Colorize output from remote less

Question

I know this is kindof crazy. I like to get crazy.

I have a local log colorizing bash function that I wrote. I decided as an experiment that I want to try to use it to colorize the output when I ssh into a server and run less on one of the logs. I can do this successfully with tail, but not with less. Is there a way to use my bash function locally to colorize the less output being returned through ssh? This is what I have tried:

function colorwrap {
   while read -r line; do
      echo "$line" | colorlog
      #printf "$line" | colorlog
   done < <("$@")
}

Invoking it like so:

colorwrap ssh -t servername -C less /logs/server.log   

With echo it seems to work a little bit. I can scroll up and down with j, k, etc. but things like search and : don't show up on the screen. But I can quit via :q even if I can't see it. Also, the colorizing works. But the scrolling is choppy and it's hard to do searches. I'm not even sure it is doing the searches I try to do.

I don't really understand how the control commands work, but I'm guessing it has something to do with terminal allocation and/or echo not interpreting correctly control characters.

Any tips on how to make this work? Or alternative *nix tools that can be used locally to wrap an interactive program running remotely?