Richard Russell was also involved in the Colour Recovery Working Group, which successfully sought to recover the colour signal from black and white telerecordin

Richard Russell was also involved in the Colour Recovery Working Group, which successfully sought to recover the colour signal from black and white telerecordings. For background: many programmes produced on colour videotape by the BBC in the 70s, were distributed to overseas broadcasters on black and white film only. When the BBC destroyed the original videotapes, this left the black and white films as the only remaining copies of these programmes. In some cases, however, the colour information had been accidentally embedded into the black and white film (a notch filter should have been used to remove it). So around 2008, Richard developed a piece of software, in BBC BASIC, which was able to recover the embedded colour signal and restore several programmes held in black and white to their full colour glory.