History Today has an article about the radio event that Orson Welles must have been copying. I’ve never heard of this, even though I’ve been absorbed in old British and American radio for most of my life.
99 years ago, in Jan 1926, BBC interrupted its programming and switched to immediate coverage of a revolutionary mob storming London. The mob was attacking Big Ben, an explosion was heard, the mob was approaching the BBC building … silence. Dead air.
Audiences responded with panic as expected. As with Welles’s copy, the attack was fictional, preceded by a clear announcement that the following would be a parody.
But most people aren’t focusing on radio, just letting it run as background for eating or reading or chores. When BREAKING NEWS or EXPLOSIONS happen, our attention is immediately snatched. That’s how we work, how we’re designed. Every level of our nervous system is designed to tune out repetition at all levels and JUMP LIKE HELL when anything breaks the pattern.
The writers and producers who made this atrocity were guilty of a serious crime, just as Welles was guilty in ’38. You can’t plead ignorance of how the brain works when your whole JOB is manipulating the human nervous system.
Polistra's Mill 