Golden Brown.


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.

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