Color introduction to TV channels is something I find very interesting, it's sad that some countries did not take the measures to archive their color.

@caw25sha

11 ай бұрын

It's now well known that the BBC wiped large amounts of what are now considered classic programmes to reuse the expensive tape. Many of the early Dr Who episodes for example.

@callme_jake1871

11 ай бұрын

@@caw25sha Not only countries like the UK but also the U.S, a lot of Asian and European countries and the majority of African ones too.

@petefluffy7420

10 ай бұрын

How can you archive colour?

@callme_jake1871

10 ай бұрын

@@petefluffy7420 What I mean by archives, I mean archiving the transition from B&W to Colour.

@petefluffy7420

10 ай бұрын

@@callme_jake1871 That doesn't strike me as anything worth remembering. I can't see descendants sitting on anyone's knee listening with rapt attention to tales of television screens becoming coloured. More like being bored out of their wits being told "back in my day it was all in black and white" and asking, only out of politeness, what is black and white? Magpies kid, magpies.

My parent´s generation spoke about this hoax for decades afterwards. Some of them had evidently fallen for it, but still looked back on it with great amusement. It goes down in Swedish history as probably the greatest April fools joke of all time.

@milyrouge

10 ай бұрын

Yes, my mother still talks about it. She swears they didn't fall for it, but I'm not so sure! 😊

@macjonte

10 ай бұрын

My grandparents tried it. :D They still talked about it while they were around.

@PlaceholderforBjorn

10 ай бұрын

My parents talked about it as well. This is the biggest April's fools joke ever. For certain in Sweden

@BolinFoto

10 ай бұрын

They are still talking about it and the papers run an article about it every 1st of april. My favorite was On SVT 1988 when we could see how a grower in Småland invested in planting and growing telephone poles - twig-free too :P But that sock is all we hear about :P

@threegoldmartlets

10 ай бұрын

My future wife and her mother did indeed try it. After all Kjell Stensson was well known and respected.

This is a classic in Sweden and is still talked about as a legendary prank.

@PlaceholderforBjorn

10 ай бұрын

State funded pranks

@Fibonacci64

10 ай бұрын

But now we have SD fooling everybody@@PlaceholderforBjorn

@Bawamba

10 ай бұрын

SD is the best thing that have happend to Sweden. Just look how horrible Sweden is atm due to the Socialdemocrats and their likes. They have destroyed Sweden. Thank God we got SD in, and may they be the biggest partie next election, for the sake of the future of Sweden@@Fibonacci64

@kvasir8931

9 ай бұрын

@@Fibonacci64 "Hey look at me, Im special, im gonna insert politics into everything, herp derp"

Growing up in Sweden I heard this story many times. Most people say they did actally fall for the prank. Part of this was Kjell Stensson's appearance. He was a famous scientist who appeared on an early science show "Fråga Lund". So his authority contributed a lot to this prank. Good of you guys to dig out this video. I am too young to have seen it myself.

@rimmersbryggeri

10 ай бұрын

washing shirts in coffee whitener is another swedish classic.

@TobiasHarms

10 ай бұрын

I didn't know that he was part of fråga Lund but that does explain a lot regarding why people fell for it.

@nissekram

10 ай бұрын

​@@rimmersbryggeriWith the difference that that actually worked ...

@rimmersbryggeri

10 ай бұрын

@@nissekram yeah it did because it was optical whitener basically.

@rickybuhl3176

10 ай бұрын

I think a fair few of us would have fallen for the same if David Attenborough had delivered an English version.

My late grandmother told me about an April fools joke on Norwegian radio long before television. They said to place a mirror in front of the radio, and then a towel in front of the mirror. On a given signal people were supposed to remove the towel and then they would see an image. And everyone did 🤣🤣

@jannejohansson3383

10 ай бұрын

Science! We aren't much brighter today, in deep lines of people.

@joelouis-arena4061

9 ай бұрын

They still experiment with that in Norway 😉

@alexandravladmets8206

9 ай бұрын

@snubbedpeer I suspect you are Norwegian and @jealous-arena4061 a Swede 😁

i would have 100% fallen for this if i was around back in the day. no shame

@uplink-on-yt

10 ай бұрын

I would have fallen for it right now, on my iPad, if I had any nylon stockings around. It's so ridiculous, I couldn't dismiss it off the bat.

