If the great Charlie Chaplin were alive today he might well marvel at the artificial intelligence enabled colour versions of his comedy masterpieces such as Modern Times or The Idle Class. A recent research paper from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology presents a fully automatic method for colourizing black-and-white films without any human guidance or references. Film/video colourization is not a new technology. A small number of early 20th century films, such as A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Kingdom of the Fairies (1903) were painstakingly hand-coloured, frame-by-frame, by humans. Computerized colourization was invented in the 1970s and has been widely used and steadily improved ever since.