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Seventy-eight years of night work

From a borrowed lantern room to a repertory of six. The short version is below; the long version is on the discs.

1926The lantern is electrified and immediately unpopular; keepers prefer the smell of the oil.
1934The great fog. Gullwrack keeps its light for nineteen consecutive nights.
1948Vivien Aldercott borrows the de-lamped lantern room for one reading of 'The Drowned Bell'.
1950The council notices. A lease is signed on the back of a tide table.
1952The Lighthouse Letters begins. The first letter is real; the archive will not say whose.
1957The pips are installed, salvaged from a scrapped destroyer's clock.
1961Studio B opens in the old oil store. The kettle clause enters the constitution.
1968The Midnight Exchange starts the fog-district noir cycle.
1971First Nights begins. The pile that night held four scripts; the pile has never been shorter.
1974The stair is threatened with replacement. Four hundred letters and one goat arrive. Both stay.
1977Signal Fires is written in nine nights during a gale.
1983The Understudy's War adapts the Aldercott papers.
1989Marguerite Ozan becomes the voice of the pips.
1994Wire & Wool proves 3 watts is enough for comedy.
1999The stream debate begins. It has run every year since.
2001Tomas Reyes arrives from the Harbour Relay and lowers everything by 3 dB.
2011The vault's 40,000th disc is a recording of the kettle.
2019The fog signal is restored to working order. It is used, sparingly, for drama only.
2024The digitisation bench opens. The queue has not shortened since.
2026Six series in repertory, 42,000 discs, one stair, no stream.

The founder

Vivien Aldercott (1911–1990) was a producer who believed three things: that drama belongs after dark, that corrections should be appended and never edited, and that a kettle is infrastructure. The Nightjar constitution is two pages, half of which is her handwriting.

People tell the truth to a radio at night.

Her papers, adapted for The Understudy's War, are held in the vault under catalogue number A-1.