BY THE MAGIC RAYS OF LIGHT [445]

The opening of BBC Two on Tuesday 21^st April 1964 marked the first time British audiences needed to update their televisions, to receive the more detailed 625-line pictures sent over the air by the new channel. Early adopters may have had a Baird mechanical set from the first experimental transmissions in the 1930s, but this was the first time that the regular TV standard changed. This switch happened at a glacial speed: 625-line versions of BBC One and ITV began later in 1969, two years after BBC Two became Europe’s first colour TV channel, but the old 405-line system used by them continued until 1985 as households and television rental firms slowly replaced their sets.

The television standard in the UK has arguably changed three times since then, in more rapid succession. The first came after digital television began in 1998, using the DVB-T standard, the switch-off of analogue signals was completed from 2008 to 2012 – this coincided with the introduction in 2009 of the updated DVB-T2 standard used mostly for high-definition channel, prompting a further push for new TVs. But perhaps the biggest change hardly involves the television, because the inexorable move to online streaming of programmes is really the end of the physical act of “broadcasting”, as sharing one channel from a transmitter is replaced by everyone having their own discrete link their device and a content provider’s server, known as “unicasting”. 

I then remembered that BBC Research & Development had carried out a trial of something named “5G Broadcast” in 2019 on Stronsay, one of the Orkney Isles. A 5G network was constructed that provided mobile internet to one of the most poorly-connected places in the UK, while also using that network to broadcast radio stations, including BBC Radio Orkney, to devices with the software capable of receiving the signals. By all accounts, the exercise proved successful, leaving the island with more reliable internet access after the trial ended.

The 4G and 5G mobile signal standards allow for broadcast capabilities, which is a naturally more efficient use of bandwidth in situations where many people are watching the same thing at the same moment, freeing up capacity on the mobile network. The computer chip manufacturer Qualcomm, which had a hand in developing the technology used for these mobile standards, explained on their website that no extra equipment is needed to receive 5G Broadcast, as mobile devices already have the necessary technology built into them, and existing television transmitters, more physically resilient than mobile signal masts, can broadcast the 5G signal too. Furthermore, if someone is outside the range of the 5G Broadcast signal, their device will seamlessly move to “unicast” mode.

However, that depends on the will of broadcasters to keep their own transmitters going at all. Switzerland is a country that already switched their TV transmitters off, in 2019, but most viewers already received their services via cable. This shift is perhaps inevitable: the cost of keeping networks of high-powered transmitters in working order would be avoidable if you can piggy-back on the internet, but relying on that network poses problems in binding one service, once available to all over the air, into another service that requires payment to access. Even Qualcomm’s article made clear that “In the unfortunate scenario that the cellular network becomes disabled from structural damages (e.g., in case of an earthquake), public authorities could still use the broadcast infrastructure to communicate with smartphones that support broadcast services” – the will has to be there.

MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG [444]

Rabbit Seasoning (1952)

When I was writing about Bugs Bunny last time, I knew I would have to come back to the use of drag because, having seen these cartoons all my life, the use of drag by any Looney Tunes character just becomes something you expect – like it is part of Bugs’ arsenal, so it could be of anyone.

But after re-watching so many Bugs Bunny cartoons in the last few weeks is seeing how, I can now fully appreciate how Bugs has become a queer icon. I had an initial wariness about how drag is essentially being used as part of a deception, but in the universe of the cartoons, it seems to come so natural to Bugs, and works so effectively. This is what happens with any media: everything present in the material has to be considered.

Then I saw the 2003 film “Looney Tunes: Back in Action” – I don’t know how I let it pass me. In a restaurant scene, Jenna Elfman, playing Warner Bros’ vice president of comedy, puts it to Bugs that he should be paired with “a hot, female character”. Spinning into Marilyn Monroe-like garb, Bugs tells her “usually, I play the female love interest.” The response: “About the cross-dressing thing: in the past funny, today, disturbing.” Thankfully, Bugs’ reply is perfect: “Lady, if you don’t find a rabbit with lipstick amusing, you and I have nothing to say to each other.” How’s that for a movie studio’s mascot?

The opposition in this scene was also present fifty years earlier: the 1952 Merry Melodies cartoon “Rabbit Seasoning”, directed by Chuck Jones with a story by Michael Maltese, the middle instalment of what became the “hunting trilogy” – “rabbit season!”, “duck season!” and so on. While the set-up appears to be Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck confusing Elmer into shooting the other, Elmer becomes another tool for Bugs to thwart Daffy – if Bugs is in the cartoon, he is the star.

Towards the cartoon’s end, as Elmer points his rifle into a rabbit hole saying “OK, come on out, I’ve got you covered”, Bugs rises up from the hole, as if in an elevator, dressed in drag, carrying an umbrella and a book – as Bugs walks to a log to read the book, Elmer follows, seduced by what he sees. An incredulous Daffy walks in, declaiming “surely, you’re not gonna be taken in by that old gag”. Elmer replies “isn’t she lovely?” Daffy stamps over to Bugs: “Out of sheer honesty, I demand that you tell him who you are. Well, haven’t you anything to say? Anything?” Bugs put his book down and says, in a feminine voice while cosying up to Elmer, “why yes, I would just love a duck dinner.” Kissing him, Elmer stumbles over to Daffy and shoots his beak off for the umpteenth time. 

Rabbit Seasoning (1952)

Audiences would have been amazed to see this much in 1952, even in a cartoon context. The Motion Picture Production Code, known as the Hays Code, introduced in 1934, does not specifically mention anything in a cartoon context, but it does state that “Sex perversion or any inference to it is forbidden” – this would be hanged in 1961 to “Restraint and care shall be exercised in presentations dealing with sex aberrations.” The Hays Code was also very clear that representation in film could not be given the latitude that you would in a book: “A book describes; a film vividly presents. One presents on a cold page; the other by apparently living people. A book reaches the mind through words merely; a film reaches the eyes and ears through the reproduction of actual events. The reaction of a reader to a book depends largely on the keenness of the reader’s imagination; the reaction to a film depends on the vividness of presentation.” So, because the Code made clear that “Pictures shall not infer that low forms of sex relationship are the accepted or common thing”, and that “Adultery and illicit sex, sometimes necessary plot material, must not be explicitly treated or justified, or presented attractively,” any depictions that come even close to these should be seen to be punished.

