Who was the test card girl

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Q. You seem to know a lot about it.

A.� Oh yes - and you ain't seen nothing yet. This card is know to aficionados - there are plenty of them - as Test Card F. She was eight-year-old Carol Hersee, whose father George was a BBC engineer. He was also the author of the BBC Engineering Division monograph, A Survey on the Development of TV Test Cards in Use in the BBC, which was published in 1967, priced five shillings.

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Q.� Essential bedtime reading

A.� Perhaps. George Hersee died, aged 76, in April, 2001, and merited full obituaries in national newspapers - and not just because of his famous daughter. As television progressed, he was given the task of providing, urgently, new studios as the old 405-line black-and-white system was being replaced with 625 lines - and colour.

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Q.� And this is where the test card came in

A.� Indeed. A suitable test card was needed to assess the technical performance of the colour TV - from camera to receiver. Many different test cards had been in use by the BBC since pre-war days and some devised immediately post-war. George became the expert in test cards, culminating in BBC Test Card F. The design is still in use today, although converted for the wide screen. Hersee suggested that the photograph of a model should be used to check the flesh tones.

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Q.� And his daughter became famous

A.� Oh yes. There's hardly a TV anorak that doesn't know her name or have a video of the card. The picture of Carol has spent more than 70,000 hours on the BBC airwaves and must have been seen, at sometime or another, by most of the population of the UK.

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Q.� But why was she playing noughts and crosses

A.� With good reason. The technicians wanted a marker to indicate roughly the centre of the card for static convergence tests, and so the X appears in the centre of the screen. Test cards, as I said, have their own fans - and even a society.�

Q.� Tell me.

A.� Fans calling themselves the Test Card Circle hold annual conventions and Test Card F is a popular T-shirt design. The circle was founded in 1989 by composer and musical director Paul Sawtell, whose primary interest was in the music played with the test cards. Nowadays, of course, there's hardly a moment of dead air when a programme is not showing and a test card - whatever type - is a great rarity.

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Q.� So before I go to one of these conventions, is there any other fascination test card fact I should know

A. Yes. The picture of Carol was 'flipped' - reversed - because she is left-handed and the BBC didn't want a southpaw on the test card.

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By Steve Cunningham