[Swprograms] Re the absence of Big Ben...

["Paul David" <pauldavid@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: "Paul Donovan" <pauldon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <uk-radio-listeners@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, May 09, 2004 12:32 PM
Subject: [uk-radio-listeners] Re the absence of Big Ben...


...from Radio 4 over the past week, here's my tuppenceworth on the subject
from the Sunday Times today:




Big Ben is silent - on Radio 4 if not at Westminster. I miss it most at 6pm
when those unhurried and reassuring bongs herald the news and at last I can
pour a drink without undue guilt ("cool the verandah that welcomes us in",
Betjeman wrote, "to the six o'clock news and a lime-juice and gin"). By the
time you read this, normal service may have been resumed, in which case Big
Ben will ring out again at 10pm tonight. But as I write, on Tuesday, it has
not been broadcast for four days and the airwaves are simply not the same.

The hour chime, the technical term for the big bongs that number from one to
twelve and are made by a hammer arm striking the biggest bell, is
unaffected. But the quarter chimes, the smaller bongs heard every 15 minutes
and made on four smaller bells, have not sounded since before dawn on April
30. "A steel shaft broke in the mechanism that drives the four quarter
bells", explains Mike McCann, Keeper of the Great Clock - now there's a job
title - at the Palace of Westminster. "A fracture had developed in part of
the locking lever, in a place not normally visible." He was hoping to repair
the Victorian machinery by last night, but says it will have to be stripped
down again in about five years' time.

The fact that the hour chime is not affected does mean, of course, that
Radio 4 could carry on broadcasting it (at 6pm and midnight seven days a
week and at 10pm on Sunday, and always live) just as it has for decades. Its
spokeswoman claims it is "easier and cleaner" to use the pips as a temporary
substitute. That may be true. But the only pips one wants at 6pm are those
in a slice of lemon.

Is there prescience in the timing? Consulting his records in the world's
most famous clock tower, McCann points out that the last time the quarter
chimes fell silent through breakdown - as opposed to a planned maintenance
stoppage - was in May 1997. For the whole time Tony Blair has been in power,
in other words, these quarter chimes have been behaving themselves. Now they
are coming apart just when his own position is being openly questioned in
his own party! What can this augur? Still, in the interests of balance I
should point out that the last time the hour chime broke down was in 1994,
under John Major, and the last time there was a real outcry about it, when
it was silent for four months in 1990, was in the era of the Iron Lady.

I love the sounds of Big Ben, on the hour and on the quarter. They speak of
the ravens in the Tower, the white cliffs of Dover, the peoples of the
Commonwealth and a country called Britain before the BBC started calling it
"four nations". They have been part of the daily bread of broadcasting since
1924, ushering in new years, a new century and a new millennium. They
punctuate the inexorable passage of time with moments to take stock and give
pause. And they are a tribute to all those in the 1850s who sweated and
toiled at Whitechapel Foundry to fill a mould with molten metal and would
never have believed that, more than a century later, their handiwork, allied
to that of many engineers, would prove so sound that the mighty clock would
be no more than a second out and some of its chimes would be available to
every home in the land at the precise moment they were striking in
Westminster.


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