are those 13 thousand homes of elderly people who are watching old sets? I don't think anyone manufactures G&W sets.

My Dad watched an ancient 13" B&W set for years. When it went on the fritz I had to convince him it would be too costly to repair and he consented to me buying him and new 19" color set. If that B&W set hadn't broke he would've watched it until he died.

I'm watching Daniel Boone in B&W as originally broadcasted in Black and White in a modern HiDef Digital broadcast on a flat screen TV

from wiki:

One of the great technical challenges of introducing color broadcast television was the desire to conserve bandwidth, potentially three times that of the existing black-and-white (B&W) standards, and not use an excessive amount of radio spectrum. In the United States, after considerable research, the National Television Systems Committee[1] approved an all-electronic system developed by RCA which encoded the color information separately from the brightness information and greatly reduced the resolution of the color information in order to conserve bandwidth. The brightness image remained compatible with existing B&W television sets at slightly reduced resolution, while color televisions could decode the extra information in the signal and produce a limited-resolution color display. The higher resolution B&W and lower resolution color images combine in the eye to produce a seemingly high-resolution color image. The NTSC standard represented a major technical achievement.


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also:

There is a significant difference between the color revolution and digital/high definition revolution: RCA's NTSC system was accepted in 1953 because the new color broadcasts were compatible with the nation's millions of black and white receivers. Not so with digital broadcasting, which is transmitted over UHF frequencies and requires all new "ATSC" tuners to receive the digital signals which are not compatible with the RCA/NTSC system. The viewing public needed to make the switch to new digital TV sets, relatively inexpensive converters allow older TV's to view digital broadcasts.

http://www.ev1.pair.com/colorTV/colortv-revolution.html

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For a monochrome set, it's much simpler: The RF signal is received, and the composite video signal is detected from it. And that composite video signal is used to display a picture. The colour signal is ignored, the tuner bandwidth mayn't be wide enough to pass it through. And the video circuitry bandwidth mightn't be wide enough to pass it through, either, even if the tuner did pass it. If the colour signal does get through, it'll be seen as a fuzzy dot pattern on top of the picture, there's nothing in the monochrome receiver to make use of it, anyway.

http://www.cameratim.com/info/colour-video#television

and I doubt he'd get the bandwidth necessary - he'd have to bid for it, and it would cost millions (he'd be up against mobile phone companies, emergency services, the BBC and other broadcasters ...).

It's not 'making a comeback' at all. It just hasn't died yet.

British tele viewers still pay a license fee...and black and white sets are still cheaper:

http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/topics/tv-licence-types-and-costs-top2/

Not likely.
They will always be around in these statistically insignificant numbers.