I have been able to play around with premiere, and after some good advice and guidance from Rick, I think I have the idea. Of course, more practice will make more perfect, but I have been able to get plausible results in a pretty short time.
Here is what I did:
First, I realised that I should analyse what is going on in the mandrake color adjuster (that's the photoshop action I used to modify the still image). Essentially, he is creating a luminance image, which displays in greyscale so it appears equally in all three channels, so he eliminates it from G and B then substitutes it back into the red channel. When this is displayed as a RGB image, it is not totally correct, but is close enough to look pretty good. A little bit of fiddling with the levels is enough to get a very close approximation.
A luminance image is (approximately) 30% Red, 60% green, 10% blue, so I plugged those values into the red channel of the channel mixer, then reduced the blue and green channel in an attempt to bring the total luminance back down to reasonable values - nothing fancy: I just reduced both green and blue to 75% - in the future maybe I should do a rough calculation to make sure I am in the right range.
After that, I used the levels editor to get an acceptable color balance. I was unable to get the level histogram to respond to the channel mixer in premiere, so I mimicked the whole process in photoshop and copied over the levels from there.
I'm pretty happy with the result; the colors look very close to what I remember and the luminance seems good - there is some burnout in places but that is actually in the original and I will try to find a way to get rid of it maybe by using the video levels tool.
I have enclosed some jpegs with an original for comparison.
Peter