@ttaibe

10 ай бұрын

Same, easy.

@tonycasey3183

10 ай бұрын

We are almost always willing to believe we can get what we want for free or little effort. Remember the app that made your iPhone waterproof, and the number of devices that were ruined when people tried it?

@ttaibe

10 ай бұрын

@@tonycasey3183 no, that really happened. I am guite gullible at times. I often forget it is April 1st. But I would not have fallen for that one. Not paranoid enough I guess

@SofaKingShit

10 ай бұрын

I would have loudly denied that such a thing had ever happened to me whilst l was out in public, and only ever mentioned it rarely indoors, and always in hushed tones.

This is one of the by far most elaborated and best April fools I have ever seen. More or less everybody in Sweden was talking about this for years afterwards, sometimes even today. I think quite many nylon stockings were sacrificed that evening all around Sweden. Kjell Stensson was well known for the TV-viewers for participating in several radio and TV shows, easy explaining new and complicated technology. He was also operational manager at the national Swedish Radio and TV company.

@freeculture

9 ай бұрын

You should get some stats on the sales of nylon stockings after this day 🙂

My grandfather fell for it, still laughing while retelling the story in the -80s. I think nylon stockings were getting popular at the same time, adding to the effectiveness of the joke.

@squidcaps4308

10 ай бұрын

Nylon stockings became popular in 1939, but then the production ceased during the war, and then sky rocketed right after the war. By 1962 nylon stockings were just everyday, normal thing.

I’m not surprised at all, that you British people would enjoy this kind of humor. We have found your slightly dry humor extremely close to our own, one of my personal favorites from BCC back in the day was Blackadder. Thank you for this video, much appreciated!

There were color filters you could buy to put in front of your TV screen which were tinted blue at the top and green at the bottom, so that a landscape scene showing blue sky and green grass would come out looking similar to a color image. And then there were the Col-R-Tel and Colordaptor, two kits to add a spinning color disc to a black & white set to produce a true color image, but they took up a lot of space, required electronic skill to install, and generated an uncomfortably flickery image.

@richardw3470

10 ай бұрын

I remember those plastic sheets; attached to the front of the TVs. My grandmother's friend three doors up had one. It was all over the street she had color TV! She turned the TV so it faced out the window and half the neighborhood was on her front porch or sidewalk. What a gyp. Pink and yellow (?) bars between the blue and green - really hilarious.

@shaun5552

10 ай бұрын

A lot of arcade games from the late-1970's and into the 1980's used that basic approach. A B&W picture, displayed on a B&W screen which had a plastic overlay with different colours. Since arcade games of that era only displayed characters in a series of pre-determined places on the screen, the basic idea worked well enough so long as the coloured overlay was correctly aligned.

Very similar thing happened in Poland. Not with color but with TV at all, in newspaper there was an extensive article on how to convert your radio to view tv with screen made of white cloth. And a significant number of people tried to do it.

@butlaoctu4464

10 ай бұрын

Cloth should be linen, cut to be 625 threads long as this will be standard of television. Screen you have to soak in mercury solution of recipe below

What's often forgotten in this history is the backlash. Stensson was seen as one of the most trustworthy science reporters at the time. For him to "stoop" the a Aprils fools joke, was simply unthinkable. Therefore many people contacted the Broadcast organisation with complaints. Also forgotten is that the price of a pair of Nylons at the time was 30-50 Euros by today's money, sometimes more for the recommended model, hence making this prank very costly for those who tried it. In short, it wasn't well received at the time and reading the outcry in the press is hilarious today.

@TitaniusAnglesmith

10 ай бұрын

It's a shame we don't do things like this on state TV today. It encourages critical thinking.

@birrextio6544

10 ай бұрын

I saw this joke live and since the TV had the central position in the home, the whole family saw it at the same time. We where laughing hard and was amazed when we heard that some people actually believed it was for real.

@-Devy-

10 ай бұрын

@@birrextio6544 Uh huh... "some people"

Kjell Stensson was a very popular TV host with programs about tecnical things. People belived in him. My mother cut her nylon pantyhose while my dad tried to not show his laugh. He knew what day it was. It's still one of the best april fool on TV here in Sweden.

