I was in a set-design meeting the other day where we had to discuss how we are going to stage a news-based comedy show. I tend to switch off in these meetings because I don't really know what I'm talking about; couldn't tell a good set from a bad one and am confused by terms like psyke, flats and gobos, and that's probably not even how you spell them. I did perk up at one point, though, when somebody asked "What colour is the news?" Now by this she didn't mean "What colour is the news in your head?" - boring old black and white for me - but "What colour is the news on television?" A much more difficult question to answer because it depends on where you're watching it and in what decade. Here are the current news-spectrum settings.
The BBC have gone for a reddy colour.
ITV have blue and white
Channel 4 have this sort of purply-turquoise.
Sky have blue.
Unless they're trying to scare you.
Channel 5's mish-mash of wood and purple is unsurprisingly the least serious.
And More 4 have gone for a kind of "The news is bad? I'm cool with that" Green.
It's difficult to conclude much from this pretty wide-ranging colour scheme, apart from: the news is definitely not orange.
But if the point of all this is to make the news less threatening and more like an entertainment show (you will often hear newsreaders say "Welcome to the programme") why not go all the way? I am waiting for the day we see news with a studio audience, so reports on paedophiles arriving at court under a blanket can be accompanied by booing and there can be cheers at the sports bits and tutting at the weather.
I'm afraid we are never likely to see again the sort of news bulletin an old man called Peter Woods used to do on BBC2(!) at about 8pm in the seventies and eighties, when the appropriate colour for news was brown.
Great post. I remember reading something else about this - there are reasons for those colours, I think.
Oh well.
Posted by: Ben | February 22, 2007 at 08:50 AM
Check out a book called Spiral Dynamics (Beck and Cowan). Not time to summarise here but spookily they cover (in this highly significant order!) beige, purple, red, blue, orange, green (gap!) and then yellow, turquoise with coral being the ultimate (unknowable?) next step.
Posted by: jon leach | March 01, 2007 at 02:04 PM
Actually, don't buy the book - here is the whole scheme on one sheet:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/reader/1405133562/ref=sib_dp_pt/026-1276962-6189262#reader-page
Posted by: jon leach | March 01, 2007 at 02:18 PM
Thanks for this, it's brilliant.
Posted by: Richard | March 01, 2007 at 02:47 PM