If television
programmes are to be believed, the Seventies were brown.
As I was born in 1981, I'm unable to
comment on this theory first-hand. Whilst being a couple
of years shy of the opportunity to offer an eyewitness account, I’ve certainly
seen a lot of secondary evidence.
Anything that
wasn’t brown was a brownish-grey or orange.
Take Columbo, for
instance. I’m a big fan of the dishevelled detective, owning the complete
series as a DVD box-set. There are two things I’ve learnt since watching so
many episodes back-to-back: that instances of homicide in 1970s' Los Angeles
were alarmingly high – and that most were committed to a sepia
backdrop.
It’s as if they’d
decided to work to a very specific colour-scheme: nothing darker than Peter Falk’s
cigar; nothing lighter than his raincoat.
If only the perpetrators
had stuck to this formula with more rigidity, they could have got away with murder. A young David Dickinson would have been lethal.
Columbo isn’t the
only seventies cop-show to work to a limited spectrum; Starsky & Hutch and
Quincy are little different. It seems strange when following the Sixties so closely; the psychedelic shades of the Summer of Love must have
seemed a dim and distant memory.
This fondness for
a pooey palette seems to have continued into the early 1980s; something that was reiterated just this evening, when
I caught a rerun of an early, Bob Monkhouse-hosted episode of Family Fortunes
on Challenge.
Perhaps they'd stained the set with tea in an attempt to age it:
If Bob had just come
back off his summer holidays you never would have seen him.