Seeing all these beautiful black and white images, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Ted Lowe’s (BBC snooker commentator in the early 70’s) infamous commentary:
“And for those of you watching in black and white, the pink [ball] is next to the green.”
Remember black and white TVs? (SSTV fans excluded!)
Many late evenings in my bedroom as a kid watching snooker in b/w. The pink & yellow were the challenge - the rest were fairly easy to distinguish by shade once you learned which was which.
Heh. Sometimes context is everything. If you know the arrangement of the table, and you’ve just seen the referee replace a ball on the green spot… 
Still happens today in football. “Norwich City kick off in their yellow shirts, green shorts and yellow socks kicking left to right. Bayern Munich are in their change strip, red shirt, blue shorts and red striped socks kicking right to left…and Jeremy Goss scores with an absolute bullet volley!!!”
…and so forth. I guess some commentators either do it out of habit or as a throwback reference. Like what that fella with the long hair does in boxing when he says boxers names twice when introducing them. He said he does it deliberately as a reference to the early days where announcer sound systems weren’t the best so calling the name twice would ensure the boxers’ name was heard.
My grandparents had one in the kitchen. Maybe 9" or something like that, with a dial to change frequency (rather than present channel buttons).
The BBC TV tax/con is going up again, including black and white licences. I wonder how many of those are still being issued!
Over 3000 were issued in 2025 according to the toilet paper below:
Sincere apologies all for linking to The Sun, I couldn’t find anything else for 2025.
There is a stat chart for B&W licenses but it is from 2019 so not really very accurate (like the journalism of said rag linked above really).
https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/cs/media-centre/news/view.app?id=1369787209230
They’re still mostly cheaper than they were 30 years ago. I do hate that I missed the dip in film camera prices that would have enabled me to get some very high end cameras for pennies on the dollar, but they’re still cheaper than they were in the late 90s and early 2000s. Of course, many of those now need some sort of service to be trustworthy and the list of competent camera techs is shrinking, so there’s that. 
Chris
Back in the late 80s, I always wanted a Bronica MF camera; there are a few on the market now, but you have to be careful what you buy!
Perhaps in a different vein, I found my father’s old Box Brownie camera and after filling it with some film have decided I’m going to try use it on summits this year and take photos. It’s very much a low quality camera - fixed focus lens, fixed shutter speed, heavy vignetting, so the photos have a distinct lo-fi feel to them, like doing SOTA in the 1950s. Definitely favours B&W film.
VK3/VC-018 (looking at VK3/VC-019):
VK3/VC-039:
VK3/VE-008 (NYD rollover):
…hi Andrew, I had the same camera, it took 620 film. I took a lot of photos with it. Got it one xmas, probably aged 12.
cheers: Geoff vk3sq
Yeah, I have to respool 120 film onto 620 spools. Adds to the character 
Great snaps! I think I might have a Brownie somewhere in my box of vintage cameras. Same deal as yours. Bakelite everywhere. Fixed focus on everything. Such a simple design you would mistake it for a toy.
I’ll see can I dig it out. I have a Lomo Holga which shoots similar.
The old Brownie cameras can deliver good pictures if the lenses are cleaned up and you work within their limitations. They tend to like a lot of light due to the slow aperture value. I have an old Brownie Hawkeye (one of the Bakelite models) and it will even feed 120 film on the 120 spool, but it does need a 620 spool for uptake of the exposed film. I run a roll through mine once or twice a year. I’d shoot with it more but I’m not set up to scan medium format at the moment.
Chris
Aye, you’ll usually find the lenses aren’t especially well-corrected for colour imaging, and will often perform better on Ortho film, might be worth trying a roll of something like Ilford Ortho 80 if you can get that easily? I do often have a tendency to forget that while Ilford films are comparatively cheap and plentiful here in the UK, that’s not always the case elsewhere in the world.