The first time I ever went to Malaysia we stayed at a hotel called the Rasa Sayang, which is itself based on a popular SE Asian folk song (that even mentions the mating behaviour of cats in a similar way to “onze poes en buurmans kater” ). I think the Japanese had built it (amongst other investment they made around that time as a sort of reparation for invading the place). This was either in 1977 or 1978, but had a lot of what were then high tech things, such as big Japanese TV sets that could show Singapore TV (presumably via a satellite or very high gain antenna on the roof) as well as Malaysian channels. Malaysian TV was still black and white (colour TV only got switched on in Malaysia on 28 December 1978).

Even SG did not have television the whole day, so they showed the testcard which was the same as our standard British one except the centre picture had been changed to 4 young girls as well as the clown puppet, these 4 girls being Malay, Eurasian, Chinese and Indonesian so all the common skin colours could be set correctly. The noughts and crosses board was there as well, with the 4th girl pointing directly to the centre of the “X” as a reminded of its purpose (it is supposed to be in the exact centre of the picture, and probably is in SG but the BBC one was out by a few mm due to someone letting the slide scanner go wonky in the 1970s and wasn’t corrected until 1999…

Rasa Sayang – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia