Variable colors in hardstatus line

[Chris Jones]

My hardstatus line invokes fairly elaborate backticks that tell me all I
need to know about the current state of my system.

I was thinking of making it more readable by enhancing it with a bit of
color.

One backtick for instance tells me how hot my system is running and
since /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/trip_points contains:

  critical (S5):           115 C
  active[0]:               86 C: devices=FAN1
  active[1]:               76 C: devices=FAN0

..I thought I might color the display, green, orange, and red, depending
on where in the above range my system's temperature currently falls.

I just tested a backtick that specifies the required xterm ctlseq's:

  echo -e "\033[38;5;160m $systemp \033[0m"

i.e. I am writing the contents of the $temp variable to stdout using
foreground color 160 in my xterm's 256-color palette.

This works fine when I run it from a bash prompt .. prints my system's
current temperature in dark pink letters, but when run as a screen
backtick it displays "\033[38;5;160m 56C \033[0m" - white letters on a
black background.

Is there any way I can use the current gnu/screen framework to
dynamically choose the color of the hardstatus line contents in order to
highlight critical pieces of data, or do I need to hack the code to
achieve this?

Thanks,

CJ