Back to “Rabbit Seasoning”. After apologising for suspecting their integrity, Daffy rips Bugs’ wig off, pointing and saying “ah-HAH! Now’s your chance, hawk eye, shoot him, shoot him!” Rubbing off lipstick, Bugs says “he’s got me bang to rights doc, would you like to shoot him here, or wait till you get home”, as repeat of the “pronoun trouble” Daffy falls for at the start of the cartoon. Daffy replies, “oh no, not this time”, telling Elmer “Wait till you get home. They walk home, and Elmer shoots Daffy there. Walking back, putting his beak back into place one final time, Daffy tells Bugs, “You’re despicable”. Bugs shrugs to the camera – end of cartoon.

For what it’s worth, “Rabbit Seasoning” does not appear to have an MPAA rating, presumably because it was passed for exhibition in 1952. The British Board of Film Classification gives it a “U”, adding “Contains mild cartoon violence”, presumably centred on the rightfully outwitted Daffy’s beak.

Rabbit Seasoning (1952)

ON WITH THE SHOW, THIS IS IT [443]

from "Bully for Bugs" (1953)

“What makes me fulfilled and able to bring my best self to work?”

“I think I perceive this the other way around - I am always as good a person as I can be upon arriving at work, the battle is how much of that remains by the end of the day. Think of it as a Bugs Bunny cartoon, where they are living their best life until someone does something to threaten it.”

Never ask me to answer an open question on a form – you are only inviting me to write. Having said that, my reply most importantly generated laughter, and was understood immediately. Bugs bunny has a way with words too, more about how they are said, that I wish I could emulate.

Similarly, Bugs Bunny has to be provoked into action, although I know, being a cartoon character, he is substantially stronger than me. Therefore, his adversaries must be stronger still, not easily beaten and worthy of the challenge, as delineated by Bugs’ frequent director Charles M. “Chuck” Jones in his memoirs “Chuck Amuck” (1989) and “Chuck Reducks” (1996), both invaluable in understanding the art of animation. In the former book, Jones understood the character he refined with fellow Warner Bros directors Fred “Tex” Avery (who added the Bronx-Brooklyn accent and “what’s up doc?” catchphrase), Robert “Bob” Clampett, Isadore “Friz” Freleng and Robert “Robert” McKimson:

“A wild wild hare was not for me; what I needed was character with the spicy, somewhat erudite introspection of a Professor Higgins, who, when nettled or threatened, would respond with the swagger of D'Artagnan as played by Errol Flynn, with the articulate quick-wittedness of Dorothy Parker – in other words, the Rabbit of my dreams.”

To that end, Bugs Bunny was an “inspiration” for who Jones wanted to be, with the unsuccessful schemer Daffy Duck serving as “recognition” for who he was. In “Chuck Reducks”, Jones noted that, in his cartoons, Bugs’ enemies were generally larger than him, with Elmer Fudd’s gun making him larger; Freleng, as the creator of Yosemite Sam, had enemies smaller in stature; but McKimson, whose final character sheet around 1949 defined Bugs’ look from then on, took on Avery’s wilder additions to Bugs’ character, with unpredictability and changes in mood, plus “plant[ing] a very combative kiss on an adversary’s face”, which Charlie Chaplin did in his 1916 short film “The Floorwalker”.

Bugs’ use of drag, knowing his adversary would then underestimate the character presented in front of them, was another part of his arsenal: “his wits are his basic weapon; he tries to avoid physical conflict when possible, believing that almost all contretemps can be solved with intelligence and humo[u]r.” I'll have more to say about this at another time.

There are times when, confronted with something someone has said or done, or reading or watching a news story, my response has been, “oh, here we go”, or “so we’re doing that now, are we?” Fortunately, I usually turn that response into a structured and considered article, instead of going on social media, where real life doesn’t exist anyway, looking for a fight. However, the moment you impact me directly, then of course, you realise, this means war.

from "Long-Haired Hare" (1949)

SAY HELLO, WAVE GOODBYE [442]

“A locally-oriented music and information station for over 30s in the Solent and adjacent area” is the baldest of descriptions for Wave 105.2 FM, but this was the service it was licenced to broadcast, playing “a spread of adult contemporary and soft adult contemporary hits and treating speech as an important ingredient”. The licence was originally more specific on the music and features broadcast, including percentages to be met for speech content and “current hits”, but these were later relaxed.

 

What made Wave 105, “the South’s best variety of hits”, the most popular commercial radio station in its area – in the last quarter of December 2023, it received 405,000 listeners each week aged 15+, with a 13.9% share of listening, both figures more than twice that of BBC Radio Solent, which plays to an older audience – was the imagination used in how that licence was interpreted. All of its programmes came from its studio base in Fareham, Hampshire, made by friendly, engaging and long-serving presenters and staff, who both lived in, and are knowledgeable about, the area they serve. Listening one day, Steve Power, who presented the breakfast show on the station for nearly eighteen years, asked a listener what their day was like. They told him they had been on, of all things, a crisis management course, to which Power replied, “how do you think that went?” I may have interpreted a genuine question as a punchline, but I have remembered it ever since.

 

Its curated and varied playlist was wide enough to encompass shifts from 1960s and 70s songs to current chart hits and back again, along “Golden Hours” in the morning and evening which, as far as I’ve heard, reached as far back as 1959, and amongst the weekend evening disco and dance shows was “Teenage Kicks”, concentrating on the New Wave of the late 70s to early 80s, which must have inspired the similar “Stereo Underground" on BBC Radio Solent. And each daytime hour featuring at least two of a listener’s top five favourite songs, that listener being added to a monthly draw to win a holiday, a feature that lasted for the station’s entire history. Add in frequent and comprehensive news bulletins, travel news and features across its schedule, and Wave 105 made for the prime example of Independent Local Radio, providing a full service to the local area.

 

Another way of interpreting the same station licence is to provide the local news and information as opt-outs of a network that broadcasts a similar mix of music to other stations. This has already happened to the competitors that sat either side of Wave 105’s music mix: Ocean FM (classic hits) became Heart, and Power FM (current hits) became Galaxy, then Capital FM, most of its output relayed from London. A Media Bill currently making its way through Parliament will eventually do away with prescriptive licences altogether, in favour of reducing “red tape”, maintaining elements of “localness” and reducing weekday hours that must be made regionally from a minimum of three to zero.

 

On Wednesday 28th February 2024, station owners Bauer Radio announced that Wave 105’s frequency would soon start carrying Greatest Hits Radio – newer songs would eventually be dropped from the playlist, with listeners advised to tune to the sister Hits Radio network to hear those, and the earworm jingles that sang “Wave 105” descending G-F-E-C notes to sing the station name, something that never changed since first going on air on 14th June 1998, were replaced by reminders that “Greatest Hits Radio is the new name for Wave 105”. On the night of the announcement, the playlist told a different story: “Love’s Unkind”, “I Wanna Stay With You”, “You’re My Best Friend”, “You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine”, “Scandalous”, “Please Don’t Go”, “Even Better Than the Real Thing”, “Nothing Loves Forever”, “U Can’t Touch This”...

