Almost no one will know the name of the person who's been on TV the most in human history
Some people are on TV a lot but none of them come close
Some people in human history have been on TV an awfully long time, but when it comes to working out who has been on screen the most there is one clear winner above all.
TV has come a long way in the decades since the gogglebox became a household staple, and while we've got more channels than you can shake a stick at - along with all different types of streaming and 24 hour broadcasts - it wasn't always the case.
Back in the day, there would be times when there was literally nothing on TV, rather than the figurative expression people use when flicking through channel after channel of things they don't want to watch.
Instead, if people turned on their TV and tried to watch the BBC they'd see the famous test card featuring a little girl playing noughts and crosses, while a clown doll was perched next to her.
Advert
This was brought up as a question on an episode of QI when they asked 'who has spent more time on the television than anyone else in the world?'. And they were spot on with the answer of the 'Test Card Girl'.
Her name is Carole Hersee and between 1967 and 1998, she was on millions of TV screens for hours at a time every single day, with her image always there on the broadcast.
The thing she appears on is known as 'Test Card F' and it was designed by her dad George Hersee, a BBC engineer who was taking test photos of his children.
Carole got the gig over her younger sister Gillian because Gillian was missing two of her front teeth at the time the pictures were taken, and it turns out the clown doll in the picture was her own toy which she called 'Bubbles'.
Bubbles actually made a return for the BBC website's error message, though this time Carole was gone and the clown doll instead stood in front of a chalkboard while a fire raged in the background.
The 'x' on the noughts and crosses board was just about in the middle of the screen while the point of a test card, other than having something to show when there's nothing on, is making sure what ends up on the screen has the proper colours.
For a certain generation of Brits, the test card girl is so iconic that she was featured as a character in Life on Mars, where the main character is a detective who gets hit by a car and ends up back in the 70s.
He gets haunted by several figures from popular culture at the time and the test card girl is among them, with her even being the last character on screen.
Test Card F and Carole still show up on people's screens from time to time, the card made an appearance during the 2019 Champions League final on one of the big stadium screens, and it was used until 2022 and the relaunch of BBC Three as a TV channel.
Back in 2007, she told the Telegraph she still had Bubbles the Clown safe in a box and that she actually got a bit 'fed up' of her face being on everyone's TV screen all the time, particularly when TVs in shop windows had nothing on except a picture of her as a child.
She also got paid £100 to pose for the picture, which is nice, and they told her she'd been on TV for about 70,000 hours in total, which tots up to almost eight years continuously on TV.
Joe Harker