Roughing it in black and white

On Sunday mornings one of the cable stations shows episodes of “Batman,” the campy series from the 1960s.

Sometimes I watch the beginning of an episode and feel a mixture of pain and nostalgia. The pain comes from remembering what a doofus I was back then — one of the few people (if that) in the country who didn’t realize that the show was a tongue-in-cheek spoof. Yes, reader, I took it seriously for a while. Then again, I’ve read that Neil Hamilton, who played Commissioner Gordon, also didn’t get the joke. At least he had something of an excuse: His career stretched back to the silent era, when scripts and performances weren’t always subtle, and his over-the-top theatricality added to the show’s fun.

The nostalgia I feel comes from each episode’s intro, when we are informed that “Batman” is “In Color!” This was after ABC and CBS finally caught up with the NBC Peacock, which had ruled the panchromatic roost for ages; for a couple of seasons the two also-rans always trumpeted their shows’ color at the beginning of each show, as if we stupid viewers couldn’t have figured it out for ourselves.

“Batman” was one of the first color programs I ever saw — but not at home.

We still had a black-and-white TV. I think my parents knew that we kids wanted a color set, but there were six of us youngsters, and given the cost of clothing and feeding us, we sensed that for some time to come we were going to have to take CBS’ word that Lucy had red hair.

In an attempt to make us feel better about this, one day Mom brought home a rectangular plastic sheet that was supposed to simulate the joys of color TV if you placed it over the screen of your black-and-white Zenith. The top third of the sheet had a blue hue, the bottom third was green and the middle section had another color — orange, I think. I remember that most of us kids were kind enough to go along with this, at least for a while.

Then, around the mid-1960s, my dad got a membership for a huge store, kind of a pre-Walmart Walmart, with every kind of department you could think of, including toys, electronics and groceries — not to mention the bags of extraordinarily tasty popcorn you could get as you were leaving; the memory still makes my mouth water.

The store’s membership was open to government employees. My father wasn’t a government employee, but his company, an auto-parts warehouse, had government contracts, so he slid through that way.

On Thursday nights, while he and Mom shopped in the grocery department, we kids would hang out in the color TV section, watching “Batman” and other shows. It was a thrill to see all these characters in color; for a little while each week, we got a taste of How The Other Half Lived. And we also learned fairly quickly that these 1960s TVs had a knob you could turn if you wanted to futz with the color. I still remember seeing an ad for Kellogg’s blue cornflakes.

By the time we finally got a color set I was entering college, and although I still lived at home, my academic workload tended to keep me away from the TV.

I now have a 52-inch set that can do all sorts of things; problem is, I’m too dumb to figure out how to make it do all sorts of things. On a good day I could maybe figure out how to plug it in. But the color is sharp and the audio is state-of-the-art, even if some of those Brits on the PBS shows still haven’t learned to speak up.

Of course the manual says nothing about blue cornflakes.

But you can’t have everything.