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Advent Calendar Day 18: An Experiment with Time and Christmas

A map illustrating the tour was featured on page 967.

Today's window is a real treat for those fans of the wireless.

Listeners on Christmas Day evening, 1931, were first treated to the traditional staple of a from studio, and an on behalf of the British Wireless for the Blind.

At 9:35pm, though, an was announced and Half the World Away, a "one of those fascinating, highly technical programmes which someone devises every now and then to remind us that broadcasting and wireless telephony really are modern miracles' began.

The listeners would have started their journey "comfortably seated in one part or another of the British Isles having celebrated Christmas in as near the good old-fashioned way as finances have allowed." They would then be transported to Tower Hill, London, for a chat with Mr Smoker, the Yeoman Porter. From there they would "fly on telephonic wings to the wild coasts of the North" to listen to a light-keeper, next to Gibraltar, and on to Cape Town. The radiophonic waves would finally take them to Sydney (where there is now Boxing Day, the listing warned), Vancouver, Edmonton and the Niagara Falls:

"If luck is with us and the Falls are not frozen solid (fantastic thought), we shall hear, for the first time in this country, the voice of those titanic waters."

Finally, "In Montreal we shall find them finishing tea, and when, on our homeward flight across the Atlantic, we stop to talk to the liner Majestic, we shall interrupt someone at dinner. From the Majestic we pass to Dublin and, as Big Ben's hands are creeping towards 10.30, back to London."

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An Early Christmas Present