 

The hallmark of a great music radio station is the curation of its playlist, and under Andy Shier, its programme controller since 2008, Wave 105 proved that a playlist as wide as listeners’ tastes could work in practice, and even with presenters playing songs they felt fit the moment, hearing the playlist gain sentience in what became its last hours of broadcasting, on Thursday 28^th March, became a truly moving experience, let alone switching on just after 7.00am to Chesney Hawkes’ “I Am the One and Only”: “You try to make me forget / Who I really am, don’t tell me I know best / I’m not the same as all the rest.” In the final minutes before 10pm, Wave 105’s male station voice, Rich Cope, opened the door to his Greatest Hits Radio counterpart, Rik Scott, before Cope said, “but, before I go, just two little things: good luck, Greatest Hits Radio, and take care of our lovely listeners, won’t you – they’ll be in safe hands”, before playing “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye” by Soft Cell, a wonderful song with a perfect title and spectacularly bitter lyrics. 

 

With the sound of waves washing on the shore, one of the best radio stations I have ever heard had ended. I may try Greatest Hits Radio: Rick Jackson’s breakfast show continues, a unique concession for the network’s English stations, with Mark Collins moving to the same afternoon slot he had when he began at Wave 105, but whether these shows continue when radio licences are simplified is another question. However, Greatest Hits Radio was already available on DAB, if not FM, and I would already have been listening if that was what I wanted to hear. Perhaps Andy Shier could release his old playlists as a PDF download.

 

I had originally intended to write about the BBC preparing to launch its biggest-ever consultation on its future, including what role a public service broadcaster plays in public life, and how that should be funded. All the while, Wave 105, a commercial station that ultimately exists to make a profit, provided a service that served its local audience as good as expected from the BBC, if not better, but there was no longer a regulatory reason for it to exist, no matter how popular it was – for its owners, freed from red tape, relaying a national network was all the imagination they had.

 

The final two hours of Wave 105 had the following playlist:

Andrew Gold - Lonely Boy

Laura Branigan - Gloria

Phil Collins - Another Day in Paradise

Joan Jett & the Blackhearts - I Love Rock and Roll

ABBA - Dancing Queen

Destiny’s Child - Survivor

Tears for Fears - Change

Modern Romance - Best Years of Our Lives

Aswad - Baby I Love Your Way

Billy Joel - We Didn’t Start the Fire

UB40 - Food for Thought

Eagles - Lyin’ Eyes

Elton John - Healing Hands

Stevie Wonder – Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours

Level 42 - To Be With You Again

Sister Sledge - We Are Family

Village People - You Can’t Stop the Music

Gloria Gaynor - Never Can Say Goodbye

Lenny Kravitz - It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over (ironically also the first song played on the station)

Soft Cell - Say Hello, Wave Goodbye 

AND NOTHING TO GET HUNG ABOUT [441]

I found myself rediscovering the sitcom “Seinfeld” recently, an incredibly easy thing to do following a multi-year, multi-national deal with Netflix keeping it constantly on demand, but the high-definition widescreen transfer made from the original Super 16 film is far away from when the show was little known in the UK, when it was found only late at night on TV, and later in DVD box sets.

 

Created by Jerry Seinfeld and long-time friend Larry David from conversations about the small things in life that make a stand-up routine, creating a rich and relatable seam for stories usually avoided by other sitcoms to that point, “Seinfeld” is a sharply written cultural institution in the United States, and perhaps the greatest live-action sitcom ever made there, the existence of “The Simpsons” providing that necessary qualifier. Set in the Upper West Side of New York, to the left of Central Park, Jerry Seinfeld plays a less-famous version of himself, a central point around which most events happen; Jason Alexander plays George Costanza, a Larry David analogue played as a ball of insecurities; Julia Louis-Dreyfus is Elaine Benes, Jerry’s smart and hot-tempered ex-girlfriend who successfully became a regular friend; and Michael Richards plays Kramer, Jerry’s unpredictable “hipster doofus” neighbour. I feel most people might already be aware of the set-up of “Seinfeld” by now, but I once had to explain the show to people who had never heard of it.

 

The outlandish plots and characters the show often used in pursuit of the biggest laugh is testament to my belief that saying something is based on a true story means nothing, despite the real-life experiences of the show’s writers making their way into episodes. I also find it an easier watch than the later shows that mine their humour from uncomfortable situations, like “The Office” and Larry David’s own “Curb Your Enthusiasm”, almost like the multi-camera filming and studio audience laughter is providing a safe distance to laugh at some of the more excruciating situations, ones that coined euphemisms like “shrinkage”, “sponge-worthy”, “master of my domain” and “...not that there’s anything wrong with that”.

 

What I have been watching the most recently have been the outtakes and bloopers, meticulously preserved on the DVDs and displaying both how much fun the actors and production staff had making the show, and how much Jerry Seinfeld really was playing himself on it. The show recently also spawned its own YouTube channel showing highlights, making me go back to watch the full episodes, while wishing they would release these remastered episodes on Blu-ray.

 

However, “Seinfeld” was probably best described as a “cult hit” in the UK during the BBC’s original broadcast of the show. It first showed up on BBC Two in 1993, on Thursdays at 9pm, on the back of the show’s huge success during its fourth season that contained famous episodes like “The Contest”, “The Bubble Boy” and “The Junior Mint”, as well as the season-long story where Jerry and George pitch a sitcom version of their own lives, a line of dialogue giving rise to the false observation that “Seinfeld” is a show about nothing at all.

 

However, the BBC began their broadcasts of “Seinfeld” from the start, when it was initially slower, more low-key, with fewer, longer scenes, with executives at NBC giving the show time to find itself. Infamously, the original 1989 pilot was followed with a 1990 season of only four episodes, using the budget intended for a Bob Hope special, introducing Elaine as a mandated female character, and a second season of thirteen episodes where Michael Richards started playing Kramer as the smartest man in the room, rather than the dumbest. After the first ten episodes, the BBC Two broadcasts moved to Saturdays around 10pm, slipping closer to midnight by the time the fourth season’s denser, multi-layered and often coincidental and absurdist episodes were finally shown in the UK, by which time it took over from “Cheers” as America’s favourite sitcom. The BBC should have started with the fourth season first.

