What are the BBC 'pips'? The Greenwich Time Signal explained!
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ต.ค. 2024
- A short stand up comedy set about the BBC pips, created for the Boring Conference in 2019 and recreated for An Evening of Unnecessary Detail.
You may also enjoy the beginning of Back-room boy, starring Arthur Askey: archive.org/de...
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Transcript:
I'm Rachel Wheeley. I'm a short adult.
I am a comedian but before I was a comedian I was a... well, I worked for a Broadcasting Corporation is all I'm going to say.
I'm not going to say which one.
It's a British one. That's all I'm saying.
I just want to tell you quickly how it started. The BBC started in... oh no, I said it.
In 1922 the Post Office gave Marconi a licence to do some experimental radio broadcasting. And within about a month, a load of companies were like, 'give us a licence to do experimental radio broadcasting.' And the Post Office went, 'No. We're not gonna do that - we can't be arsed. So you have to form a single company or a group of companies and take responsibility for British Broadcasting.'
And so Marconi got together with Western Electric and General Electric and they formed the British Broadcasting Company. And by November that year, they were doing regular broadcasts from this building. The Institute of Electrical Engineering on Savoy Hill. And they did not have a licence to do so. They got their licence in January of the next year. And it is very reassuring to me to learn that the BBC, like all great radio stations, started off as a pirate.
My job, when I worked for the Broadcasting Corporation - I was a studio director on the Today programme. Anybody know the Today programme? I thought you would. I thought, these people know the Today programme, of course they do. If you don't know the Today programme, it is a morning news show for people who like to wake up both sad and angry. Some people wake up happy and they don't like it. And this show puts that to rights. That's what I did for 10 years of my life, Here I am, trying to persuade John Humphrys and Sarah Montague to obey my very clear instructions. They did not. Sadly, so.
But the very important thing that I want to talk to you about: the best thing about the Today show is the way that it starts. It starts at 05:59'55 on weekdays. I don't know I can't get away with saying it starts then every day because you guys would be like, excuse me, it doesn't start then at the weekends. So it starts at 05:59'55 on weekdays. And it starts with this noise: PIP PIP PIP PIP PIP PIIIIIIP One very small 'woo'.
That is the Greenwich Time Signal or as it's affectionately known around Broadcasting House, the pips.
Basically what it means is you're strapped then into the flagship news programme of the BBC for three hours with no hope of a wee until Thought for the Day. It's a horrible situation to be in and it's also still extremely early in the morning. But the difficult thing about the pips if you're a presenter is that you've got to talk up to them.
Mishal Husain started working on the Today programme very recently and did something which she called, and I thought this was adorable, 'kissing the pips'. Which is where you talk up to them and you don't quite get it right but you haven't quite crashed them and it's basically fine. Jim Naughtie did unspeakable things to those pips. I don't even want to talk about it, if I'm honest.
Some facts for you about the Greenwich Time Signal. They were started in 1924 generated by the BBC itself from 1990, and only the BBC could write this sentence, 'Their utility in calibration is diminishing as digital broadcasting entails time lags'.
If you'd like a visual representation of your pips, there are six of them.
The five leading up to that half-second pip are a 10th of a second long, they are all 1kHz in frequency.
Now, what about leap seconds?
So what happens is an international conglomerate called the International Earth Rotation Society tells us, 6 months in advance when a leap second is needed, and it is inserted into the calendar on the 31st of December or the 30th of June. No idea why. And it's done via the pips. It is demonstrated by the pips. People stay up for this sh*t.
What happens is you have not six pips but seven pips. And that is the point at which they decided to make the last pip half a second long and so there was a Colloquium, which was designed to decide whether we should still have leap pips in 2003. I can reveal to you that what happened at that 2003 Colloquium is that they decided to defer the decision until 2023.
It's like Brexit all over again!
Guys, you can follow the pips on Twitter, @BBC_GTS, you can follow me on Twitter, @rachelwheeley. Thank you very much indeed for having me. - ตลก
Not only did you provide an excellent explanation of the BBC Pips, you also managed to make it funny! Thanks for sharing.
Thank you for watching Samuel!
I just randomly stumbled on this... and it was a lot. 😂 I grew up in the US listening to World Service on my grandfather's shortwave radio. I often fall asleep to the broadcast at night. When I brought my premature infant daughter home from 7 weeks in neonatal intensive care, the house was too quiet and she was restless. I turned on World Service so she could hear some calm voices. The pips immediately soothed her because they sound just like the beeping monitors in the NICU. I recorded them and played them on a loop in her crib for her first month at home and we all finally got some sleep. I've never been to the UK, yet those damn pips have been a thing in my life. 🇺🇸❤️🇬🇧
DID YOU KNOW!!!
The beeps are 1000 hz. The speed of sound is 343 metres per sec.
Each wave is 34.3 cm long
The first 5 beeps are 34.3 m long with a 307 metre interval and The last one is 171.5 m long. The total length of the beeps is 1886.5 m, that's about the distance from Big Ben to Chelsea.
The 1st 5 are 100 waves and the last one is 500 waves.
Thanks for helping a Kiwi with a Fri'Yay current affairs quiz question about 'Crashing the Pips"!
This is great! I'm a Radio 3 man, but have always wondered about the origins of the pips!
i'm glad I've managed to found a video on my random nerdy interest of the week - t'was brilliant!
Ive always been fascinated abou the big ben fader lol
Great. Enjoyed that. Thanks
Thank you Alastair!
10:12 How ironic!
So… 2023 is over. Was the decision delayed again? :D
I found it a little tiresome because of all the joking. I was genuinely interested in the pips and wished she'd have just focused on the explanations, rather than trying to be funny. That said, she actually was funny. So...thanks.