I don’t know anybody who owns a black-and-white television. Maybe you do. Maybe you are one of the 7,000 people registered as having one in Britain. It’s both a curiously high and a curiously low number. And fascinating.
It can’t be because of some hipster retro desire to go old school on everything – putting down a craft beer to wander over and turn the dial that will skip to one of the three channels you receive.bAnd while I know that fewer and fewer under-25s have an actual TV at all, they are unlikely to be among the 7,000.
The cost for a black-and-white licence is £49. It’s £145.50 for a colour one. Maybe there is an element of money-saving for some, but for all?
The world will look different in black and white because it harks back to a different world.
America is an increasingly confusing place. What was once the great hope in the West, the nation that protected, that called us all, that offered a new life if yours (especially in Europe) was lost, is now almost impossible to recognise. At the time of writing this, there have been 307 mass shootings there this year. The seat of government is doctoring video evidence to support what it says is true when we can see the opposite with our own eyes.
The president says he’d consider shooting at immigrants who come to his border and throw stones. If English wasn’t the first language and our old ties so strong, it’s not a leap to see America as a nation we’d be warned about.