 

My exposure to “Seinfeld” began in about 1998 with its seventh season of episodes like “The Soup Nazi”, “The Sponge”, “The Gum” and “The Invitations”, where George’s fiancée Susan dies through licking the gum on old envelopes. Relegated to cult status, the show was often used on BBC Two as filler during Parliamentary recess, and reviews of the day’s proceedings were not broadcast. Having only read text summaries of episodes online, and with my having been interested in how sitcoms were written, it had already been impressed on me that “Seinfeld” was a show that needed to be watched – I also found it to be a better show than “Friends”. 

 

Now able to track the BBC’s airing of the show, and through its subsequent reappearance in panel discussions and as a specialist subject on “Mastermind”, you end up realising that the biggest audience Jerry Seinfeld personally had in the UK must have been when he appeared on “Des O’Connor Tonight” in 1981, two years before his debut on “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson”, where he worked his stand-up routines about cars and left-handedness into the conversation, and when he later appeared on “Jasper Carrott – Stand Up America” in 1987, recorded in Los Angeles.

 

The final broadcast of “Seinfeld” on the BBC was in October 2001, three years after it ended its run in America, but before the DVD box sets began to appear. I never kept the VHS recordings I inevitably had to make to see a show past my bedtime, but the memory of it stayed with me long enough to be rekindled on home video. I’m just glad that more people have heard of it now, an odd thing to say about such a famous show.

YOU ARE EVERYTHING, AND EVERYTHING IS YOU [440]

The Pitt Rivers Museum is the most overwhelming I have experienced to date. Holding around seven hundred thousand objects, most of which are on display, it is a museum of archaeology, anthropology and ethnology: devoted to the study of humanity through its objects, it is the closest I have encountered to a museum of “everything”. It naturally also becomes a museum of museum displays, charting how the acknowledgement and understanding of our past has developed.

Publicly accessed via a single arched doorway at the back of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, despite being of a similar scale, the Pitt Rivers is a grotto of glass cases, more specifically a gigantic room with a hive of cabinets spread through the ground floor, with two mezzanines looking over it. Deciding to start at the top, the lift opened at a display of handguns and rifles, itself facing a wall of rudimentary clubs – spears and harpoons were at the other end of the walkway.

Among the pictures I took while at the museum were a helmet made from the skin of a porcupine fish; packs of various playing cards, displaying the link to the original tarot cards; American Indian headdresses; “a string of Chinese cash”; sword sheaths; boomerangs; Samurai armour; a box of the original table tennis game for which the name “Ping Pong” was trademarked; and various wooden shields, including four painted with depictions of the comic book hero The Phantom. 

Armed with the knowledge of what a Colt .45 looks like, you get a hang of how the museum is organised ethnologically by type of object, aiding comparisons between cultures, rather than simply by time – it feels more like browsing an encyclopaedia, or searching Wikipedia, than reading a history book. Augustus Pitt Rivers, the retired Army officer and archaeologist whose collection formed the basis of the museum, to which others’ expeditions and donations have since contributed, was among the first to insist upon all discovered artefacts being methodically catalogued and preserved for study, rather than just looking for treasure. At the same time, having such a repository for examples of many types of objects that matched when I have bought examples of physical media, like a laser disc or a Sony U-Matic tape, so I could experience them by touch – reading about something is often not enough.

This record-taking developed over time: an ivory harpoon head has its origin and catalogue number written directly on it: “W. Eskimo / P.R. Coll / 1884.20.30”, although a caption under it also specifies its North American origin and leaf-shaped stone blade along with correcting itself to “Inuit” – sometimes the catalogue details is all we know about the item. Knotted tags of handwritten text, and tiny captions of densely-packed text in Times New Roman, eventually gives way to numbered pointers to clearer captions to the side in larger sans-serif fonts like Helvetica and Gill Sans. 

With the density of objects on show, it was inevitable that, unless I sat down for a while, I would start looking past them, or through them, to the construction of their displays – if they had not removed their display of shrunken heads during the pandemic-enforced closure in 2020, part of the efforts in decoloniality that further enhance the understanding of the museum’s objects, I doubt I would have noticed.

My main takeaway from the Pitt Rivers Museum was that I don’t know of anywhere else like it – all that is missing are objects from the present day. There is a feeling of clutter, which was also felt sixty years ago: a proposed new building, designed by Pier Luigi Nervi, would have arranged its categories circularly around a glass dome, spreading outwards through time. It looked not unlike the future pavilions at Disney’s Epcot Center, but fundraising efforts petered out by 1970. A new building, with more space to think about the objects, should be considered again, or at least build its own entrance from outside. 

I COULD WRITE A BOOK [439]

Having planned a trip to Oxford for a few days, the perfect exhibition for me was announced: hosted by the Bodleian Library, “Write, Cut, Rewrite”, at their main Weston Library in Broad Street until 5th January 2025, displays various examples of the creative process that led to the major works being sold in the Blackwell’s bookshop next door, from John Le Carré’s cut-up typed pages of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” to Mary Shelley’s copperplate script of “Frankenstein”, and from Franz Kafka’s overwriting of the third-person with “K” in “The Castle” to Ian Fleming’s scribbled-out false start of “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”.

 

The comparatively brief nature of these articles means I don’t have a set creative process for creating them – a few notes on my phone or in a book, a notion of an idea, or simply being faced with a blank screen and a deadline. With admission being free, I visited the exhibition twice, looking for pointers.

 

I first noticed the spaces these writers gave themselves to exercise: a painting made by the poet Alice Oswald in a notebook gives way to the words she is looking for; Percy Bysshe Shelley drawing a landscape and a cartoon of a man’s face on one side of a double-page spread, then “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings” on the other side; Raymond Chandler’s list of similes, like “No more personality than a paper cup” and “As soothing as a piano salesman”, a line put through them once a place was found for them; and Samuel Beckett’s filling of a page of dialogue for a play with doodles of weird-looking people, and a tune written in 6/8 time on a wobbly musical stave. It is important to keep the mind working on putting absolutely anything on the page, no matter its worth at that moment, rather than waiting to form what you think the right words should be.

 

It was heartening to see how messy big-name writers can be, or can become, amid forming their work. It was not surprising to see the exercise book containing Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”, a highly-ordered set of numbered statements on the relationship between language and reality, is written neatly in pencil, the only levity being a hand-written “Schluss!” (“End!”) on the typed version, the author stopping himself from adding to it. An example of “The Watsons”, by Jane Austen, showed thick lines driven through discarded passages in a novel that was itself unfinished. It was also good to see the scribbles and ripped-out pages in one of the Moleskine books used by Bruce Chatwin, simultaneously undercutting and reinforcing the romantic story of “capturing reality in movement” that the Moleskine company, inspired by Chatwin, uses to sell their books today.

