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And the music that runs up against it at night, Sailing Away, equally important reference. The nights I lay there, imagining the storms out there, particularly

And the music that runs up against it at night, Sailing Away, equally important reference. The nights I lay there, imagining the storms out there, particularly when depressed and alone, listening to the post-midnight "ceremonies" including the national anthem and lulled off to sleep before the World Service crept onto the airwaves... so many nights. It really is a part of me in some ways. It's interesting to me just how important BBC Radio 4 (formerly the Home Service), on which it is broadcast, is and has been to our collective culture. It's now seen in a more middle-class "sniffy" light - Radio 4 listeners are a certain "type", but think what it's given us: - It's where The Goons became famous: Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Seacombe defined a certain age of comedy and inspired Monty Python and others. - Mornington Crescent is ironically one of the most iconic stations on the London Underground thanks to the game from the R4 show - All of Churchill's war-time speeches were broadcast there first - In the event of the death of the Queen, it will be announced first on the 8am Radio 4 news broadcast the following day (I'm not sure that can work in the modern era, but there we are) - Royal Navy Nuclear (weapon) submarines are to open a safe with hand-written letters of instruction from the Prime Minister if they can't pick up Radio 4 long-wave That's just off the top of my head.

zeristor 8y ago
And Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. V. Important
Theodores 8y ago
Sailing By, not 'away'... It is there to pad out the schedule and help people to find Radio 4 on a crowded night-time dial. Same with the National Anthem that follows. Even the 'pips' are there for this type of calibration, a tuning in to a British person's 'Britishness'. The way that the BBC is deeply woven into the British establishment and armed forces is obvious yet not so obvious. The BBC is a spin-off of British Forces Broadcasting Service, as per 'Better Call Saul'/'Breaking Bad' some content overlaps but the 'producers' are one and the same. You should never believe that the BBC is independently funded and free from some capitalist proprietor controlling what you think, it really is an organ of the British military industrial complex. Anyone 'socialist' gets weeded out by the very real 'Room 101'. Radio 4 is the true voice of establishment, and this differs slightly from the clowns of the day that happen to be in parliament. If you listen carefully then you can glean facts on BBC Radio 4 that are not presented on the TV news or written to paper, an off-hand comment here or there on an odd-hour Radio 4 program sneaks through when the rest of the world are self-censoring themselves during a crisis. When BBC Radio 4 rolls over and defaults to Number 10 propaganda without being honest, e.g. asserting that Russians are poisoning people in the UK without any 'alleged' or 'suspected' style words to distance fiction from fact, then that is when the folks in the submarine should go for the envelope...
- dalore 8y ago
  That's funny, my conservative friends say that the BBC is biased and full of lefties against the government.
  - fanf2 8y ago
    https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-43754737 https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-43754737
- isostatic 8y ago
  > The BBC is a spin-off of British Forces Broadcasting Service BFBS was established in 1943 The BBC was founded in 1922 Which BBC Room 101 are you asserting is "very real"?
  - arethuza 8y ago
    I believe the original Room 101 was just a meeting room in where Blair had to sit through boring meetings.
    - isostatic 8y ago
      Blair? Allegedly Orwell named Room 101 after a meeting room in BBC Broadcasting House that no longer exists.
      - arethuza 8y ago
        George Orwell was Eric Blair's pen name.
sandworm101 8y ago
>> Royal Navy Nuclear (weapon) submarines are to open a safe with hand-written letters of instruction from the Prime Minister if they can't pick up Radio 4 long-wave It is one of many factors. Shutting down Radio 4 will not send the subs into attack mode. I do laugh every time I read about the "hand written" part. The assumption is that PMs are unable to use typewriters. Anything typed would therefore have been handled by their secretaries/PAs, making them a target. I have this image in my head of a sub captain not being able to read the PM's handwriting. These are embellished protections generated by novelists.
- arethuza 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure Peter Hennessy was one of the first to report on the nature of Letters of Last Resort and I'd be inclined to believe his account. Having them handwritten seems entirely appropriate to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Hennessy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Hennessy NB Hennessy is obviously well in with the Navy - he has attended during the Perisher course - maybe an advantage to be being a historian who is also a Peer!
  - sandworm101 8y ago
    Be wary of believing any account when it comes to nuclear weapons procedures. There is much misinformation. Changes happen all the time. Some of the public stories have been adopted strait from fiction. The letters have been the subject of so many spy thrillers they are now more myth than functional. The very concept of the letters presupposes that sub crews have full control over their missiles, that they can fire them based on instructions in a hand-written letter. That does not mesh with the safeguards surrounding other weapons that require external command/codes prior to launch.
    - arethuza 8y ago
      It's also fairly well documented that UK Trident sub warheads do not have Permissive Action Links - the crews of the subs do indeed have the ability to launch without receiving any codes. The justification for this is pretty simple - timing. In the event of a launch from a likely enemy (the Soviet Union in the bad old days) there simply wasn't enough time to guarantee that a code be transmitted before weapons bursting.

