The one above is our favourite (we're very heavily into black and white nostalgia as you've probably guessed by now). It's a tuning signal from around 1950 which is an embellishment of a slightly earlier test transmission card used for setting up new transmitters. This was an era in the UK when loads of transmitters were going up for the first time. For the geeky, the lines in the centre hole are a 2.5Mhz frequency grating. The wavy lines were used from 1949 onward but had disappeared by the 1960's.
Fast forward to when we were growing up (we're not going to say exactly when but you can probably guess) the BBC test cards had evolved though various versions arriving at 'test card F' (above) with the advent of colour TV in 1967. The girl in middle is Carole Hersee (although for all the years we saw this test card we had no idea what her name was). It turns out she was the most recognisable face on British TV between 1967 and 1997. It's safe to say that she takes the prize for having her image broadcast on TV for the longest... It would add up to eight consecutive years.
The colour properties of test card F were lost on us and the engineers that came round to fix our Black and White TVs. We didn't have colour until much much later than 1967! Unlike out American cousins, we only had three TV channels BBC1, BBC2 and ITV (later we had Channel 4 but we had to wait a while for that!) ITV were keen on giving out lots of super-geeky engineering information when they weren't broadcasting anything else, including the state of all their transmitters...
If you were lucky you'd get some Muzak to listen to while the test card was up. If you weren't so lucky you'd just get a test tone. I don't have a great memory or perfect pitch but I'd guess at it being A440 or some multiple of that frequency. A sine wave of course. This would have us killing the volume in the early mornings while we were waiting for early morning children's programmes to come on. On the BBC, although test card F was the mainstay, sometimes you'd get variations like this totally 'robotic' one (come back Carole please!)...
You were most likely to see a test card after 'closedown' which as a rule as around midnight (or not long after). At the end of every day before the test card came on, the BBC would play out with the national anthem and naval footage... You know, British flags fluttering on board ships with blokes in uniform saluting. The test card that came on would always be accompanied by the test tone (cheaper than music) which would play the whole night through until maybe 5.30 when it would turn to Muzak until the first programmes came on at 6. But back in the 'golden age of television' test cards weren't just nocturnal, they were also a regular fixture during the day. BBC2 wouldn't have enough programmes to last the whole day so often in the afternoons a Muzak-accompanied card would be up. Then over on ITV they very considerately put huge long gaps in between their 'Schools and Colleges' programmes (to give one class a chance to leave the room in the school with the TV and the next class to come in). They filled these gaps with this (usually together with some depressing academic sounding music like Bach played on a guitar!)
Test card F was so well known that it was parodied by pretty much every comedy show on UK TV at the time. In 1993 UK Comic Relief held a competition for a replacement Carole which was won by Hannah Marriott. We'll leave you with her...
British spellings courtesy of the Oxford English Dictionary.