 

Any creative writing I try is usually in longhand on paper. Use of a word processor is almost the final step before anyone sees it, with any printout eventually attracting penwork to correct or re-order what already looked complete, something the typescript of “Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy” proved, with different-coloured paper, passages cut up and staples, different coloured pens used, and so on. Eventually, you do have to say “Schluss!”

 

Finally, there was only one person who I could see had used a ballpoint pen, and that was Ian Fleming. Everyone else used water-based ink and, unlike me, who only had the Bic four-colour pen in their rucksack for a few days, did not experience the extra little bit of effort in forcing oil-based ink onto a page – if the ideas are flowing, you don’t want to feel that in your hand too much.

FELIX KEPT ON WALKING [438]

Original and current versions of Felix the Cat and "Felix the cat"

Felix the Cat is an animated cartoon character that first appeared in the cartoon “Feline Follies” in 1919. Like a hand-drawn Charlie Chaplin, but with a tail that magically transformed into anything needed in the moment, Felix’s surreal cartoons were a big hit in the 1920s, making him a mascot to celebrities and sports teams, and entering homes in toy form. Losing out to Mickey Mouse by the end of the decade, Felix continued in newspaper comics strips and on television, now carrying a magic bag that changed shape as required. Having not starred in a major film or series in over twenty years, Felix survives as intellectual property owned by DreamWorks Animation since 2014, his image licensed for merchandise in a manner not unlike that of another character not seen on screen in years, Betty Boop. 

“Felix the cat” has been the mascot of Felix cat food since 1989. Originally a manufacturer of dry cat biscuits in Biggleswade, Felix Catfood Ltd was bought by the Quaker Oats Company in 1970, and a relaunched product range included wet food in tins. A new advertisement campaign launched in 1989, including television for the first time, which featured a realistically-drawn black-and-white cat, named for the product and behaving as mischievously as any regular cat. This campaign continues to the present day, surviving the brand’s change in ownership to Spillers, the former makers of Kattomeat, and to Nestlé Purina Healthcare.

Searching “Felix the Cat” on Amazon.co.uk brings up “Felix” ahead of Felix, and while that is an indicator of which one has consistently made more product in the last thirty-five years, it still annoys me – I never got used to one of the UK’s Brexit negotiators being named David Frost, when they were not the same David Frost that interviewed Richard Nixon and presented “Through the Keyhole”.

There is precedence in the UK, also involving cat food and a cartoon cat, of something arriving with the same name, but it resulted in a name change to avoid confusion: Spillers already had a cat food named “Top Cat”, meaning the Hanna-Barbera series was renamed “Boss Cat” on television from 1962. This cat food is no longer produced, so there is no longer any confusion. Later in the 1960s, Marvel Comics were able to introduce their own superhero named “Captain Marvel” in the absence of the original Fawcett Comics character, now largely known as “Shazam” due to new owner DC Comics being legally unable to use their original name to title their books.

With DreamWorks’ copyright for Felix the Cat extending to “prerecorded goods” and “musical instruments, namely, guitars” with licensing of that image from there, there is the space for two Felix-es to exist, and because they exist in industries separate from each other, there should be no issue, apart from my own cognitive dissonance.

What I do find amusing is that, while DreamWorks’ copyright covers the later version of Felix the Cat, with a rounder head, larger eyes, no whiskers, longer legs and shorter body than the 1920s version – this also means that, like the “Steamboat Willie” Mickey Mouse, the original Felix the Cat is in the public domain – the cat food “Felix” that continues to appear in animated ads on television was recently redrawn with larger eyes, a more human-like smile and, like the original Felix, their own song “It’s Great to Be a Cat”, sung by Robbie Williams. However, this will remain contained within the space of an ad break, and away from the original Felix.

JOHNNY, REMEMBER ME [437]

There is no point in listing how the 1995 film “Johnny Mnemonic” incorrectly predicts the world of 2021 – CRT television screens, Concorde remaining in flight, 320 GB storage capacity being a large number – as not all science fiction is speculative fiction, although I was amused by Johnny (Keanu Reeves) explaining that the encryption code for the information downloaded to his mind should be sent by fax to its destination. My focus should be on it story, which is good, but I don’t think it is told well:

“Second decade of the 21^st century. Corporations rule. The world is threatened by a new plague... its cause and cure unknown. The corporations are opposed by LoTeks, a resistance movement risen from the streets...The corporations defend themselves. They hire the Yakuza... But the LoTeks wait in their strongholds, in the old city cores, like rats in the walls of the world. The most valuable information must sometimes be entrusted to mnemonic couriers, elite agents who smuggle data in wet-wired brain implants.”

A sure-way to turn my attention off from a film is by starting with a text crawl setting the scene. The most egregious example I personally came across was “Broken Blossoms” a 1919 film written and directed by D.W. Griffith that, while a silent film, betrays the visual talent of someone known as the progenitor of much of the language of film we use to this day, the copious inter-title cards reading like chapters from a book, chapters I am required to read.

With “Blade Runner” having influenced the cyberpunk genre over a decade before the release of “Johnny Mnemonic” (1995), adapted by “Neuromancer” author William Gibson from his own short story, audiences would be familiar enough with this dystopian, corporation-run, neon-drenched world of rainy nights for it to be taken as written, but without needing to write it – everything else can be given its portrayal when we reach that stage in the plot.

There are more characters in this film than Gibson’s story, but it feels like this is to move Johnny, the central character but also the MacGuffin whose brain holds what everyone needs, around the film – more than once is it made clear that only his head is needed, and the intentionally robotic acting of Reeves doesn’t make him endearing, like his mention that he had to delete his childhood memories to have more, well, drive space, is to make him a tragic figure.

The film was originally to have been a lower-budgeted production in the vein of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Alphaville”, a science-fiction film noir story set amongst contemporary Paris that I have talked about previously. The casting of Keanu Reeves, hot from the success of “Speed”, as Johnny gave it a higher profile, production budget and expectation, making it the blockbuster film it was never intended to be. Director Robert Longo since re-edited and released a version in black and white, bringing closer to his original intention, but the story could still be adapted again.

“Johnny Mnemonic” today seems to exist as the bridge between “Blade Runner” and “The Matrix” – indeed, the Wachowski sisters told the “New Yorker” magazine in 2012 that they used the film to sell their story, perhaps as shorthand for the cyberpunk genre that Sony, releasing the film through TriStar, hoped to capitalise on. For one thing, “The Matrix” had daylight at times...

