Test Card F

It was the first to be transmitted in colour in the UK and the first to feature a person, and has become an iconic British image regularly subject to parody.

The card was developed by BBC engineer George Hersee (1924–2001), the father of the girl in the central image.

It was further phased out from BBC1 in November 1997 when the station began to air 24 hours a day, followed by BBC2 in January 1999 when its overnight downtime was replaced entirely by Pages from Ceefax.

Along the top (see above) are 95% saturation colour bars in descending order of luminance—white, yellow, cyan, green, magenta, red, blue and black.

Standard greyscale and frequency response (1.5, 2.5, 3.5, 4, 4.5 and 5.25 MHz) tests are found on the left and right respectively of the central picture.

In the centre image, a child was depicted so that wrong skin colour would be obvious and not subject to changing make-up fashions.

Some of them are also associated with cathode-ray tubes; modern screens use liquid crystal displays (LCDs) that are not scanned at high speed.

The name of the broadcasting channel usually appeared in the space underneath the letter F—a sans-serif F denoting an original optical version of the test card.

Originally, Test Card F was a photographic slide made up of two transparencies in perfect registration—one containing the colour information (chrominance) and the other the monochrome background (luminance).

[10] Along with his Test Card F co-star Carole Hersee, Bubbles has appeared for an estimated total of 70,000 hours[11] on television, equivalent to nearly eight whole years.

However, the shade of green material chosen was too subtle for the engineers' liking and so Bubbles' body colour in Test Card F was retouched (this can be seen from the edges of his image) to make it more saturated and also to give it a higher luminance value on screen.

Notable overseas users included: A 16:9 (1.78:1) widescreen predecessor to Test Card W without an identifying letter first appeared in March 1998 as part of digital tests on the Astra 1D satellite, and was notably broadcast to the public on 6 November 1998 as part of a joke on Have I Got News For You to censor then-host Angus Deayton about discussing Peter Mandelson's life.

Extra mirrored arrow-heads on the central axis at the sides mark the positions of the middle 4:3 and 14:9 sections of the image.

[37] Variations and parodies of Test Card F are common in British broadcasting, Internet sites, and games.