Why We Broadcast at Night

AM skip opens after dark, and so does the imagination. A short history of the night slot, from crystal sets to the patchwork of relays that still carries us up the Reach.

The studio log for the night this piece aired records only: “fog, kettle, third try.” That is most nights, and it is the honest weather report of any art made after ten o'clock.

We broadcast at night for practical reasons first: the AM skip opens after dark, the relays up the Reach are quieter, and the effects bench sounds better when the harbour is asleep. But the deeper reason is the one the founder wrote on the first schedule card in 1948: “people tell the truth to a radio at night.”

Everything here is engineered around that. The pips run at the top of the drama hour so you know the story is starting and the kettle is on. Dead air is kept, on purpose, for as long as a held breath. The 1908 stair is walked at full weight because a careful footstep reads as a lie.

The bench itself deserves a paragraph. A recovered ship's whistle from the trawler Kindly Light. A rain tray the size of a dinner table, fed by a watering can with a hole in it. A door whose latch is the closest thing radio has to a signature. Desmond catalogues all 1,400 props by hand and refuses a computer, on the grounds that the computer would want to be on the air.

Visitors ask why the walls of Studio A are bare pine. Because the first producer, Vivien Aldercott, could not afford plaster, and by 1953 the acoustics had become the acoustics. Renovation proposals arrive annually. They are filed with the renovation proposals for the tide.

Members sometimes ask what their money buys. It buys the chronometer's winding, the discs' one degree of cold, the pips' accuracy, and the kettle. The kettle clause is the only clause in the constitution written in a hand other than the founder's; it was added in 1961 by unanimous vote of six people and one goat.

If you are reading this at night, the dial is already warm. If it is morning, the tide tables are on at 6:40 and the fog will do the rest.

Transmissions are studio notes, not news. All places and programmes are fictional.