I don’t really like to be made to feel suddenly disoriented at ten minutes to one in the morning, as Margherita Taylor managed to do early today.
She chose to play Sailing By as a smooth classic at precisely 00.47 hours, a piece composed by Ronald Binge whose work includes Elizabethan Serenade & an arrangement of Charmaine for Mantovani's orchestra.
But Sailing By is the music which, since time immemorial, has had ‘the function of filling the airtime between the end of the late reading, at approximately 00.45am, and the shipping forecast at 00.48am, which mariners rightly expect Radio 4 to transmit precisely on schedule’.
Of course I was confused. Had I somehow managed to switch stations without realising, or remembering? Is this the first sign of Alzheimers?
Even more so because the music sounded both familiar & strange; the version of Sailing By that Radio 4 use is not available commercially, so Classic FM chose an orchestral version instead.
Do they do the same thing every night?
