Regular readers may have seen some of my trips to Broadcasting House in London for various radio shows. One I have attended a few times is Digital Planet. This goes out on the BBC World Service, but I discovered it online years ago. In that time it has had a few name changes. First it was Go Digital, then Digital Planet, then Click and now Digital Planet again! They have an active listeners group on Facebook that I have been part of on and off.
They generally record in a studio, but do the occasional audience one and this time marked 18 years of the show. I met up with some fellow listeners in the BBC cafe and one of them managed to get us all on the guest list. She knows the presenters quite well. That got us seats in the front row.
This was an extra long show with lots of guests. There were some guys from a company who have developed a holographic display. Part of their demo included a call to one of their team in Australia. This is not great for radio, but looked really cool to us. Their were two musical features. One was identical twins duetting on marimba and cello with the twist that one was in the theatre and the other in Edinburgh. They were using a special low latency connection that had no more lag than if they were just a few metres apart instead of hundreds of km. The other was some modular synthesiser tunes using similar laser interferometry to the gravity wave detectors. There was a bit of a party atmosphere going on.
Hologram
After the show we were invited to come along to the after party at the BBC club. I had been there before after a previous show. This time there were lots of friends and family of the team. One of them had baked a cake in the colours of their logo.
It was a really fun night and they really do appreciate their listeners.
I'm writing this in my train journey home, but may have to post it later as I'm having issues with the images. I managed to get on the wrong train at first, but am now on the right track.
Here's me with a dalek at the BBC.
