In my last column, I asked why Ofcom was so willing to surrender oversight of the BBC by allowing the broadcaster to opt into a DRM scheme that put British telly rules into the domain of a cartel of offshore entertainment giants.

Truth be told, I think I know the answer: Ofcom's worried that if the US media giants (as well as sport leagues and other major rightsholders) make good on their threat to boycott unrestricted high-def television, the ensuing absence of "good content" will stop you from upgrading your receiver. If enough people refuse to upgrade, it will be politically difficult to complete the "analogue switchoff" (termination of all non-digital TV broadcasts) in 2012.

Nothing upsets a voter like a broken telly, after all.

Why does anyone care about analogue switchoff? Spectrum. The last major British spectrum auction was one of the most successful money-raising exercises in the history of world government, with more than £50bn coughed up by telecoms companies for 3G licences. As government struggles to patch the yawning pits in its balance sheet, another £50bn would be most welcome. And, more importantly, the failure to realise the expected windfall would be fatal to the career of any civil servant who could be blamed for it.

The problem of how to get punters to replace their tellies is a hard one. TVs tend to enjoy second and third lives in the kids' rooms, in the garage or in the shed. Chucking them out — or even buying Freeview boxes for all of them — requires major carrot (Freeview is free) and stick (analogue switchoff makes your set obsolete), and it's never a sure thing.

The history of earlier changeovers is a colourful one. My favourite example is the US colour TV transition. In the mid-1950s, the US regulator and NBC (a broadcaster whose parent company, RCA, made colour sets) began the process of rolling out colour broadcast apparatus across the nation. This was a substantial investment, and in order to recoup it, the broadcasters would need to see an increase in the number of viewers (this being before practically every American household owned a TV – penetration in 1955 stood at 64.5%) and a higher rate from advertisers for reaching those viewers, on the strength of the new possibilities opened up by colour adverts.

But there was a problem: there was practically no colour programming. Broadcasters didn't want to commission colour broadcasts to transmit to a nation of black-and-white sets; viewers didn't have any reason to switch their sets to colour if everything being aired was in black-and-white.

There was one source of ready-made colour material that could have gone out over the airwaves: Hollywood had been shooting feature films and accompanying short subjects in colour for decades and had amassed a prodigious back-catalogue of material that might have jumpstarted the colour TV transition.

There was another problem, though: the studios hated TV, feared it, and would like to have seen it dead and dusted. It was the competition.

Until Walt Disney decided to build Disneyland, that is. The Walt Disney Company came through the second world war as a publicly listed firm, and Walt spent the next decade chafing against shareholder control and squabbling about spending with his brother Roy, the adult in their partnership. When Roy refused to open the company coffers to him for the $17m he needed to embark on a mad scheme called Disneyland, the company instead raised millions by opening their vaults to ABC, a broadcaster.

In 1961, the Disney show moved to NBC, where its mission became the promotion of colour TV. The programme was eventually retitled Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color, and each episode featured subjects that were apt to make the black-and-white viewer feel like she was missing out on something special, indeed.

My favourite segment from those days is something called The Spectrum Song, which was presented by the character Ludwig Van Drake (himself a remix of the Nazi war criminal and rocket scientist Werner Von Braun, whose reputation Disney had helped to rehabilitate with TV specials that presented the former SS Sturmbannführer as a cuddly, daffy scientist who would help America win the space race).

In it, Von Drake sits down at a piano keyboard whose keys have the "octave" of colour – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet (yes, it's an octave with seven members!) – and he sings a song that names all the colours and the colours that they can be combined to make. As he names the colours, they shoot out of the organ and dance around the screen (the whole video is available on YouTube – watch it before Disney copyright-nukes it from orbit!).

The best part is the version so that people with black-and-white TVs don't feel left out: the keyboard's saturation fades to monochrome, and Von Drake begins to play and sing: "Black, black, grey, grey, black, black, black, white, black, grey," and so on.

And there you have it: a cuddly duck based on a fearsome Nazi, gently taunting the technological refuseniks who wouldn't stump up for the next generation in colour TV.

It's hardly the most plausible way to get a TV transition, but it certainly has more plausibility than crippling our sets and handing over our cultural regulation to a foreign cartel as a means of getting there.