Radio Past and Present

Up until a few months ago, listening to the BBC was a haphazard, sometimes impossible task for me. There were basically two options open to me: one possibility was to get into the car and drive in the general direction of England and hope to pick up Radio 4 on the long wave. Curiously enough, reception on our old Renault 16 was much better than in any car (or on any radio) since then. Even so it was never an ideal solution.

The other option was to try and pick up the World Service on short wave or medium wave. Short wave was far too painstaking and in any case I was always having to change from one frequency to another. I eventually settled on 648 on the medium wave as the best of a poor bunch, but even this choice was beset with difficulties. For one thing reception would often fade and the BBC would be replaced by some state-sponsored station from behind the Iron curtain where the fare consisted of Bulgarian folk music or talk of "freedom-loving peoples" and "capitalist hyenas". Post 1989, the problem remained although the content of the interloping programmes changed.

Another problem with the medium wave is that, like Dracula, it only comes into its own during the hours of darkness.

All this has changed now that I have easy access to the BBC via the Internet. I have noticed something rather strange, though. The live web programme lags five to ten seconds behind the identical live programme broadcast on FM. Can anyone explain this phenomenon?