Living, as we do, in an age where the entirety of human knowledge and creativity — and an increasing amount of machine-generated garbage — is available at our fingertips, it can be easy to forget that in the past, certain portions of entertainment were a lot more linear. And that brought with it its own considerations.
One of the most interesting things I occasionally think back on is the phenomenon of the "Follows Shortly" screen on television, which punctuated programmes that apparently weren't quite long enough, or, presumably, covered for when the continuity announcer needed to go and take a really big shit or something.
You never see these any more today, but at a certain point in the 1980s in particular, they were quite frequent. (I don't know about before that, because I wasn't alive to see them then, but I assume they still happened in the earlier years of television, too.) They are, in effect, "loading screens" for live television. And they came in varying degrees of elaborateness.
One of the most elaborate was the one that came before ITV's schools programming on Channel 4, which if I remember correctly was broadcast in the middle of the night because no-one in their right mind would want to watch that voluntarily. Thus, in this case, I'm pretty sure the "Follows Shortly" screens were there to cater for variations in the clocks on video recorders, which everyone would have had to set manually rather than just letting the Internet do it for them. If you build in a buffer of a few minutes either side of your programme, that means even if there is some variation in the time people have set their clock to, everyone will be able to record the whole programme without having to leave an impractical amount of time either side of it.
The other thing about ITV Schools is that it had incredibly memorable music, particularly for the final 1-minute countdown to the programme actually starting:
In fact, a lot of these continuity-filling slots actually had some really great music, similar to that heard during Pages from Ceefax. Have I talked about Pages from Ceefax on here? I forget. [checks] Apparently not. Well, there's something to talk about another day, then.
Anyway, all you need to know for the moment is that Pages from Ceefax had great music, and a similar crop of inoffensive yet undeniably catchy instrumental tunes were used for "Follows Shortly" pages, particularly when schools programming was involved.
It's funny the things that you start to miss and even pine for as you get older. When I was a kid, a "Follows Shortly" page coming up on TV was immensely frustrating, because I just wanted the show to start now! Today, though, they can be seen as a symbol of a lost age: a time when we didn't feel the need to be constantly "consuming content", and when it was okay to stop for a moment, put the kettle on, have a wee, tickle the cat and perhaps have a brief conversation before the programme you were waiting for actually came on.
So yeah. I miss them. And I suspect my thinking back oddly fondly on these stupid inconveniences is at least part of the reason why I've never minded load screens and load times in video games all that much. Sometimes waiting a moment is just part of the experience, and it doesn't have to be a negative thing. Sometimes it can be quite valuable.
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