The Future Is Orange

Over the last few years, the backdrops to British television news have scuttled across the spectrum from an erstwhile conventional blue to a newly modish orange. The BBC has gone the whole-hog, abandoning its cyan to indigo range in favour of ochre and rust. ITN brokers a compromise - an orange dawn rises then periodically swashes across a deep blue screen, a transformation which is enacted before our eyes. With orange now so well established on the two major channels, it is not surprising that Channel 4 - the chromatic pioneer which plucked orange from citrus obscurity into the limelight of current affairs - has moved on. Employing a clashing set of saturated hues, Channel 4's news may well be responding to Josef Albers' insistence that we can overcome a preference for harmony in favour of a relish for dissonance. But even here, amongst slabs of imperial purple and violent green, orange holds its own - the note that emerges may only be partly orange, but it is not at all blue.

The rise of orange must have something to do with the recent epidemic of house and home publications. Over the last year, the colour has been actively promoted on their pages, and the domestic interiors market is enjoying a bubble fuelled by hot orange breath. The source of this effusion can be traced to an alliance between the ongoing 70s revival and various, vaguely defined, non-European aesthetics. The contemporary message of orange suggests inside rather than outside, intimate rather than public, warm rather than cool. The chromatically split cover of the current UK IKEA catalogue spells it out: the left-hand side shows warm light spilling onto an orange wall while the right-hand side reveals the chill blue world beyond. Orange insulates the contemporary urban nest; as conditions outside grow harsher, the home fires are kept burning.

By turning orange, the newsroom is attempting to ape private space. In the case of the BBC this move toward intimacy is also reflected in the furnishings. Rather than sitting behind the traditional, authoritative, one man desk, BBC newsreaders now perch tentatively to one side of a figure of eight table. Not an object anyone would have in their homes, the invitation to sit down and take part is unmistakable all the same. Channels 4 and 5 have gone one step further: the newscasters have sprouted legs and stride round the floor, propping their bottoms on desks. This would never have happened in the days when news was blue.

This truncated chromatic vocabulary of orange and blue is not unique to the news, but is becoming commonplace. Apple, for example, has concentrated its marketing efforts upon the blueberry and tangerine iMacs and iBooks. Blue computers (open-minded turquoise, not conservative, British Airways navy) are advertised showing off their potential to access information, to tap into the public sphere; orange machines are depicted editing a home video, active in the reification of the domestic realm. While iMac consumers are invited to choose, those buying Sega's Dreamcast have had the choice made for them. Within Europe, the Dreamcast's spiral logo is indigo, elsewhere it is orange. Employing the dichotomy of inside and outside, the European hue suggests the possibility of escape, while the non-European offers the warm flush of belonging: anomie - the old model of single player games - versus community - the new multi-player game model. Whatever the reason, the blue package seems hackneyed: blue is the fall back and orange is in the ascendant.

But what does all this mean? In the 40s the Swiss psychologist Dr Max Lüscher pioneered the Lüscher Colour Test. The mainstay of his theory was the assumption that colours have independent structural meanings derived from man's encounters with these colours in the natural state: dark blue equals night, which equates with calm; yellow corresponds to daylight, which signifies activity, and so forth. This clunky set of associations is not that far removed from Goethe's equally un-scientific colour theory and his insistence that colours have intrinsic 'sensual and moral effects' that are the product of their appearance in nature. According to Lüscher, to choose orange in preference to blue means, if your choice lies at the red end of the spectrum, that you are attempting 'to dull [a] feeling of non-fulfilment by impassioned behaviour or sexuality', or, if the shade tends to yellow, that your 'oppressive lack of emotional fulfilment demands that the situation be eased and the associated depression be lifted'. Key to Lüscher's theory is the notion that you are attracted to the colour whose properties you lack; we are all gnawing on orange like a pregnant women gnaws on chalk.

So what might contemporary colour psychologists - a field truly dominated by charlatans - have to say about the new orange dawn? Faber Birren, the American colour authority and accumulator of the world's largest colour library, took a different view. Writing in the 60s and 70s, Birren argued that colour preferences could be mapped straight onto character. If you prefer orange above blue, 'you are a natural and good-hearted person, but greatly troubled that you lack profundity'. Taking care to by-pass an 'inferiority-complex', orange lovers can look forward to a happy but dumb existence. Birren argued that 'with maturity comes a greater liking for hues of a shorter wavelength (blue, green) than for hues of a longer wavelength (red, orange, yellow)'. So, the embrace of orange reflects a mass retreat to infancy and affirms the conservative critics' theories that our culture is dumbing down. Of course, the notion that contemporary orange is the colour of our collective nursery walls is riddled with prejudice; elsewhere in his writings, Birren observed a preference for immature long wavelength colours amongst Latins and Southern Europeans. Evidently a product of Cold-War America, Birren's understanding of maturity suggests an alliance with big, corporate blue.

Abandoning the biases of chromopsychology and turning to the cosmic field of chromotherapy yields the utterly banal: blue rays calm you down (and alleviate jaundice); orange rays warm you up (and do wonders for faulty elimination). Broadly speaking, we are being offered a big upper. Trite this may be, but within the limited schemes of marketing it is entirely plausible. Rudolf Steiner whisked the black pens from the hands of his disaffected pupils in an effort to relieve them of forces that were alien to life; maybe it is a similar, slightly grating insistence that we 'look on the bright side' that has turned the news orange.