A few years later there was a joke that black and white television broadcasts would begin in South Africa, but that the (apartheid) government had ruled that the black and white parts of the pictures must be viewed on different sets....

I live in Sweden and when the topic April Fools jokes comes up this one is often mentioned first. I am not old enough to have lived at the time of this joke, but would likely have fallen for it. I have been told that my grandmother did.

There was another famous April Fools-joke i Sweden during the sixties. They informed on the news that they have discovered a way to identify those who hadn't payed license fee for their television set, and that they could turn of the picture on their televisions with the sound remaining. Then turned off the picture for everybody. They got a lot of angry calls from people who actually had paid, and also a lot of calls from people who reported that they owned a television, and wanted to start pay.

@joelouis-arena4061

9 ай бұрын

Tack. Aldrig hört om den. ☺️

This is a classic in swedish culture. My grandma has talked about it several times

Unintentionally entertaining is that you when you said Swedish words , "sveriges television" for instance, managed to be spot on doing it with a Finnish accent ❤😊 It was so spot on that my wife (a swedish tescher) actually thpught thay you were from Finland 😊 Swedish language is hard so absolutely no shade. Im just easily amused 😊

@jakob3044

9 ай бұрын

I mean, you could probably spell it in a more engl-ish way and the pronunciation would be way closer

The BBC spaghetti tree incident is definitely my favourite example of a broadcaster having a little fun with his audience.

One of the most memorable April fool pranks on TV for me was back in the 1980s, made by a regional news program here in the UK; the prank was showing a new technology for sleeping: a microwave bed that gave you the equivalent of 8 hours of sleep in 2 hours! Amazing! I could party until 6 a.m. and still get enough sleep for work at 9 a.m. 😁

The string vest reminds me of Raymond Baxter appearing in just such a thing (and his underpants) in an episode of the Goodies called "It Might As Well Be String" in his Tomorrow's World persona extolling the many virtues of string, including using it to substituted for copper cables "it's safer and cheaper because it doesn't work!".

Never knew about this. This was honestly quite an interesting watch

I'd love a video on the spaghetti harvest - that one always makes me laugh.

My grandmother fell for it and to her embarrassment jad to admit to my more tech savvy grandfather that she'd ruined a pair of nylon stockings, which wasn't entirely cheap back in those days. It's still considered to be the gratest April fools joke in Swedish history.

1st July 1967 was proudly trumpeted by the BBC as being the launch date of colour TV in Britain, though programmes such as Late Night Line Up were already being broadcast in colour during spring 67. As you say, some European broadcasters were transmitting colour tests in late 66 - I recall seeing a BBC2 trade test film in colour around Christmas 1966 in a department store. Everyone was agog!!

@Sacto1654

10 ай бұрын

I believe both PAL and SECAM started their rollouts in 1967.

@newforestpixie5297

10 ай бұрын

My elder sister looked after children at a large house where I saw my first colour tv . I would’ve been about 5 & although impressed by the screen showing coloured boxes & stripes I recall thinking watching Catweasel or High Chapperell in black & white was better…

A tradition in my country is, on New Year's Eve (or New Year's Day, can't remember at the moment), the daily news broadcast consists entirely of bloopers made by the news announcers and journalists while recording for news during the year.

This video is fascinating. Sweden had a totally different approach to us and his verbal explanation was... quite something 😂 I like how they explained the science behind it though, so everybody could have an idea of exactly how the colour transmission was formed ❤

The intro to this video is the slowest playing of Rhythm is a Dancer I have ever heard~ Kudos!

What a fabulous video! I have always been fascinated by the history of color TV around the world but have never come across that "breakthrough". The Swedes were years ahead of the rest of us :) Actually I was thinking of the BBC spaghetti tree report as I was watching your video - glad you showed a clip of it. I'm sure its hard for the younger viewers to imagine what the world was like before the internet and people were vulnerable to believing what they saw on TV. Hmm - maybe things haven't changed that much after all. Regards from Canada!

i was born like 40 years after this and still hear about it. My great-great parents allso thought the people on the TV could see them so they allways dressed up to see the news

I believe a similar April fools joke were broadcasted in Norway, not sure which year though. All you had to do was to turn off all the lights so it was completely dark, except for the glow of the TV of course.

