ALL WE HEAR IS RADIO GAGA - MINUS THE PIPS Dan Roberts – UK Telegraph 'Digital insertion" sounds like the sort of procedure you might expect in hospital. But news that culture secretary James Purnell was digitally airbrushed into an NHS promotional photograph is just a taste of the real jiggery-pokery he has planned for us.
The procedure that should have us shuffling nervously in our armchairs is known as "digital switch-over". This is the point at which the politicians hope you switch off - lost in the white noise of geek-speak. Tune in more carefully, and the message is a lot more uncomfortable than this weekend's photo manipulation.
Most of us are dimly aware that our ageing television sets are about to be declared old hat. By diktat of culture commissar Purnell, the analogue TV signal will soon be turned off, requiring everyone to shell out for some more equipment to watch the same old repeats of Only Fools and Horses.
I wonder though how many people realise this process begins in just 16 days' time. Or that the only way to prepare for it in the first affected area (Cumbria) is to buy a Sky dish - making a mockery of this week's Government review into Sky's dominance of commercial broadcasting.
I wonder, too, how many listeners know they are planning to do the same thing to radio. No one wants to broadcast the fact yet, but industry regulators are already talking about switching off the AM and FM signals to force everyone to use digital radios. As far as most radio companies are concerned, the only question is when.
Here's one bright spark from an industry body called the RadioCentre: "If you've got every home wired up to broadband, every home with a digital TV, everyone with a 3G phone and an iPod, the traditional analogue radio is going to look very old-fashioned. In five years' time Britain will be a digital economy, and radio should play its role in that."
Much of this may be true, but none of it is a reason for forcing us all to ditch every radio set in the house: from the expensive hi-fi in the living room, to the paint-splattered portable in the greenhouse, just so the industry can flog us some new products.
There is nothing Luddite about opposing this process. Government attempts to guess the direction of technological change usually serve only as a guide to how things won't turn out. By 2012, the iPod is almost certain to be about as cutting edge as the pogo stick.
Neither do the reasons for forcing us to accept digital switch-over have anything to do with stoking the white heat of technology. The only half-decent reason for turning off the analogue TV signal is that the broadcasting spectrum might be used for something else, like more mobile phones.
The spectrum used by FM and AM radio stations is far smaller and therefore of even less use. The real reason we are sleep-walking towards a mountain of redundant radios is down to self-interested commercial lobbying and the mindless inertia of government. Anyone who still thinks progress should be forced upon us by bureaucrats just needs to listen to the beeps. Digital radios have a time delay of around two seconds, which renders the bongs of Big Ben and the six pips that fix the hour on Radio 4 utterly useless. There is no easy way around this as the exact delay varies from radio to radio.
So far, neither the BBC nor the sellers of digital radios have seen fit to 'fess up to this fraud. When analogue is scrapped, we will have no choice. Anyone who wants to know the precise time will have to use some other expensive piece of electronic equipment to find out. The only other solution would be to persuade the manufacturer to tell you the specific time delay and then adjust for the missing seconds yourself. It would certainly make setting the clock rather trickier: beep, beep, beep… bugger.
The timetable for analogue TV switch-off can be found at www.digitaluk.co.uk. |