Things I'm Looking Forward To Doing Now That I'm British: Number Two

[nanila]

2. Tutting, in all its nuanced forms. Tutting is the beautiful art of expressing everything from mild disapproval to the full weight of immense rage. The gradations of tut are not immediately obvious to outsiders, and indeed I believe I'm still but an amateur when it comes to interpretation. I can discern the situations that call for a mild frown (e.g. a push from a fellow commuter unaccompanied by an exchange of apologies no matter who was at fault). I can tell when a more serious crime has been committed, e.g. queue-jumping, because a click of the tongue will accompany the tut. And I can tell when a crime of unforgivable proportions has been committed because actual words, e.g. a muttered rebuke, are allowed into the tut. But I'm sure there are shades of tut that I have yet to add to my repertoire.

I have yet to venture to express a tut myself, as I feel I'm too new a Brit to be tutting just yet. I look forward to the occasion of my first tut.

Comments

[pbristow]

That's because of their "programme within a programme" format, i.e. their "zones"; which in turn is all part of the fact that 4Extra is itself an automated service, playing out the zones in rotation from a server (you'll note that exactly the same zone, with the same links, etc. gets played out several times a day, and the only time explicit start times get mentioned is *between* zones: Even those bits are pre-recorded (to insure against any fluffs or fumbles and make sure the overall timing stays on track), and just played out by the computer at the top of the required hour.

The zones are all a specific number of hours long (usually 3 hours), minus a couple of minutes for continuity announcements specific to the time of day. Each zone is split into 1 hour or half-hour segments. The EPG advertises the start times of the inner programmes, but sometimes that's actually the start time of the "zone" it's included in (as it is in the above case), or of the standardised 30 minute slot , which only has a 24 minute main programme in it (because it was originally made for a station that had 25 minute slots), and 3 minutes of padding either side.

One of the benefits of the zoning system is that you can be a bit more flexible about the start times of the individual programmes - for example if you think *this* 28 minutes Goon Show deserves a longer introduction than *that* 23 minute Dead Ringers, you can do that, and stay within the alloted time for your zone. The downside then is that a programme's start or end time might slip outside the alloted 30 minute slot in the programme guide, so the automatic stream-slicer for the iPlayer has to allow more margin for error before and aft.

Clear? =:o}

(If you're wondering how I know all this stuff: I once tried to get a hospital radio station to take up the idea of such a service for their overnight sustaining service, instead of just relaying a music channel that was laready available on the hospital headphones on its own channel. I was going to record a 3hr 55m block of comedy programes (one block for each day of the week) onto a VHS tape and put it in a player on auto-repeat for the night, with a pre-recorded loop of our own jingles that would play out while the main tape was rewinding. I figured this would be more attractive to any bored insomniac over-50 patients than "Dance Hits '95" or whatever!

10 year later, BBC Radio 7 (now 4Extra) basically nicked my idea! =:o}