Messaging in Old Skool

Do you find yourself, when watching an old movie where the principal characters are in dire peril and in need of urgent help, shouting at the screen for them to just use their mobile phones and summon up assistance?

It is an easy thing to do as we have come to rely very heavily upon our smart phones for just about everything in our every day lives and yet we tend to forget that it was only in the recent past that such personal aids were just not available.

Our heroines and heroes in those vintage films had to frantically seek out a telephone box, a friendly resident of a nearby property or resort to other improvised means such as semaphore flags, smoke screens or to send out a small boy on a messaging errand in order to even have a chance of salvation or rescue.

I suppose that you could even resort to chalking a plea on a wall or marking the universal summoning of help abbreviation of S.O.S in a suitably soft surface such as a sandy beach or using rocks and bits of handily curly shaped fallen tree branches.

When I was growing up in the late 1960's and early to mid 1970's I seem to remember another method of communicating an emergency or urgent message and that was through the mainstream broadcast channels of the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation).

That in itself, at the time, seemed very strange to me as the BBC was respected as the purveyor of news to a national audience and not necessarily known for its one to one services.

I recall the first time I heard one of these appeals on the airwaves and thought that it sounded more like a cryptic message to secret agents than anything else. This was a bit of a conspiracy theory I know but to an active juvenile mind it seemed a perfectly logical explanation and certainly way more exciting than what was often quite a dourly presented and rather, to my young mind, mundane content.

The messaging service would just emerge through the valve radio speaker after a brief and silent pause between an on-the hour news bulletin and the weather forecast on Radio Four.

I seem to think that this was normally about 1pm and 2pm and although highly likely to have occurred on a daily basis I would only be tuned in to the channel after Sunday family dinner when such programmes as The Navy Lark or The Clitheroe Kid were on. They were my favourite shows.

A stern and monotone voiced announcer would follow a script starting with the lines "Would Mr and Mrs Smith", followed by "currently touring the English Lake District in a dark blue Rover Saloon, registration number J234 TLL" and concluding with "please get in contact with the General Hospital in Basingstoke about their Auntie Frannie who is seriously ill".

Other proclamations were of various other ailments, terminal or not, afflicting all sorts of close relatives and not just confined to UK citizens but also foreign tourists and casual visitors. I supposed at the time that it was quite typical, based on this content, that family emergencies only took place when one or more of them had dared to take a vacation or go on a trip for whatever reason.

We must have been a bit more of a trusting society in that era as such a message clearly advertised to anyone acquainted with the named persons and their home address that they were currently not there, also applying to the residence of poor Auntie.

Sometimes the message included a phone number as again, in the pre Smartphone and Google Search days the finding of a contact number for anywhere, even a large establishment such as Basingstoke General would constitute a major piece of research.

As rapidly as the appeal message would appear it would be confined to the radio waves of outer space as it was BBC policy for just a single broadcast with no repetitions.

I can well imagine keen eyed schoolchildren vying for the multiple I-Spy type points tally of actually spotting that elusive blue Rover Saloon, registration J234 TLL when able to peer above their sick bags on the back seats of their parents' car whilst themselves on a bit of a jaunt in the picturesque Lakeland scenery.

I did harbour an ambition of being the intended recipient  of such a message although I would not, naturally, have wished for this to have arisen over any ill health issues of any beloved members of family, relatives and friends.

A message to the effect "Would Peter Thomson, last known whereabouts stuck sweatily to the vinyl back seat of his Mother and Father's VW Variant Estate please contact Mission Control Houston about a spare seat available on the next Apollo Space rocket" would be just perfect.

That such bulletins were, in reality, subversive messaging to covert agents remained as a bit of a topic of public conversation for some years but this was later dismissed as being pure fantasy....but then again they would say that wouldn't they ?