It came from music libraries, and a huge exchange of material between European broadcasters. The man who chose the music in the 70s was John Ross-Barnard, who worked in the BBC's Foreign Recordings Department: "People wrote in – can I have a copy? But it wasn't ours. The BBC regularly received letters from the public asking where they could buy it the short answer was: they couldn't. It was once compared to a Home Counties version of the Seventh Seal.īut it was the testcard music that hooked me. Her face never changed the game of noughts and crosses never ended.
Later on in life, the image of Carole Hersee became more associated with waking up on the settee at three in the morning with the telly still on and empty beer cans on the floor. For girls, the Mona Lisa-like image of Carole Hersee was a role model – I know a DJ in Wales who dressed like her as a child, even carrying a cuddly clown around someone else I know thought she was the most beautiful girl in the world (no, it wasn't me).
#OLD BROADCAST END OF NIGHT SCREEN TV#
Now living in the New Forest with two daughters, she can claim to have had more screen time – around 70,000 hours – than anyone else in British TV history.įor children the image seemed incredibly important. Hersee was, unsurprisingly, teased at school and, to her discomfort, the image was used on a daily basis until 1998. So Carole went into a photographer's studio: the result was the familiar image of a girl with an alice band, playing noughts and crosses with a rather terrifying toy clown, surrounded by mysterious test graphics. The BBC decided that replacing Carole's picture with an adult model was too risky – they needed something timeless, and 1967 fashions weren't exactly built to last. Its designer was a BBC engineer called George Hersee and, for a dummy run, he had included a picture of his eight-year-old daughter, Carole, at the centre of it. The most iconic image, introduced in 1967 with the advent of colour TV, was called Test Card F.
Come the 90s and the lounge music boom, I was fairly sure I wasn't the only kid who'd been watching the test card. The liberal use of European synth instrumentals, vocalese jazz, even bits of Bach, informed my tastes – the test card may not have primed me for punk, but I really understood where the Pale Fountains and Portishead were coming from. I ended up with a collection of C60 cassette tapes containing things like (though I had no idea what they were at the time) Norrie Paramor's version of the M*A*S*H* theme and Andre Brasseur's The Kid, probably the only record played both on the test card and at Wigan Casino.
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