Lamenting Long Wave and looking to the future

Opinion

Long Wave radio is no more, and a transition from terrestrial broadcasting to internet-delivered TV is expected by 2034. If we are to embrace the future, we should preserve the past, writes Ray Snoddy.

Shed a brief tear for the end of a broadcasting icon – Long Wave broadcasts of Radio 4 by the BBC.

The demise after nearly 100 years was on its way for some time, mainly because of dwindling numbers of users of analogue radio sets and the fact that the valves used in the trusty transmitters are no longer manufactured, with the number of available spares running low.

Long Wave listeners, probably a residual 90,000 of them, were warned two years ago that the end was nigh, and then, as an additional disincentive, the BBC stopped printing Long Wave programme schedules.

The end came with a minimum of fuss at 1 am last Saturday, when, during the Shipping Forecast – one of the last holdout bastions of Long Wave – the announcer called out “the end of an era” as the signal was finally switched off.

Radio enthusiasts everywhere will be distraught, and everyone from fishermen to submarine commanders will have to find a digital way to get their information if they haven’t already.

Long Wave was relevant for submariners because the signal penetrated several feet below the surface of the ocean, so it could be used as a certain way of making sure the UK still existed and hadn’t faced nuclear war while the submariners were under the surface.

We have to assume that the Royal Navy has found an alternative way of ensuring that Britain still exists.

Nick Totterdell of the Radio Society of Great Britain described the change as very significant for British radio enthusiasts.

“It marks the end of the main source of UK Long Wave transmissions. These have been focused on the Droitwich transmitters and their huge aerial for more than 90 years,” Totterdell said.

There is now a move to preserve those transmitters and the huge aerial used to broadcast coded information, propaganda and entertainment into occupied Europe during the Second World War as a national monument.

It is also, as The Media Leader’s James Longhurst once told me, the end of a little scientific curiosity. If you held an analogue radio near Elizabeth Tower, you could hear the bongs of Big Ben on your radio fractionally before the real thing – because radio waves travels a little faster than sound waves.

It truly is the end of an era, albeit inevitable.

The end of Freeview is next

However, the switching off of the Long Wave signal is kids’ stuff compared with the next big planned switch-off or over – the proposed end of traditional Freeview television services by 2034 or maybe by the end of 2044.

Mobile phone companies would like to get their hands on all that extra spectrum, and presumably the Government would be happy to pocket the proceeds of a spectrum auction.

There is the slight problem that mainly elderly and poorer viewers who do not have broadband or sophisticated mobile phones, plus those living in areas with poor communications, could lose all their television services if nothing is done. That would be poor politics for any government.

Luckily, there are more optimistic technological precedents.

At the start of the millennium, there were fears that at the stroke of midnight, every computer system in the world would crash, resulting in chaos. Nothing happened, of course.

More relevant was the phased replacement of analogue television services by the very digital terrestrial TV signals now facing oblivion in 10 or 20 years.

At the time, some broadcasting luminaries who ought to have known better predicted that the whole thing was impossible and would never happen.

In fact, after a lot of effort, investment and planning, analogue television was successfully phased out area by area between 2007 and 2012. The very last remnant of analogue ended when Virgin Media’s cable television service in Milton Keynes went digital in November 2013.

The same can happen again, although only if there is an absolute determination not to leave people behind to fend for themselves.

The DCMS, and whoever heads it after the apparent coronation of Andy Burnham as Prime Minister, will soon have to decide on the timetable. 

The BBC and the Future TV Taskforce would like to see the transition from terrestrial broadcasting to internet-delivered TV (IPTV) by 2034.

At the moment, MPs are still concerned about what will happen to those who rely on aerials and do not have broadband, and they will mainly be older, poorer viewers or those living in remote places.

There is no question that the prospective PM who promised to “re-wire” the UK in 10 years will also have to oversee the re-wiring of the telly as part of the overall national project.

Physical transmitters on hills may be expensive to maintain, but they feel more manageable and reliable, much like Long Wave broadcasts used to be.

If the internet goes down, and we are all on it, what happens then?

Viewing habits have changed, as have methods of delivering the pictures

According to Enders Analysis, around 90% of households have broadband in some form, while a further 5% – usually younger households – use the internet and smartphones to access entertainment services.

The remaining 5% with no internet access may sound like a small number, but it would actually account for nearly 1.5 million households.

With the number of smartphone households growing and those with no internet access shrinking, perhaps time will go a long way towards solving the problem.

Government estimates suggest that the older household group will have shrunk to 2% by 2034 and down to a more manageable 0.2% – around  58,000 – by 2044.

Maybe there is a case for playing the long game here and investing in providing free or heavily discounted broadband for the last remaining minority.

In the meantime, in memory of Long Wave services and the era of the Long Wave Shipping Forecast, not to mention the coded messages for the French resistance, the Droitwich transmitters and huge broadcasting mast should be preserved for posterity – just in case they are ever needed again.

Raymond Snoddy is a media consultant, national newspaper columnist and former presenter of NewsWatch on BBC News. He writes for The Media Leader on Wednesdays — bookmark his column here.