NTSC was crap compared to PAL. I remember American students being surprised how better the colour was with PAL system. I had a Sony TV in England, when I moved to Japan I was shocked by the low definition and dreadful colour. I had the same type of Sony TV in the UK and Japan. Majority of channels were VHF still in Japan I was shocked. A Japanese friend of mine who went to the UK in the early eighties and said I was correct and admitted it was a mistake to use the American system. Naturally Japan pushed to get rid of NTSC and go for a more advanced system. Japan became a pioneer of HD television. Now of course most countries have great television technology.

@joshuarosen465

10 ай бұрын

NTSC came out a decade before PAL, it was brilliant for the time. NTSC was backwards compatible with the existing black and white user base so broadcasters didn't have to send out two signals. PAL was better because it came later so they were able to correct the flaws in NTSC. But you know what's better than PAL, 720P HD and whats better than that is 1080P and what's better than that is 4K. You get my drift, technology gets better as time goes by.

@5roundsrapid263

10 ай бұрын

It’s a moot point now since practically everything is HD. PAL looked better, but NTSC had a higher frame rate.

@paulohagan3309

10 ай бұрын

I had a friend in the 70s at a British university studying electronic engineering and he was always going on about how the Americans had gone too fast and should have waited to get in a decent system.

@jayrogers8255

10 ай бұрын

@@paulohagan3309then don’t tell him about the CBS Colorwheel system!!!

As a child, I remember a _'colour television test'_ performed here in Australia in the late 60s. It was actually an optical illusion of an AMPOL petrol logo flashing rapidly, resulting in an illusion of the red/blue/white parts of the logo appearing. It did actually, sort of, work! I would kill to see footage of this today as I remember it clearly. If anyone out there knows where I could see this online? It's probably now 'lost media'. (FYI, aired on Sydney's TCN9 & was hosted by Brian Henderson to promote Ampol).

@bascomnextion5639

10 ай бұрын

I too remember that.

@chrisantoniou4366

10 ай бұрын

Yep, I remember it. It was based on the persistence of vision and the colour depended on the frequency of the strobing (I think).

@MorgoUK

10 ай бұрын

There was a similar thing in the UK about ‘67? It was on a science programme (but not Tomorrow’s World, I think). It was just a spinning disc with sectors on the screen which magically appeared in colour on our 405 line b&w set. I swear I could see red, green and purple rings, my brother saw red, yellow and pale blue. Edit: the TV show might have been “How”

@darylcheshire1618

10 ай бұрын

I remember a Graham Kennedy sketch where he said that viewers can watch colour on their B&W TVs and went to show penguins and magpies etc.

@marktubeie07

10 ай бұрын

@@darylcheshire1618 😂😂😂😂 Kennedy was brilliant !!

I remember I read somewhere that in my country, Israel, there used to be a time before color broadcasts officially launched, and the government had a law banning color broadcasts - their excuse was that the military used the frequencies or something like that - so one guy made a special device that removed the restrictions that were built into TV sets sold in the country so that you could see a color image, and it became very popular. Eventually, as the government realized that the law was useless, that ban was lifted, and the Israeli Broadcasting Authority broadcasted their evening news program in color for the first time, with the iconic phrase "...and this evening, we are in color".

@lightbearer313

10 ай бұрын

I remember a similar story to this in my country (Australia) decades ago. Like Sweden, TV started here in 1956, but we didn't get colour TV until 1975, but many of the TV programs were transmitted in colour prior to 1975. This is also a major difference between the world of then and now in that new consumer technology basically arrives in most nations about the same time nowadays.

@eyeball226

10 ай бұрын

Wait, so if there was a built in restriction that could be disabled then the TVs must have actually been colour ones. Why would anyone be selling or buying colour TVs when there are no colour TV broadcasts? And also what would be the point in disabling the restriction unofficially if the broadcasts weren't in colour? I must be missing information here because it doesn't make any sense like this.

