimes you could also tell from the way the actors etc looked. My first TV in the late 90s was B&W, and on some programmes it was rather hard to read their facial expressions etc as their faces were just greyish blobs. If I recall rightly, in the pre-colour era they deliberately used makeup to accentuate the features. A variant of this could be the choices of set/attire etc not working in B&W - a prime example [I believe] being the 1960 Presidential election where Nixon's choice of suit in a TV debate looked fine in colour, but almost blended in to the background in B&W. [Not intended to be a political point, just a TV one].
However, this aspect only came up if the programme was filmed in colour without taking into account that some viewers had B&W sets. There would have been a period [for the UK, 60s/70s] in which set designers etc would have taken both types into account.
You could also tell which shows were black and white by looking at the sets.
Related to the unexpectedly coloured sets is the yellow teeth. Yellow comes out brighter than white so yellow makeup was used to brighten up teeth.