Tony Grant
I’ve found an interesting development in helping people with red/green colour blindness: glasses that solve colour-blindness – for a big price tag.
Fortunately I never had any problem with colour perception (and I doubt any TO did, or we’d not have got a job with the Beeb) but I have known one or two friends who definitely had strange ideas of colour (some of whom called themselves ‘artists’).
Chris Woolf
Techniques like this help people sneak through an Ishihara test but don’t actually correct colour blindness. You still match shades incorrectly, compared to the majority of the population. What the lenses do is give you enough of a differential colour contrast between your two eyes to enable you can distinguish the "hidden" numbers in the test, providing that you have some residual colour vision.
Any tester who was really bothered about the results could use one of the alternative tests and detect the disguised colour blindness in seconds.
Americans will claim anything….
Nick Ware
My dog only has two colour sensors, and given the choice, always, without fail, goes and fetches the yellow tennis balls, ignoring the orange ones. I’m not convinced he sees them.
Keith Wicks
Colour-blind applicants may well have been rejected by the BBC when colour television had been introduced. But I was told by a friend at TVC that some staff who joined pre-colour, and who therefore hadn’t had their colour vision tested when they joined, knew they had defective colour vision. I’m not sure of the details now, but I seem to recall that they all managed to survive. I think that some were never tested, and others who were called up for a colour vision test managed to fiddle the test by memorising the coloured numbers to be displayed, which were always the same.
Can anyone here add to this story or, perhaps, correct it? And does anyone know of any occasion when someone’s defective colour vision affected transmitted picture quality?
Dave Mundy
I know of an OB engineer who memorised the colour test charts!
Ian Hillson
That’s why it was best for whoever was administering the Ishihara Test to not do the pics in sequential order!
(I seem to remember from my six months attached to Recruitment in Cav Square.)
Dave Plowman
I do remember an SA1 who transferred to Vision Control. He would have dated back before colour vision was tested at entry – mine was, although I joined long before colour broadcasting started. And when colour came along he was tested and found to have problems. I’m not sure what the eventual outcome of his position in Vision Control was.
Decent colour vision would certainly be needed for certain aspects of adjusting colour monitors and cameras, perhaps more so in the early days of colour.
Bill Jenkin
I think there were a couple of vision staff who were resettled because they were found to be colour blind.
There was Bob Marsland who went to Birmingham as a station assistant and came back as a director, did “That’s Life” (sorry, the ‘Scottish Programme’) amongst other things. I remember Mick Manning at a wrap drinks do in the TVT saying to him, "Yes, not bad for a colour blind V.O. Bob".
I also seem to recall that there was a colour blind L.D. who went undetected and won a BAFTA or two, though I can’t remember who that was.
Roger Bunce
We definitely had the colour-blindness test when I joined – 1964/5 – long before colour tele. I understood that this was nothing to do with tele going into colour (when we carried on happily with black-and-white viewfinders!) It was because operators were still expected to be half-competent engineers, and would need to read the colour coding of wires, resistors, and all that stuff that I never understood.
Now . . . tick-tick-tick . . . should I cut the red wire . . . tick-tick-tick . . . or the green wire . . . tick-tick-tick . . . which, since I’m red-green colour blind, . . . tick-tick-tick . . . may well be another red wire . . . tick-tick … Soddit – BOOM!
Alec Bray
Interestingly, when I joined (interviewed etc in late 1962, started Jan 1963), I did not have the colour-blindness test.
Dave Buckley
I was told by my old boss at TV Training many years ago, that when he was at ETD in the early 1960s, one of the engineering instructors was colour blind yet could set-up a colour monitor correctly!
Around the same time, I understand ETD ran a number of courses for service engineers who would be setting up colour TVs on hire from a well-known High Street company. During one of the courses, one of the instructors asked if any of the engineers had been given a test for colour blindness? The answer was ‘no’!
On a slightly different tack, does anyone remember the engineer in TC2 VAR (the last valve studio), who would come out with the remark that “…he sprayed the equipment racks with DTD to keep the three legged monsters away?…” (He meant transistors!) I think he also had quite bad eyesight as well.
