This is a selection of Test Cards and similar images used by UK television channels from the 1970s onward. I've tried to include every single pattern I can remember being shown, though I've not created images for all the minor variations that existed.

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

Let's kick off with the world-famous Test Card F. This is the version shown by BBC1 in the early 1980s. The 'BBC 1' caption and the colourbars at top were actually superimposed on what was otherwise a pure 'optical' test card. The caption overlays the 'BBC 2 COLOUR' caption that was printed on the optical card (this is why its background is so large, as you can just about make out). To me it looked like the colourbars were hiding behind the test card, waiting to leap out at any moment!

BBC1 used this (mixed in with Pages from Ceefax when these started) before schools programmes started for the morning - or really second thing, as there were often a couple of Open University programmes in the early morning. BBC Schools programmes were broadcast on BBC1 until 1983, and during some school holidays there were no replacement programmes. There were often periods of test card in the afternoon as well, except when ousted by sports coverage (Glorious Goodwood springs to mind). Hard to imagine now, but in those days you'd get a lot of TCF on Beeb One.

BBC2 also made great use of TCF. They regularly had no programmes between the morning OU and Play School, allowing about 3 hours of test card to be shown. This was replaced by cricket during its season, but occasionally, as is the way with cricket, the weather prevented play. In this case, rather than show replays of old matches, or indeed the test card, an apology/info caption was shown, often with some church organ music. Apparently this was one of the usual test card tapes, which featured Handel's Organ Concerto.

Test Card F Fact: The green colour of the doll was artificially enhanced to help it test chrominance response (via the yellow buttons). The original colour was a darker green, as seen on Test Card J.

This is Test Card G, a modified version of the Philips PM5544 electronic test card. This was a common sight on BBC2 in the late 1970s to mid 1980s, when BBC2 used to close down completely at 11.30, with programmes not restarting until around 17.00 (except, again, when sport showed up). The test card was shown for a few hours before the evening progmmes - mostly F, but various regions 'opted out' and showed G for a while, usually with different music. These opt-outs were the result of the regional centre using their network feed of BBC2 to receive programmes for later transmission - they pre-booked a timeslot for this and switched to a locally-generated test card for the duration. This was a cost-saving alternative to hiring extra vision circuits for the transfers. It could affect more than one region at once, as the network feeds are chains rather than each region getting a direct feed from London.

Usually the 'BBC2' caption would be in a more chunky version of the font shown here. Other minor variations occurred too - the coloured brackets could be missing, and the black 'belt' across the centre could lose its 'buckle'. Apparently these were not deliberate variations, but were due to a fault in the test card generator, which in those days was all hard-wired electronics, rather than a bitmap image in a memory chip.

Test Card G Fact: The colours in the brackets all have the same luminance value. If you turn down the colour on your TV, they fade to the same shade of grey as the background. Some versions of the PM5544 have additional "colourless colour" squares in the corners, which patented PAL decoders will ignore (and thus show as the same grey again), but some other 'cloned' PAL systems will interpret as real colour.

The test card used by Granada Television, HTV Wales and probably all other ITV regions from the early 1980s onward, was the Independent Broadcasting Authority's prosaically titled Electronic Test Pattern 1. The ITV regions used Test Card F and music through the seventies, but as more and more programmes ate into valuable testing time, the physical card and the accompanying music tapes were allowed to deteriorate. The ITV strike of 1979 finally put paid to TCF on ITV - indeed I don't recall ever seeing it for myself.
For much of the 1980s (before 24-hour ITV programmes) and certainly beyond the start of TV-am in 1983, Granada used ETP1 with alternating 400Hz tone and silence. Quite scary, in that you never knew how long the silence would last before the tone came butting in again.

ETP1 Fact: An early prototype of ETP1 (never transmitted) had only five frequency gratings instead of six. This was no less ugly. :-)

The version of ETP1 used on Channel Four, and indeed the only test card ever used by Channel Four as far as I know. The Welsh fourth channel S4C used the same card but with 'S4C' in place of 'CH4', and with different music.
Test transmissions from Winter Hill, NW England, began in the winter of 1981-82, and on S4C from Moel-y-Parc, N Wales, in May 1982. Initially the channel caption did not have the framing lines, and periods of tone (usually 400Hz, but not always) and silence were broadcast. The presence of these lines, and music on audio, indicated that the picture was originated from Channel Four's main output in London (or in the case of S4C, from their main output in Cardiff). The music was interspersed with periods of 1KHz tone.

When Channel Four first started they only broadcast from around 16.30 to midnight (perhaps starting a little earlier on weekends?) so there was still plenty of test card viewing to be had. Channel Four also took on the IBA's Engineering Announcements programme, which had been shown on ITV until the start of TV-am meant it would have had to be transmitted at some ungodly hour of the morning.

After the IBA was split up at the end of 1990, the caption changed to read 'NTL:CH4' (NTL being formed from that part of the IBA which was responsible for transmitters). By this stage ITV companies were all broadcasting 24 hours a day as far as I know, so a plain 'NTL' caption would never have been used. The current 'ntl:' logo, with the colon, reminds me of that caption.

Before ETP1 was created, Granada used mainly to show colourbars with 400Hz tone. The caption was a later addition; most of the time it was absent. And no, I didn't know what 'NCR' meant. I thought possibly 'North Cheshire Region', but the Winter Hill transmitter is in Lancashire. In fact, as I've recently been informed, 'NCR' stands for 'Network Control Room'. Granada continued to use colourbars after closing down at night in the 1980s, right up to the start of 24-hour programmes in 1987.

HTV's version of colourbars. This was accompanied by 900Hz tone. These were also shown last thing at night and first thing in the morning, though if I remember correctly, HTV switched to using ETP1 (with the usual 400Hz tone) in the mornings when it became available. Certainly in 1984 they were using these colourbars at night and ETP1 in the morning.

Note the thin white line separating the colourbars from the solid red band - apparently there was a version without this! Why there were these two slight variants, I don't know. Have a look at this for Flash recreations of these variants and many other test cards and station clocks.

Tone Fact: The nearest notes of test tones mentioned here are: 400Hz = G above middle C; 440Hz = A above middle C (by definition, in fact); 900Hz = next A up (though when you hear it next to 440Hz you can tell it's not a proper A); 1KHz = the adjacent B. The BBC currently use atomic clocks to generate both test tone and line sync pulses.

Ah yes ... poor old TV-am. Anyway, these colourbars could often be seen in the hours now occupied by breakfast telly on ITV, for the few months before TV-am actually started (February 1983). I forget what the audio was; probably either 400Hz or 1KHz tone, or silence. (This image used to have an HTV-style white line above the red block too - I now think it more probably didn't have one.)

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

None of these images are screen captures. Most of them were created using version 2.3 of FML's Test Card Maker with some additional processing via MGI PhotoSuite. These pages are for information purposes only. Copyright on images, where it exists, rests with the original owners.

You can download the latest version of Test Card Maker for free here.

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