@AL5520

10 ай бұрын

As someone who experienced it, it is true but inaccurate. The Israeli government, mostly the prime minister Ben Gurion, refused to introduce tv broadcasting as it is low quality and distracting entertainment that will corrupt the youth. In 1966 the government agreed to start educational transmission for schools and in 1968 full transmission for the generalm7public started. Transitions began in black and white but during the 70' newer equipment and foreign programs were in colour and people also watched broadcas from our neighbours, mostly Jordan (they even had news in Hebrew on channel 6, that was in English), some from Lebanon and in northern coastal areas with a good antenna even from Cyprus. This was considered as wasteful since colour TVs were expensive and imported so the government instructed IBA (Israeli Broadcast Authority) to block colour transitions. What the did was to erase from the broadcast signal the colour synchronisation channel, and without it tv sets defaulted to black and white image. An electrical engineer named Mooly Eden (later became Intel's CEO) invented a device that adds to the incoming signal the missing sync channel (it was an estimation so results weren't always great. My friend had one and the first colour program I saw was an episode of Little House on the Prairie. First free colour broadcast was the song selection show for the 1979 Eurovision that was in jerusalem, and the Eurovision itself. From 1981 more content escaped colour erasing and the first official colour, including the 1982 world cup, broadcasting was the news in 1983.

There was a thing on Blue Peter where they showed something in colour on a black & white broadcast. It was a disc with different colour segments and by rotating that disc at a certain speed (related to the screen refresh rate?) you would see it in colour. It was pure optical illusion but it did work.

@paulohagan3309

10 ай бұрын

I remember something similar on 'Tomorrow's World' in the 70s.

To add salt to the injury nylon stocking was so prohibitively expensive at the time. It's like saying to people that smashing a iPhone screen will enable hologram display function of the said smartphone.

Another great documentary Adam!

@AdamMartyn

11 ай бұрын

Thank you!

Technically the national broadcaster of Sweden at the time of the colour switchover wasn't called SVT but SR (Sveriges Radio TV). At least they were still using the SR logo on the end credits when Abba won Melodifestivalen in 1974. It would appear the name changed to SVT in 1979 having been previously Radiotjänst (1956-1957) and Sveriges Radio TV (1957-1979). The name Radiotjänst continued to be used as the name of their TV licencing body until the TV licence was scrapped in 2019.

I remember my dad trying to redo this exact prank on us kids when our colour tv broke and we had to use the old 60s tv set for a few months. I don't recall us actually finding any nylon stockings though.

Fascinating presentation & very good pronouncements there Adam!

@AdamMartyn

10 ай бұрын

Thank you!

I like that you used the 1980-2001 logo for SVT, I miss it so much!

That prank still lives on here in Sweden among the younger generations, that only ever had collourtv. :)

This is by far the greatest April fools prank of all time!🤣

Used to love the Auntie Jack show. I remember the night colour TV commenced with this particular program. Greetings from Dimboola, in Victoria, Australia 🇦🇺.

my parents used to tell me how my grandads on both sides of the family fell for this and cut open pairs of my grandmas' nylon stockings and they thought it was hilarious to see the shameful looks on my grandads faces when they realised what they had done

I had actually never heard of this occurrence, so cheers for introducing me to this funny lil slice of Swedish TV history XD

One of the best April Fool's pranks must be the flying penguins from the BBC.

This was another great video documentary I actually read about this when I was looking into this for my media course about hoaxes and it was really interesting that alot of people believed it I honestly can't wait for the spaghetti trees video when ever that will be I love colour TV series I would see one about south Africa and Cambodia since they didn't get Colour TV until 1976 and 1986 respectively

@caw25sha

11 ай бұрын

South Africa didn't have TV at all until the mid 70s. Probably the last country.

@reddwarfer999

11 ай бұрын

How ironic that South Africa under the Apartheid regime being so obsessed with colour, didn't get it on their TVs until 1976.

The Swedish colour tv joke. Basically our version of a "War of the worlds" broadcast in terms of making fools of people.. :D

In my little kid hood only the rich people down the block had color TV's.

I've told people about the spaghetti harvest. Some have actually believed there are spaghetti trees. There's one born every minute.

Never knew this was an April fools joke. I just heard form people in my family that people at one point thought putting nylon in front of a tv would make it color.