Chris Eames
I think that the gentleman in question was the irrepressible Gil Walker. Not only could he set up a monitor, but he could also balance colours using a flicker photometer! I have no idea what particular type of colour blindness he suffered.
Dave Plowman
There are, of course, degrees of colour blindness.
As far as I know, something like 30% of males with blue eyes in the UK have it to a certain extent. I was told this many years ago by an ophthalmologist at a London teaching hospital. Perhaps things have changed recently. I’m fairly certain it referred to the UK specifically. I do know that those of my male friends who have mentioned having defective colour vision, all have blue eyes.
Red/green are the colours most difficult to differentiate between in poor light: which does make you wonder why they were chosen for ‘safe’ and ‘danger’.
Chris Woolf
Well…. Only 8% of Europeans can be classed as colour blind – mostly men, and mostly with red/green deficiencies. Some others are poor colour matchers, perhaps because their photo-pigments are slightly different from the norm – they can see all colours, but they don’t agree with the majority about precise shade matching. Many people with incipient cataracts have a poor colour discrimination because they are looking for a coloured filter all the time. Blue eye colour has no connection – the genes for that are on chromosome 15; the ones for red/green colour blindness are on 23. Red and green were clearly chosen for safe/danger by the 92% who didn’t understand the problem. Brown, blue, green/yellow were picked as mains cable colours to get round that, and have got stick ever since for being "less obvious".
Chris Booth
I failed the Ishihara test and had to progress to the Munsell chip test.
This was a lot of coloured blocks/chips that you arranged in order of colour. The ‘operator’ then inverted the set which revealed where your colour vision was deficient. Mine was in the desaturated reds, but was obviously OK, although I always made sure I had an assistant who could grade properly!!
Jim Kirkus, lecturer at ETD, was another one who failed the “Japanese Battleship” test.
Pat Heigham
I’m a blue-eyed boy!
I think I passed the Ishihara test, run at my board, I remember. It was put away so quickly as to prevent a memory fix, maybe.
I did have it done again recently, at my optometrist, out of interest, as I had two cataracts sorted, and everything looked so much whiter/bluer than before!
A close friend is red/green deficient – he cannot discriminate between them, they both look grey. I asked him how he dealt with traffic lights? It’s the position, he said! Just hope the Highways Agency don’t decide to alter that!
If monitors are set up with colour bars, was there not a display which managed that with a scale graduation per colour? If cameras are being matched – they would look the same to a colour blind operator, so would probably come out the same? There are so many variables available for setup.
Someone I was trained by mentioned that to get a decent colour pic on your home set, best to reduce the pic to B/W and set the brightness and contrast to a good image, then bring in the colour saturation to a pleasing level.
Today’s TVs have a confusing extra control – a backlight, which I’ve never really got to grips with (this for LED screens, I think), plus, manufacturers have offered various options for picture ‘saturation’ -‘Cinema’ ‘Dynamic’ and other esoteric variations – too many choices for the average viewer to comprehend and know how to twiddle anyway.
Peter Cook
I was once waved down by a Turkish soldier in northern Cyprus who stuck a green bat out where I was attempting to turn left into a side road. I don’t speak Turkish and he spoke no English so after some sign language I understood I could not go down the road as I had planned to, as it led to a military camp. This established, I was signalled to move on by same soldier with a red bat!
Two conclusions:
1. Turkish soldiers do not do the Ishihari test (as I did when joining the Beeb)
2. It was probably wise of me to ignore the colour symbols as Turkish soldiers all seemed to have guns.
Nick Ware
You needn’t have worried. They don’t give the soldiers bullets for fear they’ll shoot the officers. (Or so a senior Turkish military bod once told us in a “60 Minutes” interview).
Graeme Wall
I used to work with a sound mixer who was colour blind. He was fine until they brought in stereo PPMs with red and green “hands” to indicate left and right.
Chris Woolf
Indeed. And red overload LEDs at the top of a green scale completely flummox my son. Being narrow wavelength light with similar luminosity he has no idea that they are different chromaticity.
