On Wednesday, February 14, 2001, I received an unexpected telephone call
that literally began with the caller saying "BBC London Calling." On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of England's "Decimal Day" February 15, 1971 when England started the "decimalisation" process for many of its measures, the premier BBC radio programme "Today" planned to commemorate that day with a story about metrics. They did a search of the Internet for metric time, found my percentage metric time clock web page, and called me to set up an interview for later in the day. My interview with featured "Presenter" Jim Naughtie was prerecorded one hour before airtime (Midnight my time and 5:00am (conventional time) their time). When the three-hour programme started at 6:00am Jim Naughtie opened the programme with a couple of news headlines and then told the listeners that later in the programme they would be hearing from "The Metric Man" who says that this is not really six O'clock but 25 O'clock. In the last
fifteen minutes of the three-hour programme they aired the segment about metrics. Former Prime Minister Sir Edward Heath was interviewed about the topic for about 4 minutes, since he was Prime Minister on "Decimal Day," and then my 3 minute interview about metric time was aired.
I have received
permission from
the BBC Today Programme to offer the interview here as long as I acknowledge
that the interview is from the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme with a link to their web site: BBC
Today Programme. (I also recommend BBC
Radio 3 to you for a variety of online music.)
Hear my BBC interview:
I.
Hear intro promo and my entire interview via STREAMING AUDIO
Click start arrow in player below.
My part in the interview was certainly not all that great, but the fact that they called me, interviewed me, and aired the interview, of course, was an exciting event for me.
footnote 1. - Esperanto is an artificial language
designed and proposed by Russian L. L. Zamenhof in 1887 to be an international
medium, based on words and forms common to the principal European languages.