IF YOU’RE ALRIGHT, YOU CAN’T GO WRONG [436]

"I'm Alright", a novelty song that charted at number 40 in 1982

The outpouring of grief at the sudden death of Steve Wright on Monday 12th February speaks both to the intimate connection between the radio DJ and his audience, and to his professionalism. I shouldn’t have been surprised at my upset over the loss of such an engaging, friendly and funny personality, when that was all I knew of him. 

Media coverage of Wright’s death, coloured by a narrative that he “died of a broken heart” at the ending of his Radio 2 afternoon show by the BBC in 2022, later dispelled by his own brother, collides with his own lack of sentimentality about his career, having only taken over “Pick of the Pops” four months ago, with further projects to come.

Usually a straightforward and nostalgic chart rundown, Steve Wright turned “Pick of the Pops” into a Steve Wright show: engaging chat, meticulously researched facts, and massive current-sounding jingles firing off all over the place, the energy kept high throughout. He did cut off a few songs too early, but name a DJ that hasn’t done the same.

What makes a Steve Wright show can be tracked through an abundance of radio recordings, and listings in the “Radio Times”. Starting his professional broadcasting career at the launch of Radio 210 in Reading in 1976, presenting evening and weekend shows, he was interviewing Marc Bolan and his wife Gloria Jones within its opening fortnight. Wright’s confident and cheeky radio personality is already evident, with only the jingles and content telling you what year it is, despite having to give way to AA Roadwatch telling the audience that the car parks in Bracknell are filling up fast. He also displays the “gift of the gab” required at a time when there were still restrictions on playing records on UK radio.

After three years, a six-month stint at Radio Luxembourg had Wright reading the news bulletins during his own evening show – the peppering of news headlines, weather, showbiz stories and “Strange But True” features through an average Wright show, over and above the news already on BBC Radios 1 and 2, would be read in the same way, more conversational than authoritative, keeping the audience both engaged and informed – “infotainment” is an apt description for any of Wright’s shows.

Headhunted by the BBC, Wright’s first two years on Radio 1 were essentially a bootcamp - if you weren’t a top-class national broadcaster by the end of this, no-one will be. His first Radio 1 show was on 5^th January 1980, presenting Saturday evenings for three months. One month later, Wright presented “Top of the Pops” for the first time without a screen test. After covering the flagship breakfast show during April, and after taking May off, Sunday mornings became Wright’s main show in June - this month also had him present his first Radio 1 Roadshow from that year’s Lawnmower Grand Prix in Holt, Wiltshire. From June to August, he also presented a Saturday lunchtime hour titled “The Amazing Facts and Figures Show”: a “Radio Times” listing in July had Wright saying that “collecting useless but often fascinating bits of information has always been a thing of mine, and it’s surprising what you find out.” The “Strange But True” and “Factoids” features and spin-off books make perfect sense now, especially the one that stuck in my mind: if you unfurl a human brain, you can cover an ironing board with it.

Wright moved to Saturday mornings at the end of August while both frequently covering other presenters’ shows during the week, while acting as film reviewer for fellow host Andy Peebles. This continued until October 1981, when what became known as “Steve Wright in the Afternoon” began, although he continued reviewing films on other shows for the station. The lightly satirical characters like Mr Angry, Damien the social worker and local radio DJ Dave Doubledecks would start to appear, the meticulous preparations for each show becoming more apparent, inviting comparisons with Kenny Everett.

All this happened before you get to what people start with when they talk about Steve Wright: the “zoo radio” format, with lots of co-presenters, lots of features, big interviews replacing character sketches, lots of clapping and lots of “love the show, Steve!” from listeners’ messages. Hearing him speak on his Radio 1 show from May 1983 about spending a week in Los Angeles and New York, mostly listening to the radio and watching CNN and MTV, explains why his shows for the BBC right up to 2024 retained an energy not present on other British radio shows – it had to be imported. Scott Shannon innovated the “morning zoo” breakfast show on WRBQ-FM in Tampa, Florida, taking it to WHTZ in New York – Shannon did not continue with the zoo format upon leaving WHTZ in 1989, but the station continues to run a similar format at breakfast time today.

The major innovation Wright had upon the zoo format was to run it in a continent where, if people weren’t experiencing a lull in their day at 2pm, they were taking a nap. It was a second wind for its audience as much as an entertaining listen, augmented by bespoke jingles sourced from New York production houses. Ironically, when Wright moved to the Radio 1 breakfast show in 1994, carrying the existing format didn’t work, and his Radio 1 career ended the following year – perhaps it was a bit full-on for British audiences at that time of day. After a short break in television and at Talk Radio UK, Wright joined Radio 2 in 1996 for two weekend shows, resuming an updated afternoon show in 1999 that, while toned down a little, remained an outlier to how the rest of the station sounded.

I am not ready to talk about Steve Wright in the past tense, and listening to so much of his work from across his career only made me wonder what he could have done next. His public modesty about his own career is admirable, and while he never really got personal on air, you were always left with the impression that he was a thoroughly sincere and hard-working man, such as when he spoke to Simon Garfield for his book about BBC Radio 1, “The Nation’s Favourite”:

“Part of the success of the afternoon programme wasn’t the fact that we were postmodern and smart, it was that we were reliable and friendly. You could switch on wherever you were and be amused and have a friend. That sounds terribly pretentious, but it’s true: it’s comforting, it’s something nice, it’s upbeat, we tried only to reflect the good, the funny and the interesting... It's just a jobbing broadcaster doing a gig. When you do a show you can't think of the exact numbers of people tuning in and how it compares with the last figures - such thoughts are impostors. What people remember is the time you got them through their depression, or the time you helped them with their exams... Everything else is unimportant. At the end of the day it's just entertainment. Nobody has a disease.”

ONE PILL MAKES YOU LARGER [435]

The Wachowski sisters’ film “The Matrix”, the wildly successful and thoughtful cyberpunk science fiction action blockbuster, was released in March 1999, long enough ago for my first copy of the film to be on VHS, bought from no less than Blockbuster Video. It was the widescreen release, reducing the picture resolution to only about a hundred lines – it was “letterboxed” as in like watching it through next door’s letterbox. No wonder I swapped it for a DVD at the first opportunity, and later a Blu-ray boxset of what had become a trilogy. 

 

I like “The Matrix” for the same reason I say that Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” is my favourite film: it has everything in it. It is visually vibrant and innovative, densely plotted, filled with action, and it stays with you after the end, withstanding repeated viewings. It was like the nature of what a blockbuster film could be had changed, something which didn’t bear fruit much beyond its own three sequels.  