April Fools Day is serious business in Sweden

One of the best April fool jokes in Swedish history. :)

My grandmother told me about this. She said that the excitement and the expectations were so high that people actually believed there was a bit of color on the screen. She told me that she exclaimed "I can see the colors" once they put the stocking infront of the screen

This is one of the April fools' legends along with the BBC's spaghetti tree harvest prank (which was mentioned towards the end).

Really good video on the subject.

This is fantastic! Great story!

I think this is great because it basically describes how a colour LCD screen works. White backlight modulated through a crystal and then passed through a polarized filter screen to get rid of the undesired wavelengths.

@Andrey_Gysev

10 ай бұрын

So we can use CRT as a backlight and put a thin mesh of liquid crystals controlled by tv box or something on its screen?

Despite the title. Even knowing that a diffraction grille produced changes in brightness, with only some minor rainbow fringing on the edges. By the end, I was beginning to wonder if you really could get the changes in brightness to correspond with colours as in the “test” card with just the right density of stocking and if you did get your head placement juuuuust right. The power of deadpan delivery! That is, until the overexposed daffodils which should’ve been yellow yet were white as far as the “test card” was concerned. Then it fell down again for me 😅

Plastic covers to simulate coloUr Television, using a similar principle were widely sold in the Early 70’s. In one episode of Coronation Street, Stan Ogden lost the money for Hilda’s colour television and Eddie Yeats (Twiggy in Royal Family) bought Hilda the screen cover as compensation. They were cheap and gimmicky and people bought knowing just that!

@squidcaps4308

10 ай бұрын

Yup, and really were just based on sky being blue and ground being dark orange, aka brown. So, putting blue on top and orange at the bottom some pics look like they are in color..

Fellow swede here, I heard bout this story from my father, Had quite a good laugh and still a very funny tale. But i do appreciate too see this my self first time like my parents did. The prank is truly a legendary one . And i am so happy that you made a little documentary bout it so the rest of the world can have a little laugh of this and learn the story too.

love that old footage of them driving on the left...

I don't know if this has happened in other coutries, but in Portugal there was a time that scammers phoned people to do a satellite mammography. And they would go to a window for the scan to take place... Gosh...

About this april fools joke, it is one of them we remember most vividly! Very popular. Nice of you to catch attention to it!

As kids, we had a Magnavox Game System that had translucent plastic color ‘skins’ that we Scotch-taped over our old B&W tv. Circa 1973, PONG!!

As a Swede I have obviously heard of this, but I had no idea that it was specifically a Swedish thing.

Norway has had some funny April Fools jokes too

…and that was the last Swedish joke ever. Satisfied they had cracked humour and created a masterpiece of international proportions they returned to their ordinary lives and ate crispbread and herring.

My mom has told me a few times about this specific incident and how my grandpa took the bait line and sinker

For a moment there I thought I was watching an infomercial for stockings and undershirts ;)

This reminds me about my dad looking for radio nottingham, on TV at breakfast time, before it officially started in the UK.

Fun fact: the similar technique was actually tried for real in USSR, in search of a seamless B/W-to-color transition path. They tried attaching a grid filled with colored glass grains in a specific pattern - which, when combined with a similar pattern embedded in signal brightness, would make image appear in color. The test was successful, but the resulting image was somewhat unstable (any degree of interference or noise in analog signal would cause some degree of color shift) and resulting in only a quarter of horizontal resolution (1/3 remaining for obvious reasons, and some more on top of that for redundancy). Not to mention brightness issues and required scanline-perfect mesh manufacturing vertical precision. So, in the end, it was a dead end and a tremendous failure, which, alongside to the failure of their own independent color TV standard development (which tried to squeeze color in the existing B/W infrastructure), was the reason USSR joined SECAM standardization initiative.

Here in brazil most color television channels signed off in black and white and on the first day of color televusion they just signed on in color, showing the festa da uva as their first color program and introducing colorful idents making full use of color, as much of it as possible.

These stories are truly fascinating. I'd assumed that colour TV would just be a matter between broadcasters and manufacturers with perhaps some government intervention to decide on a standard... The details of the stuff that actually went on never occurred to me and that stuff that did go on is... well... fascinating. Keep up The Great Work! ... I was wondering if you were going to get on to the Hungarian Spaghetti Harvest.

