BBC World Service

The World Service has, I believe, the biggest audience for any radio station anywhere.

Prior to a transmission starting,
an ident is radiated for several minutes and two such idents are here.

Also here, is "Lilliburlero", which, I think, everybody knows.

When Radio Four started carrying the World Service during the night,
for a few months, VHF transmitters did not carry it.
Prior to this, even when Radio Two was on Long Wave, the World Service was always on 1500m, 200Khz Long Wave for a couple of hours each night, though at that time,
this was not shown in the "Radio Times",
but was in "London Calling" (the "Radio Times" of the World Service).

General Overseas Service Ident
The World Service was formerly known as the General Overseas Service.

Added 02/01/02
Geoff Bliss Wrote:
"The General Overseas Service became World Service on 1st May 1964.
At the time I was a T. O. in Bush House. Later Green Continuity was staffed by SMs
following the "merger" of T.O.s with Programme Operations in 1967.
Certainly up to 1988 when I left the BBC, the Overseas Services were referred to as External Broadcasting.
Up to that time World Service was exclusive to the 24 hour a day English Language Service.
There were times of the day when the mainstream World Service split
to provide a regional version for Europe or Africa."

Bush House Tape
A really brilliant piece of tape editing done some years ago.
If you remember that all the edits were done with tape and a splicing block,
it's fantastic, really!

Colin Neal Senior Broadcast Engineer Bush House Remembers:
"I joined the BBC in 1969 and I designed and built the electronic interval signal generator,
around 1975 with a little help from my friends!
Previous to this it was the letter 'V' in morse sounded on timpani,
the 'BBC' apparently was recorded by Radiophonic workshop and was some early electronic musical instrument.
With the BBC int sig my instructions were to make it as much like the original as possible, which I did.
With the V I had to make it much higher pitch than the original
as I was told the timpani didn't do very well on short wave."

A visitor to this site, Mike Christieson wrote:
"As a matter of interest, when I was involved, the programs were divided into networks identified by colours.
Green was all World Service in English. Brown, I recall, was almost all Arabic. Grey was mainly Russian.
Red was a collection of things including Persian. Yellow, I think, included all the Far Eastern languages.
There was also Violet, which seemed to be a collection of programs that did not fit anywhere else.

The distribution to sites was at that time copper music lines, the circuits were referred to as Chains.
The old Aspi1 medium wave was on the end of Chain 51, I seem to recall.
Feeds to overseas relays were by HF rebroadcast, ISB feeds and pre shipped tapes.

At the start of a program feed there was five minutes of
pulsed 1kHz tone follow by ten minutes of interval signal. The program started at T- 30 seconds.
Carrier was radiated from T-15 minutes but it was our convention not to radiate pulsed tone and often only five minutes of interval signal.

Some transmissions had what were called crash starts.
There was on all program junctions a four second gap from H-32 seconds to H-28 seconds
where H was hour or half hour point. This was to allow transmitters to be crashed on and off,
ie carrier and mod at the same time, where the tx was being passed from one site to another
or to join in synchronism.

The Crowborough site was closed in the early eighties and MF operations transferred to Orfordness.
Operational responsibility passed from DWS Broadcast Group to BBC transmission and then onto Merlin.

I am not sure of the situation now, but in the mid seventies when I was "on shift" at the Aspidistra site at Crowborough the following was the convention on interval signals".

Electronic Ident 1
Used by the European vernacular services ie those not in English.
Typically in French, German, Polish etc. That is why it was heard on 1296KHz recently.
The original drum version of was a left over from the wartime V for victory signal
on European services.

Electronic Ident 2
Used on non European vernacular services
and included a wide range such as Arabic, Chinese and Somali.
The three notes are BBC in the tonic scale.

"Lilliburlero" Station Ident
World Service, in English used "Lilliburlero" before each world news
and as such was not really an interval signal in the sense it did not signify a new frequency coming up.

The World Service interval signal was at that (1970's) time Oranges and Lemons,
but had recently changed from Bow Bells. About 1980 it reverted back to Bow Bells.

Many thanks to Mike for the text below each clip

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