Colour vision

In an eye-baffling arrangement of geometric shapes, a sinister-looking clown and a little girl, Test Card F is one of television’s most enduring images, says Rob Crossan

- Rob Crossan

IT’S a long way from the corner of a 1970s British living room to a mobile music app playlist in 2024. Yet there is one image that has, with peculiar stubbornness, crossed that analogue-to-digital rubicon. If you were home from school with chickenpox in the era before This Morning and Countdown, then, should you have switched on your parents’ wood-encased, steamer trunk-weight television before hiding under an eiderdown on the sofa, the image presented to you would be that of a girl playing a game of noughts and crosses on a blackboard with a predictably sinister-looking clown.

That clown was called Bubbles and that girl was eight-year-old Carole Hersee. She would go on to become the person who, to date, has clocked up the most screen time of any individual in UK history (about 70,000 hours so far) as the face of the BBC Test Card.