YouTube Closes Down For The Night
March 8, 2010 6:27 AM Subscribe
Is it Ghostbusters 2?
posted by Deathalicious at 7:01 AM on March 8, 2010 [4 favorites]
posted by Deathalicious at 7:01 AM on March 8, 2010 [4 favorites]
It's kinda like MetaFilter with elevator music.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 7:09 AM on March 8, 2010 [1 favorite]
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 7:09 AM on March 8, 2010 [1 favorite]
Where's Locke? Claire? This is Lost, right?
posted by menschlich at 7:42 AM on March 8, 2010
posted by menschlich at 7:42 AM on March 8, 2010
Kids these days have no sense of patriotism
posted by Throw away your common sense and get an afro! at 7:43 AM on March 8, 2010
posted by Throw away your common sense and get an afro! at 7:43 AM on March 8, 2010
FAIL! no national anthem :(
God Save The Queen.
posted by the cuban at 7:53 AM on March 8, 2010 [1 favorite]
God Save The Queen.
posted by the cuban at 7:53 AM on March 8, 2010 [1 favorite]
When’s the BBC footage from?
posted by thelastenglishmajor at 8:17 AM on March 8, 2010
posted by thelastenglishmajor at 8:17 AM on March 8, 2010
A great number of readers born after 1985 or so just went "huh?"
posted by clvrmnky at 8:23 AM on March 8, 2010 [3 favorites]
posted by clvrmnky at 8:23 AM on March 8, 2010 [3 favorites]
mmmm... leftover polecat meat...
posted by smoothvirus at 8:23 AM on March 8, 2010
posted by smoothvirus at 8:23 AM on March 8, 2010
I still miss a proper closedown after a decent late night film with the announcer wishing you a good night and then God Save The Queen followed by a blank screen to send you off to bed. And none of this ceefax rubbish, never mind 'going over to News24' shudder... Yet another reason to not watch television.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:33 AM on March 8, 2010 [1 favorite]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:33 AM on March 8, 2010 [1 favorite]
A great number of readers born after 1985 or so just went "huh?"
Because their bedtimes are still before midnight.
posted by DU at 8:38 AM on March 8, 2010 [3 favorites]
Because their bedtimes are still before midnight.
posted by DU at 8:38 AM on March 8, 2010 [3 favorites]
Did anyone else think the first page's search results were for 'Celebrity tug jobs'? Maybe I've just been on the internet too long.
posted by AJD at 8:44 AM on March 8, 2010
posted by AJD at 8:44 AM on March 8, 2010
A great number of readers born after 1985 (or anywhere who haven ever lived in the BBC's viewing area) or so just went "huh?"
FTFY.
Granted, when I was growing up in America (born prior to 1985), I was led to believe by the Griswalds that British programming consisted of documentaries on making cheese.
posted by Atreides at 8:49 AM on March 8, 2010 [3 favorites]
FTFY.
Granted, when I was growing up in America (born prior to 1985), I was led to believe by the Griswalds that British programming consisted of documentaries on making cheese.
posted by Atreides at 8:49 AM on March 8, 2010 [3 favorites]
I'm gonna sound like an old man here but I remember back in 1984 how there was NO entertainment at all after midnight, unless you happened to get something like HBO or Showtime. Even a lot of the cable channels went off the air, except for KTLA, WOR, and so forth. If you didn't have access to that and all your friends had gone to bed or had to work in the morning, you really were in a kind of sensory deprivation tank. Want to call up that friend across the country who's actually awake? You'll rack up a $18 phone bill talking for an hour (equivalent to $40 now). Of course you could put on music, but it wasn't like now where people have hard drives with 50 zillion MP3s to pick from. It was always fun to dabble with shortwave radio as that was a kind like looking at a primitive Internet of sorts and you could hear about interesting overnight news.
Needless to say, it was a huge, huge thing to be able to log into BBS's and CompuServe back in the mid-1980s because it felt like somewhere out there, ideas were starting to really flow in the wee hours of the night and it was possible to tap into that undercurrent. And by 1995 the old days were truly gone. I can appreciate both aspects of that change. Nowadays I have a nice Sony shortwave radio and have never used it. It makes me a little sad, but at the same time I realize I'd never want to go back to those old days.
posted by crapmatic at 9:10 AM on March 8, 2010 [4 favorites]
Needless to say, it was a huge, huge thing to be able to log into BBS's and CompuServe back in the mid-1980s because it felt like somewhere out there, ideas were starting to really flow in the wee hours of the night and it was possible to tap into that undercurrent. And by 1995 the old days were truly gone. I can appreciate both aspects of that change. Nowadays I have a nice Sony shortwave radio and have never used it. It makes me a little sad, but at the same time I realize I'd never want to go back to those old days.
posted by crapmatic at 9:10 AM on March 8, 2010 [4 favorites]
Atreides: your fix created a regression, and had to be rolled back.
