I'll be glued to my TV on Dec. 13 for 'Room at the Bottom' in colour. What is even more interesting is that they've used a new technique not previously employed when colourizing old films and TV shows: they have actually used the data the black & white pixels offer and translated them back to their corresponding colours, so this is more than just a colourization: it's truly a colour restoration with the colours being as close as possible to what was originally aired.
I am only sorry I don't have a DVD or HDD recorder yet to record this episode, but I'll ask some of my friends if they do, and I'm sure many other people will have their remotes handy.
Got to say I loved it in colour - even if for some reason the skin colours were slightly 'out' and made them all look like they were swarthy Mediterranean types! The colour gave the episode a whole new dynamism and really brought it alive. Not been a fan of the black & white episodes so much - they seem very wooden unlike the colour episodes. Just wish the whole series had been filmed in colour from episode one....
I also thought it would have been nice if they had even just mentioned sometime during the night that John Ringham, who played Bracewell in the first few episodes and Captain Bailey in Room at the Bottom had died just last month... It would have been a nice tribute....
Apologies if this has already been posted but the restored episode was featured on Newsnight and can (for the moment) be accessed via the following URL...
Did we gain much in the colourization? RATB was made in colour and that is therefore the preferred way to see it. Some thought must have been given to the fact it was a colour production rather than B&W at the time.
But this is a half hour studio based TV comedy rather than a feature film. I don't think the colour palette has been used in an artistic way to add much to creative whole (compare perhaps the use of colour in Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes to some of their earlier B&W featues where the use of colour gives it a new dimension),
I appreciate and am grateful that the BBC went to the effort. Anything new from Dad's Army at this point has to be treasured. But I think my B&W copy of RATB will suffice and, for me, a DVD release with that as the sole new feature would proably not be tempting enough
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