 

The comparative box office failure of 2021’s fourth instalment, “The Matrix Resurrections”, may have put pay to the chances of the original film’s twenty-fifth anniversary being officially recognised, but it remains important to me. The anniversary cannot be marked by the US Library of Congress adding it to the National Film Registry for future preservation, because that already happened in 2012, when it was inducted alongside “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”, “Dirty Harry” and “A Christmas Story”. 

 

Cyberpunk was a subculture still current in 1999, but also nearly twenty years old, and the combination in “The Matrix” of technology, music and fashion, with added martial arts and gunfire, may have redefined that term in the mainstream, the nature of “the matrix” as a simulation and distraction of the real world of the film prepared its audience for when the World Wide Web would become exactly that. The Wachowski sisters’ innovation of “bullet time”, freezing action to move around it before continuing, has been copied endlessly, as has the “digital rain” of phosphorous green code and text on a black background, itself inspired by the 1995 anime “Ghost in the Shell”.

 

Much was made at the time of the use of postmodernist philosophy in the story of “The Matrix”, either to put the film above the action-fare characterised as mindless, or to say that it was too complicated for audiences to understand. The Wachowskis issued copies of postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 book “Simulacra & Simulation” to the cast and crew. Baudrillard himself said the film had nothing to do with this work, which was more about the breakdown of distinctions between reality and simulation until the latter takes precedence, but then again, it is also about the implosion of meaning in the media... well, at least that sentence appears in my copy of his book.

 

I will admit I had problems following “The Matrix Reloaded” and “The Matrix Revolutions” when they were in cinemas, but the epic nature of the story allowed you to get lost in it. Having already been used to the layering of references and meaning in “The Simpsons”, to be uncovered as your knowledge increased, I thought “The Matrix” will be the same. Only in August 2020, when Lilly Wachowski said that she and Lana had written and directed a trilogy with implicit transgender themes, my thoughts were, in order, (a) I wish they said that at the time, (b) how did I miss that, (c) 1999 may have been too early to say explicitly, and (d) that makes the films so much easier to understand, what with Keanu Reeves’ character Neo being alerted to their true nature, as well as that of the world around them, along with the villain Agent Smith only referring to Neo by the name the Matrix gave them –this would also apply to Trinity, Morpheus and so on.

 

When I saw “The Matrix Resurrections”, I took issue with criticisms of its internal commentary, and replaying of scenes from the original film: “To make a new ‘Matrix’ film is to comment on what has happened to our representation of the world in the last eighteen years, because that is the only acceptable way to do it.” It is my favourite film of the now-tetralogy, just as my favourite film of the “Back to the Future” trilogy is the second one.

 

We are now at a point where cyberpunk may now be understood as a historical period in popular culture, just as the dystopian worlds depicted in its literature and films resemble reality greater than they ever did. With “the matrix” now being misappropriated for personal gain by whoever Andrew Tate thinks he is, and “taking the red pill” being used as by right-wing groups as a term for “freeing” themselves from what they believe is a simulation of the world created by liberal ideology, a celebration of “The Matrix”, and what it really is about, couldn’t be timelier.

 

I now need to square how a previous film that also starred Keanu Reeves, the critically derided “Johnny Mnemonic”, came to influence “The Matrix”.

DON’T EVER CHANGE, NEVER CHANGE [434]

The Isle of Man is part of the British Isles, but not part of the UK. It is a self-governing Crown Dependency, but the UK government is responsible for its defence and representing its interests abroad. The British monarch is the Isle of Man’s head of state, and their head appears on their currency, the value of the Manx pound being tied to the British Pound.

The Isle of Man government has said it will no longer produce their own 1p and 2p coins, as they cost more to produce than their face value. Businesses on the island have been asked to start rounding prices to the nearest 5p, in preparation for shortages of the lower value coins in the coming years.

This is old news to many people. Six countries that have the Euro as their currency have not used one- and two-cent coins since 2013, something I hardly noticed when I visited the Republic of Ireland in 2016. The policy there is also to round up the final amount to pay to the nearest five cents, a policy introduced in Sweden in 1972 when they began a similar process with the krona – the öre still exists as one hundredth of a krona, but the one-krona coin has been the smallest unit of physical currency since 2010.

The last item I bought for a penny was a few years ago, a second-hand book obtained through Amazon, although the cost of postage must have made up for any shortfall. I remember being able to buy penny sweets individually, but that was in the 1990s.

The time is now ticking on the practicality of the British penny, despite the protestations of coin collectors. My own coin collection exists mainly to have examples of old coins, like the old pre-decimal farthing, one quarter of a penny when 240 pennies made a pound, itself withdrawn in 1960. I also own three unopened rolls of decimal half-penny coins, withdrawn in 1984 when dividing a pound into more than a hundred units became useless. Few coin-operated payment machines in the UK now accept coins under 10p in value – by the way, one Swedish krona happens to be worth between seven and eight pence. I usually only carry coins in an emergency, anticipating if a car park is only accepting cash, or if a card payment machine in a shop is broken, otherwise only paying in coins to get rid of the weight received as change from using banknotes. I would be fine with the “shilling” being the lowest value British coin, as the five pence coin is smaller in size than a penny.

Coins don’t wear away that fast, so coin collectors will be fine for some time to come – this group is the reason I rarely see a fifty pence coin in my change, as they are usually issued these days as special editions. A new set of standard, “definitive” coins will be introduced by the Royal Mint, with a dormouse and red squirrel on the 1p and 2p respectively, so they will remain for some time yet. The penny could eventually become a commemorative coin, having been pure silver until the switch to copper in 1796, before bronze and copper-coated steel followed – this will allow the usually-commemorative crown coin, valued at £5, to finally replace the £5 note.

LIKE A SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM [433]

AI image generated via Dall-E 3: "cybernetics, but without using human form"

I have built a long enough list of words I have needed to look up to clarify their meaning, I could start my own dictionary – “proscribe”, “sententious”, “speechify”, “extant” and “disdain” have been my most recent additions. I like to be sure, and I want to be clear, so I need to use the right word if I can.

“Cybernetics” is one of those words for which I felt I should know the meaning, but the breadth of the subject made it hard to grasp in one go, when what I would like is a working definition that may form the basis of further discussion. Therefore, the grasping has become the discussion.