While this particular example leveraged a well-known (to some) BBC sign-off, I was speaking about test patterns/test cards in a more general sense as discussed in this thread.
posted by clvrmnky at 9:17 AM on March 8, 2010
While this particular example leveraged a well-known (to some) BBC sign-off, I was speaking about test patterns/test cards in a more general sense as discussed in this thread.
posted by clvrmnky at 9:17 AM on March 8, 2010
Someone has to keep this thread on topic! (Not really)
posted by Atreides at 10:22 AM on March 8, 2010
posted by Atreides at 10:22 AM on March 8, 2010
Well done, I enjoyed the music in particular. Somehow also reminds me of when I would sign off the college radio station at 2am with L. Ron Hubbard singing "Thank you for listening."
posted by davejay at 11:30 AM on March 8, 2010
posted by davejay at 11:30 AM on March 8, 2010
I always though Goodnight Kiwi was lovely. According to youtube comments, it scared the crap out of some kids. Huh.
posted by Dandeson Coates, Sec'y at 11:30 AM on March 8, 2010
posted by Dandeson Coates, Sec'y at 11:30 AM on March 8, 2010
I was led to believe by the Griswalds that British programming consisted of documentaries on making cheese
If you watch American Werewolf in London, you can see a fairly accurate representation of what British daytime TV was like in 1981. Of course, the following year Channel 4 came along and everything changed: it was now three test cards and a terrible advert rather than two. That said, the test cards were usually more entertaining than the programmes.
Although when I was very small, I got to spend the day watching the Trade Test Transmissions, which were perfect for small children, as they were repeated frequently, and broadly speaking incomprehensible, although I have a strange fondness for the work of John Piper solely on account of Crown of Glass and a strong pro-European stance that comes out of repeated watchings of Giuseppina
None of that's relevant at all, is it?
posted by Grangousier at 11:49 AM on March 8, 2010
If you watch American Werewolf in London, you can see a fairly accurate representation of what British daytime TV was like in 1981. Of course, the following year Channel 4 came along and everything changed: it was now three test cards and a terrible advert rather than two. That said, the test cards were usually more entertaining than the programmes.
Although when I was very small, I got to spend the day watching the Trade Test Transmissions, which were perfect for small children, as they were repeated frequently, and broadly speaking incomprehensible, although I have a strange fondness for the work of John Piper solely on account of Crown of Glass and a strong pro-European stance that comes out of repeated watchings of Giuseppina
None of that's relevant at all, is it?
posted by Grangousier at 11:49 AM on March 8, 2010
Ah yes. I remember when the Public Broadcasting Network used sign-offs similar to this before dissolving into static and snow.
posted by stagewhisper at 12:19 PM on March 8, 2010
posted by stagewhisper at 12:19 PM on March 8, 2010
How odd to make an unexpected appearance in a thread I'm perusing.
Dasein, I went back and looked at those links I posted years ago, and you know what I just realized? That animated O Canada signoff actually tranverses the country west-to-east, which is something I hadn't clued into before. (Being an east-to-west kind of guy, it all seemed kind of arbitrary.) Fun to watch again now that it makes sense.
Tip for outsiders: unlike many countries, Canada is fundamentally two-dimensional, existing along a thin ashphalt ribbon we call the Trans-Canada Highway. Only in one spot is one major city located more or less directly north of another. As such, the country is a treasured plaything to artists and theoretical physicists alike, who enjoy mulling over ways in which Canada might be folded so as to create a 3, 4, or even 5-dimensional object.
posted by bicyclefish at 12:43 PM on March 8, 2010
Dasein, I went back and looked at those links I posted years ago, and you know what I just realized? That animated O Canada signoff actually tranverses the country west-to-east, which is something I hadn't clued into before. (Being an east-to-west kind of guy, it all seemed kind of arbitrary.) Fun to watch again now that it makes sense.
