I was interviewed on Future Radio on Wednesday morning for the Breakfast show with Di Cunningham. As usual, I thought of something useful to say several minutes after the broadcast – why TV masts and daytime telly transmissions inspired me.
Visibility
These days, impressive technology often takes the form of an app or website – things that happen online. Clever code runs on banks of virtual servers tucked away in data centres, somewhere anonymous. You never get to see the infrastructure, unless you work in a data centre.
Compare that with the infrastructure for analogue television transmission – such as the Emley Moor TV Mast. It’s on top of a hill and you can see it for miles! And it’s impressive. It’s iconic. And if you live near it, it becomes part of the landscape. If you’re travelling and returning home – you know you’re nearly there when you see Emley Moor.
Transmitter information
Apart from visible bits of infrastructure, there’s the testcards and strange daytime transmissions, back when there were just three or four channels which were mostly closed down during the day.
BBC2 used to broadcast Service information for the Television trade a couple of times a day. It used to start with music, originally the very groovy Walk and talk by Syd Dale and then later on Swirley – by Roger Limb of the Radiophonic workshop.
First up would be transmitter information – announcements about engineering work or new transmitter locations. The technical terms and place names became familiar, even if you weren’t sure what they meant or where they were. Perhaps a similar experience to listening to the Shipping Forecast – poetic stuff.
So, here’s my track – Transmitter information.
Among other things it includes audio recordings from outtakes and studio chatter from the studios of Nexus Television (the student telly service at UEA, Norwich from the 1980s). There’s an engaged tone from a telephone (the masts used to relay phone calls too). The main tune is provided by the Oddity 2 from Gforce.
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