The Day The Pips (Almost) Died

If the portable Uher Report tape recorder was the workhorse of radio, the bigger, snazzier Arabian stallion of a beast was the Studer. It was the most beautifully made reel-to-reel machine money could buy. In the office we only had a few old Revox machines which throbbed and whined as they turned, but in the studios, for playout of tape recordings on air, we used Studers. They had the world’s most satisfying clunk when they started playing, like a BMW door when it gently clicks shut.

Studers were, as well as sounding good, intricately designed. They had an auto-stop feature which meant that as soon as the tape ran out, the computer inside it realised the tension had dropped and would click off and stop. Revox machines, on the other hand, would flail around like a whirling dervish until someone actually pressed STOP. If you were within a metre of the tape as it flew round it could take your eye out, and unless you’d locked down the central tape holder, the whole aluminium reel which held the tape could fly off, threatening to decapitate anyone in its path. They wouldn’t get past Health & Safety these days.

Now, this will come as a big surprise, but sometimes — just sometimes — radio programmes aren’t always actually live. I know. It’s a shock. Occasionally, the presenter is sitting at home with a nice cup of Horlicks as their programme goes out. There are whole shows on national network radio that are, to this very day, recorded and pretend to be live (the presenters are very clever — they never actually say they’re live, they just intimate it in order to comply with that pesky rule about not lying to your listeners).

Shows are recorded days in advance — you can always tell when it’s happening because of the lack of time checks and references to the weather (which, lets be honest, make up 90% of all radio programmes). And there I was, sitting in Cubicle 1A at BBC Radio Cleveland, watching a spool of tape go round and round while the presenter of the programme was sitting on a train on the way to London. The first two hours of the show had been live; the last one was on tape. This would have come as a great surprise to the station manager, who knew nothing about this and would have hit the roof if he’d found out.

The breakfast show presenter was an egotist. Not for him the occasional blurred line between taped and live — he just went for it: time checks, pretend “I’m looking out of the window” comments, and even the odd recorded phone conversation dropped in with ‘listeners’ (who, in reality, were mates of his from the pub). If this happened nowadays, heads would roll. I wish they had back then.

My job as his production assistant - or Programme Assistant in BBC language - was to sit in the studio and make sure nothing went wrong. It should have been simple. All I had to do was press play at half past eight and wait for the programme to end at exactly nine o’clock, when the newsreader would take over.

At 8.45 I had to stop the tape for the traffic and travel news, which came in live from another studio in Newcastle. The presenter had left a 90-second gap and I was to restart the tape at the correct moment to make sure it hit 9 o’clock on the dot. The problem was the crash on the A19 trunk road. The traffic and travel bulletin took two minutes. As they finished, I pressed play and the taped programme started up again.

It took me a couple of minutes before I instantaneously broke out into a sweat and froze on the spot.

I looked at the reel of tape going round and round.

Then I looked at the clock.

And then I looked at the reel of tape again.

“Oh shit,” I said out loud, thereby breaking the first cardinal rule of radio by swearing in front of an admittedly turned-off microphone.

The second cardinal rule of radio was about to be broken. The idiot presenter had recorded the pips on tape.

Let me explain.

The pips are the industry slang for the Greenwich Time Signal — six short beeps played a second apart to mark the top of the hour. It is, I’m pretty sure, a sackable offence to screw around with them, and I’ve heard you can be taken to the dungeon and whipped if you ever use a recording of them on tape. The pips, sitting at the end of this reel of tape in front of me, were inexorably getting closer and closer. And they’d be 30 seconds late.

Planes would fall from the skies, ships would crash into lighthouses, cashpoint machines would spew money into the street and zombies would rise from Middlesbrough’s graveyards.

Or I’d get reprimanded by the Station Manager. One of the two.

There was a ray of light, however. A small possibility. The reel of tape was being played in off a Studer. These machines were the bee’s knees. They had variable speed. I could just make the programme go a bit faster and get the timings back on track.

Thirty seconds out of kilter, with fifteen minutes to go. I grabbed a pen and paper to work it out before remembering I was as thick as a plank and had no idea how to work it out. If only ChatGPT had existed (although, of course, nobody ever uses that at the Beeb…). So, faced with my own stupidity, I just sped it up bit by bit. Cher’s new single sounded a bit weird, but I could pass it off as being the result of an early version of auto-tuning.

I did a bit more back-timing and realised I was about five seconds out. The varispeed wouldn’t go any higher now. Madonna was racing through her new song and sounded like she’d been inhaling helium, but to make up the time I had to do something even more drastic. So I pulled the tape towards me and started to feed it, as fast as I could get away with, through my hands.

At five seconds to nine, the pips hit on time.

Success!

Then the micro-thin magnetic tape sliced my finger open like a paper cut. I yelped and let go of the tape. The pips warbled, slowed.

Right.

Down.

And then stopped.

Because I’d dropped the tension between the two reels of tape, the Studer had realised something was wrong and had shut down on its own. The news jingle never made it to air. I looked through the glass to where the newsreader was sitting in the opposite cubicle. She was staring at me as if the whole world had collapsed.

“START READING!” I yelled into her headphones over the intercom, and she clicked into action and sounded as smooth, calm and collected as only a newsreader can.

I walked out of the studio corridor, wandered round to the manager’s office and knocked on the open door.

“John, you wanted to see me?”

“No?” said the manager, looking a bit perplexed.

I realised the radio wasn’t on in his office.

“Well, I’m pretty sure you will in a couple of minutes,” I smiled, in a slightly resigned way. “I’ll be at my desk.”

As I walked out, I heard his phone ring.

The nine o’clock news hadn’t even finished before John Watson’s head appeared round the door.

“Nick,” he said. “A word please…”