Tip for outsiders: unlike many countries, Canada is fundamentally two-dimensional, existing along a thin ashphalt ribbon we call the Trans-Canada Highway. Only in one spot is one major city located more or less directly north of another. As such, the country is a treasured plaything to artists and theoretical physicists alike, who enjoy mulling over ways in which Canada might be folded so as to create a 3, 4, or even 5-dimensional object.
posted by bicyclefish at 12:43 PM on March 8, 2010
Those google searches were brilliant, I was disappointed to find that at least some of them are faked. It wouldn't have surprised me if typing 'google' into google really had led to something snarky.
posted by memebake at 12:43 PM on March 8, 2010
posted by memebake at 12:43 PM on March 8, 2010
"Never goes to bed before the Queen" used to be a snarky comment directed at anyone who stayed up and watched TV until close-down, the National Anthem, and the fading tiny dot in the middle of the screen which old sets used to show after you'd turned them off. (The HT for the scan went away, leaving the electron beam undeflected, but it took longer for the capacitors in the EHT supply to discharge through the CRT. LCDs just don't have that deep connection to the physics.)
There once was a time when TV closed down for an hour in the evening so that mothers could get their children to bed (I think that in some places - Iceland? - that continued until quite recently). In a whole host of ways, broadcast TV was so expensive and its relationship with people so new that it had to work to fit in with the way people lived - and to avoid being too threatening. It's hard to chart the transition between that and the current situation, where video is cramming itself into every spare inch of our lives, but it's happened in my lifetime and I'm not THAT old. Cheeky.
People will forget dead air. Static, audio and video, is fast becoming the same as black-and-white and emulsion blemishes - seasoning to sprinkle into the mix to evoke a rapidly-fictionalising sense of the past. There is no space between stations to tune through, because there is no tuning knob. There is no analogue hiss, because it's digital all-or-nothing.
All noise is becoming synthetic.
posted by Devonian at 1:10 PM on March 8, 2010 [3 favorites]
There once was a time when TV closed down for an hour in the evening so that mothers could get their children to bed (I think that in some places - Iceland? - that continued until quite recently). In a whole host of ways, broadcast TV was so expensive and its relationship with people so new that it had to work to fit in with the way people lived - and to avoid being too threatening. It's hard to chart the transition between that and the current situation, where video is cramming itself into every spare inch of our lives, but it's happened in my lifetime and I'm not THAT old. Cheeky.
People will forget dead air. Static, audio and video, is fast becoming the same as black-and-white and emulsion blemishes - seasoning to sprinkle into the mix to evoke a rapidly-fictionalising sense of the past. There is no space between stations to tune through, because there is no tuning knob. There is no analogue hiss, because it's digital all-or-nothing.
All noise is becoming synthetic.
posted by Devonian at 1:10 PM on March 8, 2010 [3 favorites]
Those google searches were brilliant, I was disappointed to find that at least some of them are faked.
I wasn't the only one to rush off to search 'James Murdoch Suicide' with vigour coursing through my veins then...
posted by opsin at 1:52 PM on March 8, 2010
I wasn't the only one to rush off to search 'James Murdoch Suicide' with vigour coursing through my veins then...
posted by opsin at 1:52 PM on March 8, 2010
Great stuff.
For me, sleeping = bedroom = radio, so my bedtime accompaniment is the shipping forecast and then turning the radio off before my staunchly republican wife grumbles about God Save the Queen.
posted by athenian at 2:25 PM on March 8, 2010
For me, sleeping = bedroom = radio, so my bedtime accompaniment is the shipping forecast and then turning the radio off before my staunchly republican wife grumbles about God Save the Queen.
posted by athenian at 2:25 PM on March 8, 2010
In Arkansas, we didn't do patriotism. We did statism. (or something)
AETN has been running this signoff video (with "this concludes our broadcast day" instead of "concludes our analog service") since I was a little kid, at least.
posted by wierdo at 6:02 PM on March 8, 2010
AETN has been running this signoff video (with "this concludes our broadcast day" instead of "concludes our analog service") since I was a little kid, at least.
posted by wierdo at 6:02 PM on March 8, 2010
We have discussed TV signoffs previously.
And, pace bicyclefish, I think the old CBC signoff is utterly fantastic.
I was sad when they stopped using that signoff. I honestly never expected to see it again--I'm glad YouTube was invented so I could bask in the nostalgia of things like this.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 6:12 PM on March 8, 2010
And, pace bicyclefish, I think the old CBC signoff is utterly fantastic.
I was sad when they stopped using that signoff. I honestly never expected to see it again--I'm glad YouTube was invented so I could bask in the nostalgia of things like this.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 6:12 PM on March 8, 2010
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posted by nevercalm at 6:41 AM on March 8, 2010