BBC Radio 4 loses its pips
One of the most ear catching audio clips on the radio, the pips which herald the arrival of Radio 4 news bulletins, have mysteriously vanished from the airwaves.
The silence that followed didn’t prove golden for Mair however who said on air: “It is five o'clock. Well, there were no pips in essence. We've been making checks. We've been told it is a computer error."
Radio 4’s pips were first introduced in 1924 and consist of six distinctive beeps, the first five of which sound for a tenth of a second with the sixth lingering for half a second.
Timed relative to Coordinated Universal Time the pips gain their accuracy from an atomic clock housed in the basement of broadcasting house.
BBC sound engineer John-Paul Dunkley blamed the pips demise on faulty hardware, saying: “The box that creates the audio of the pips has died unfortunately in the basement of Broadcasting House. We do have a reserve but unfortunately that has not been picked up.”