Continuity Cards
Small typed cards for station announcers, with corrections in orange pencil.
Broadcast Day
One imaginary day of public media, from sign-on to accidental midnight interval.
Program schedule / station continuity
Operating thesis
Broadcast Day gives the Reader a clock. The station becomes real when it has to decide what airs at 06:00, what repeats after lunch, and what slips into the night by mistake.
The schedule is designed like a lost Thursday: useful, civic, educational, and gradually more uncanny as the building empties out.
Continuity
Thursday, October 17, 1979
- Continuity desk
Sign-on and lake weather
Tone, colour bars, station identification, lake wind, school closures, road conditions.
- Schools service
Science for small rooms
Pond biology, frog development, tape counter reminder, teacher pause at 09:34.
- Forest desk
Field report: controlled burn
Calder files from a smoke line. The narration is too calm, which makes it trustworthy.
- Evening education
The public map
Rivers, dams, bison range, hydrology, civic announcements, a note about a missing reel.
- Late relay
Northern Signal, unscheduled
A tape marked only with a date goes to air. Nobody claims the playlist.
- Dead air
Interval music and carrier tone
The image ends. The tone remains. The station log says: leave it until morning.
Specimens
What the room keeps
The Thursday Error
The wrong tape airs late enough that everyone later pretends it was intentional.
Useful Morning
The first half of the day remains earnestly useful. The strangeness needs a civic base.
Reference Shelf