In article ,
"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote:

In article ,
Arfa Daily wrote:
That's my feeling too. It definitely used to be much better here in the
UK, than it is now. If a programme was billed to start at 8pm, then it
pretty much did.

Pretty much sums it up. But in those days few had dead accurate clocks
which are so common now.

Actually,they were very close.

Western Union clocks all over the country were almost always all synched
to within a second or so. The technique was to use clocks (those big
things with the red sweep hand you may have seen in a broadcast studio)
that were basically pretty good, and to synch them to a remote timebase
from time to time.

The clocks were pendulum timed and electrically wound (couple of big dry
cells inside), and every one of them had a leased-line connection to the
nearest WU office, and from there to a national site.

Every 12 hours (AFAIR), Western Union sent a pulse down the wire that
"jammed" the sweep hands of all those clocks to 12 (and illuminated a
little red light behind the clock face so you could see that your time
was being corrected). I don't think the minute and hour hands were
controlled. It was up to the engineering personnel in each station to
twiddle their clocks' pendulums so the clocks could run within a second
or two in 12 hours -- not at all difficult for a good pendulum clock.

So as long as the accounting department paid the WU bill, you could join
your network or insert a local commercial with almost perfect accuracy.

Isaac