I am born 1964, so I obviously missed this. My mother and her family watched it though, and she was 15 years then. She got excited about the idea and rushed our top get some stockings, but my grandfather (morfar) laughter man har realised what day or was, so she never got to cutting it up. They all talked about this with a great smile. Even my mother, that is still alive.

I recall, from many years ago, ads in the back of some magazines for a colour TV adapter. It consisted of a sheet of clear plastic, with a blue tint at the top, pink in the middle and green at the bottom, IIRC, which was then attached to the TV screen. A friend's father fell for that one. 🙂

I just walked on that street where the first scene from Sweden is recorded just 10 mins before watching this!

Growing up in a rural area of Denmark in the eighties, we could only receive one channel of television, the Danish national broadcast. They too made April Fools jokes every year and I remember my parents talking about how people would glue a knitting needle onto a frying pan, covering the whole thing with aluminum foil and connecting it to their tv set, then pointing it to the sky in hope of catching satellite broadcasts. 😂

Just to add to the chorus; my grandparents and parents have told us of this. It's *the* classic April fool's joke (the spaghetti harvest is also remembered here too though).

According to my mom, when this took place, my grandfather went around the house looking for my grandmother's nylon stockings. He did not put them over the TV, however, but over his head instead. It did not work.

brilliant!

My dad, born in the 40s, still tells me stories about when this happened. The stocking frenzy and later confusion when it wouldn't work. It sounded on him like everyone they knew also fell for it. Nice addition with the Swedish national anthem in the end.

This is the bt far most famous April fools joke ever played in Sweden and is referenced every March as the one to beat if you attemp at an April fools joke

As a Sweden this is hilarious, I've never heard of this and wouldn't have guessed we had color tv that early, I'm born in 81 btw :P

@karl-erikmumler9820

10 ай бұрын

Det är ju en klassiker! Skäll ut dina föräldrar ; P

The commercial abt spagitti trees is very clever.

TBH If this was an obvious April fools prank, and everything and everyone was telling it's a prank, I will still fall for it!

Technically have you had thousands of micro RGB colored dots you could use individual scanlines as different parts of the color spectrum and mix them together lower-quality screen but with color

Best April's fool day prank ever. People here in Sweden are still talking about that one 😅

This is the greatest April fool's joke in Swedish history. It just can't be beaten.

Well, I remember this one. Hadn't start school yet. Dont remember the details but from my memory. We were sitting watching tv. Suddenly dad sprung up shouting "Ruth (mom), we need one of your old nylon stockings". Dad took action, cut the nylon sock and taped it on the tv screen. Then we, the tv watching group, try to see any coiour. Remember I said "Perhaps I see some green there?!? Than mom hesitantly enter the room. "Flourus, (yeah, it was dads name) what date is it today?" The fact dad working as engineer didnt slow her laughter the slightest. She stood there really burst out laughing, tear in her eyes, slapping her knees. Dad wasnt so fond of that story. Rememberit i was the time when we believed in authorities and tv. Take care out there. 😅

Our nabour rang on our door and wanted to borrow some stockings!😂

I still use these special stockings for colour on my black and white remote watcher..

Our specialists say that, if your set doesn't displays color when you dressed it socks, you may be in possession of a black and white set.

I wonder how many people went to work next day and told their colleagues that it worked for them (either to continue the joke, or because they believed it could work and didn't want to appear to be incapable of mere stockings handling).

I’m about 1/8 Swedish from my father’s side of family when my father was 1/4 Swedish. When I was a kid that my family had colored and even black & white televisions in the house.

interesting video

For most of my life it has been the tradition of various news media (TV stations, radio stations and newspapers) here in Denmark to make one April Fools news story every April 1st.

Funnily enough, in the late 1960s or early 1970s, I remember pestering my parents to buy a 'miracle' screen for black & white TVs that purported to turn them into colour TVs. They were advertised in Exchange & Mart. Similarly, around the same time I remember an episode of Tomorrow's World where they experimented with some form of screen flickering to simulate colour. To the best of my recollection it wasn't broadcast in early April!

I told my son the world was all in B&W until 1972... he believed me for ages.