Where Time Has No Meaning
It is a place where nobody ever wishes you a “good morning” or a “good evening”. You are never blessed for a “good night” because nobody knows if you’re about to have a night, whether it be good, bad, or indifferent. All hours of the clock are equal, and equally blind, and equally bland. Character and personality are ripped away from the face of the dial. Two in the morning is no longer the time of the lonely grope for the gin bottle, and six is no longer a call to arms for the jiggling joggers and their horribly coloured trousers. There is no time for work, break, dinner, fooling around, or kicking-out. But you always know the time.
Resistance is not useless. I have resisted and I do not have British television channels piped, beamed or slingboxed to my particular and personal corner of a foreign field. Not even the international hotel fodder delivered to English speaking runaways around the globe makes it through. I have no CNN (but this will change if there’s another cool war – they always get the best tank footage), no BBC News 24 (this won’t change – it sucks), and even no Fashion TV (the poor man’s nudie channel). Most of all, however, I have no BBC Prime – the channel where “nation shall speak mediocrity and endless repeats unto nation”. It is not that I wouldn’t watch it. I would, for a million hours a day. And then I’d spend the other million bitching about the fact that it was all mediocrity and endless repeats. The more things change, the more they stay the same. That’s hardly worth the effort of shifting countries. At least watching endless Czech sport I am picking up a few Czech phrases. Education, and all that.
Instead, for English news (I never know when the next flood, plague, election, or other amusing catastrophe is going to hit the UK) I turn back to the radio, and the BBC World Service – the place where time has no meaning. The World Service is no stranger to British shores. Its edited highlights and news bulletins fill the hours when BBC Radio 4 takes a nightly power-nap to recover from the day’s deeply deep thoughts and importantly important insights. Like Gardener’s World. And so in thousands of minds an association forms; a union of pathos that binds Ol’ Blighty’s insomniacs, early risers, and dirty stop-outs. You know you’re up late. You know its dark outside. You probably know where the gin is.
Listening to the World Service out in the badlands of the World itself there are no such ties that bind. My evening listening is the background to somebody else’s breakfast. He missed it because he was at work. She missed it because she was in bed. They missed it because they have BBC Prime and were watching “Hetty Wainthropp Investigates” again. But it is alright, because there are plenty of repeats, scatter-gunned around the clock to make sure that everyone gets a clear chance at listening. You never know when you will get to hear once more that hour long special on jellyfish or some feminist dim-bulb claiming that men forced women to have regular periods. In either case, “never” would be too soon for me.
There is no point listening to the World Service for much of its content, unless you are particularly interested in the disgruntled views of the African public or the type of “world music” that makes you want a either a curry or a shotgun. I don’t get it: Chicago in part of the world so why not play some damn blues and cut it out with the Amazonian Butt Flute? The news, in the absence of any other source of information, is adequate. World Drama sometimes has a plot. Sport coverage is surprisingly decent. It’s not all bad, but that’s not the point.
Just as we all look up and see the same Sun, and as such people who live thousands of miles apart can see the exactly same object before them, so this global broadcast reaches out over and above the distances that we normally live our lives by. It crosses the time zones more thoughtlessly then we cross the road.
For right or for wrong there is not much in the way of social unity in 2007. This is not all bad. Too many people thinking the same way usually causes trouble. It’s nice to have friends and be loved and all that sort of stuff, but we’re all individuals these days, so go away, keep your nose out of my business, your doctrine to yourself, and your bloody hand out of my wallet.
It is in this (ever warming) climate that the BBC World Service provides a point of unity and commonality. It does not matter what time of day it is. It doesn’t matter that I’m getting up for work and you are getting dressed for a date. It doesn’t matter if you’re hitting the books and I’m hitting the booze. The time in GMT is rigorously monitored, but like hooks with nothing to hang on them, these bulletins are more curio than command. There is no morning or evening, no night and day. Just numbers keeping account of themselves.
It does not matter what country you live in, what colour you are, what you believe in, and how you voted last time round. It is irrelevant how much you earn or what car you drive or how big your house is or what your wife looks like or how many wives you have. We’re all different but we’re all the same. Humanity stands together. We’re all listening to the same sound. We’re all drinking from the same well. We’re all digging the same vibe. For once, no matter what time of day it is to us, we’re all thinking the same thing.
“How much does satellite telly cost anyway?”