zeristor 8y ago

And Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. V. Important

Theodores 8y ago

Sailing By, not 'away'... It is there to pad out the schedule and help people to find Radio 4 on a crowded night-time dial. Same with the National Anthem that follows. Even the 'pips' are there for this type of calibration, a tuning in to a British person's 'Britishness'. The way that the BBC is deeply woven into the British establishment and armed forces is obvious yet not so obvious. The BBC is a spin-off of British Forces Broadcasting Service, as per 'Better Call Saul'/'Breaking Bad' some content overlaps but the 'producers' are one and the same. You should never believe that the BBC is independently funded and free from some capitalist proprietor controlling what you think, it really is an organ of the British military industrial complex. Anyone 'socialist' gets weeded out by the very real 'Room 101'. Radio 4 is the true voice of establishment, and this differs slightly from the clowns of the day that happen to be in parliament. If you listen carefully then you can glean facts on BBC Radio 4 that are not presented on the TV news or written to paper, an off-hand comment here or there on an odd-hour Radio 4 program sneaks through when the rest of the world are self-censoring themselves during a crisis. When BBC Radio 4 rolls over and defaults to Number 10 propaganda without being honest, e.g. asserting that Russians are poisoning people in the UK without any 'alleged' or 'suspected' style words to distance fiction from fact, then that is when the folks in the submarine should go for the envelope...

dalore 8y ago
That's funny, my conservative friends say that the BBC is biased and full of lefties against the government.
- fanf2 8y ago
  https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-43754737 https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-43754737
isostatic 8y ago
> The BBC is a spin-off of British Forces Broadcasting Service BFBS was established in 1943 The BBC was founded in 1922 Which BBC Room 101 are you asserting is "very real"?
- arethuza 8y ago
  I believe the original Room 101 was just a meeting room in where Blair had to sit through boring meetings.
  - isostatic 8y ago
    Blair? Allegedly Orwell named Room 101 after a meeting room in BBC Broadcasting House that no longer exists.
    - arethuza 8y ago
      George Orwell was Eric Blair's pen name.

sandworm101 8y ago

>> Royal Navy Nuclear (weapon) submarines are to open a safe with hand-written letters of instruction from the Prime Minister if they can't pick up Radio 4 long-wave It is one of many factors. Shutting down Radio 4 will not send the subs into attack mode. I do laugh every time I read about the "hand written" part. The assumption is that PMs are unable to use typewriters. Anything typed would therefore have been handled by their secretaries/PAs, making them a target. I have this image in my head of a sub captain not being able to read the PM's handwriting. These are embellished protections generated by novelists.

arethuza 8y ago
I'm pretty sure Peter Hennessy was one of the first to report on the nature of Letters of Last Resort and I'd be inclined to believe his account. Having them handwritten seems entirely appropriate to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Hennessy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Hennessy NB Hennessy is obviously well in with the Navy - he has attended during the Perisher course - maybe an advantage to be being a historian who is also a Peer!
- sandworm101 8y ago
  Be wary of believing any account when it comes to nuclear weapons procedures. There is much misinformation. Changes happen all the time. Some of the public stories have been adopted strait from fiction. The letters have been the subject of so many spy thrillers they are now more myth than functional. The very concept of the letters presupposes that sub crews have full control over their missiles, that they can fire them based on instructions in a hand-written letter. That does not mesh with the safeguards surrounding other weapons that require external command/codes prior to launch.
  - arethuza 8y ago
    It's also fairly well documented that UK Trident sub warheads do not have Permissive Action Links - the crews of the subs do indeed have the ability to launch without receiving any codes. The justification for this is pretty simple - timing. In the event of a launch from a likely enemy (the Soviet Union in the bad old days) there simply wasn't enough time to guarantee that a code be transmitted before weapons bursting.