When I previously defined cybernetics here as “the science of control systems, communications and technology”, I was still under the impression that the term was mostly to do with technology, the prefix “cyber-” having been popularised in the 1980s by the cyberpunk movement of culture and literature. The use of “cyberspace” to describe online space also dates from then, but the word dates from the 1960s, “Atelier Cyberspace” having been the name of a husband-and-wife artistic group from Denmark producing installations about the management of physical space.

“Cybernetics”, both the word and the discipline, dates to 1948 and the publication of the book “Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine” by Norbert Weiner, following a Greek word meaning “steersman”, but more usually translated as “governor”. This title is similar to definitions I found for “cybernetics” used by the Oxford English Dictionary at OED.com, and via the macOS Dictionary app, which used the Oxford Dictionary of English. Merriam-Webster is more detailed: “the science of communication and control theory that is concerned especially with the comparative study of automatic control systems (such as the nervous system and brain and mechanical-electrical communication systems).” This definition reads like it was written before technology captured the meaning of the first two syllables, examinations into artificial intelligence as part of cybernetics having begun further into the 1950s.

The most straightforward and useful definition of cybernetics I have found is in the book “Anti-Oculus: A Philosophy of Escape” by the artistic and philosophical collective Acid Horizon, published in 2023 by Repeater Books: “Cybernetics is the interdisciplinary science of control and communication. One can use cybernetics as a science to build social machines of control, and one can use cybernetics to analyse the machinations of production that attempt to direct and govern social reality.”

After positing that we have arrived at the “vision of ecstasy and anxiety all at once” promised by cyberpunk, the book explores how we can escape the management and control inherent in this “Cybercene”, by way of a manual produced by a fictional institute concerned with studying how systems organise, recognise and compartmentalise ourselves. The idea of this book is exciting, and it is my reason for making cybernetics that will come up here in future: it is “having a moment”. Deciding what kind of world you want to have starts with how the world acts with you, or on you.

DO YOU WANNA KNOW HOW IT FEELS? [432]

My musical listening journey has created a list of artists and bands for whom I don’t have a physical copy of any of their music, an omission to remedy someday: Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell, the Spice Girls and so on. Some works demand better than the lossy compressions of MP3 or streaming.

Kate Bush is a different matter. Upon realising I had none of her albums, I felt embarrassed by this admission - how can I have all of David Bowie’s studio albums, but nothing by Kate Bush? I practically ran to the nearest HMV to stock up: “Hounds of Love”, “The Red Shoes”, “Never For Ever”, “The Kick Inside” and “The Sensual World”, one each of what the store had in stock. 

My CD collection felt complete in that moment, and seemingly remains so until I decide I really need something by Pink Floyd, for Kate Bush always feels like a special occasion, whenever I hear a song by her, and no matter how often I hear those songs. 

From the ethereal nature of early hits like “Wuthering Heights”, “Them Heavy People” and “Wow”, to the spiky characters of “The Dreaming” album, and the triumph of both sides of “Hounds of Love”, Kate Bush’s output became better as more creative freedom was afforded to her, and her increasingly experimental albums, made in her own time, at home through technological advances and portability, like the Fairlight CMI album first used on “Babushka”, have allowed this experimentation and freedom to become mainstream.

My favourite Kate Bush album is 1985’s “Hounds of Love”, and my favourite song of her songs is “Running Up that Hill (A Deal with God)”, from the commercial-led side A of that album – the perceived failure of 1982’s “The Dreaming”, which still reached number 3 in the charts despite singles not charting, led to a compromise that put more avant-garde material onto side B, while also becoming Bush’s first album recorded entirely at home, in her own time, at her own pace.

“Running Up That Hill” reached number 1 in the UK singles chart for three weeks in June 2022, having been used as a plot device in the Netflix TV drama “Stranger Things”. Having a song that talks about exchanging sexes to achieve a greater understanding to have come back from 1985 to become more relevant and celebrated than ever intended, is perhaps one of the best things that could have happened in pop music, and it was entirely deserved – it was like us, as the audience, had caught up with the song at last.

Kate Bush’s last album of new material was 2011’s “50 Words for Snow”, a chamber-pop-jazz-ambient album based around a single theme, with no track shorter than seven minutes in length. There is a natural expectation for any future release, but I currently like to think that she thought long enough to make music her way, having achieved a position where she can make music entirely for herself, any clash this makes with the image of a publicly accessible rock star is her audience’s problem alone.  

STUMBLE YOU MIGHT FALL [431]

The BT Tower, seen from St Paul's Cathedral

Leaving home for work as usual, I opened the BBC Sounds app on my phone to play BBC Radio 6 Music. Chris Hawkins has a brilliant weekly feature about people’s names heard unintentionally during songs, and as the time for it approached, the app would not load. Sometimes it takes a while, but realising this was taking longer than usual, I opened my web browser to stream the station via the BBC’s website. This also failed to load, along with any other website I tried.

Arriving at my bus stop, unable to check why my phone had no internet signal, I hoped the bus company’s app will let me catch the bus. Restarting my phone did not re-establish any connection. Fortunately, I was able to carry on my journey, as whatever codes needed for the app to work today must have downloaded previously.

Unaccustomed to travelling in silence, and with my MP3 player at home, I was resigned to listening to music saved to my phone before the near-unlimited choice of a music streaming app made purchases rare. I compromised with the Muzak Corporation’s “Stimulus Progression 5” background music album, various songs by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, and the reworked version of David Bowie’s 1987 “Never Let Me Down” album released in 2018, an interesting exercise that could still have been left alone. Listening to the sublime original “Rawlinson End” piece by Vivian Stanshall, I thought of looking up more information about it, then had to sit there realising I could not – I couldn’t leave my bus to work to stop at a library.

Finally logging into my work computer confirmed that Vodafone, my mobile network, had an outage of their 4G and 5G internet networks, but not phone calls and text messages – Vodafone introduced text messages to the world, so maintaining its use must be a point of pride. I thought the internet came back just before starting work at 9am, but this was after going to an area of the building with poor reception (the staff toilets) caused my phone to search out the still operating 3G network instead. This network will be phased out by Vodafone during 2024 to bolster 4G and 5G reception, a good idea in the circumstances, but GPRS (General Packet Radio Services), introduced in 2001 and still used for calls and messages, will remain.

Cybernetics is a subject I plan to discuss in greater detail in coming weeks, but nothing serves to focus your mind on the science of control systems, communications and technology than being temporarily kicked out of such a control system. As much as I would like to think I could live without the internet, I have surely arrived at the point where any period of disconnection will cause frustration. Its initial usefulness became a welcome extension of myself, and it may be time to properly make sense of that.

Everything was back to my new normal by 11am, and I listened to Chris Hawkins’ radio feature during lunchtime.