The Clock
In the 1980s, the dead space between our television programs was filled with… a clock.
Of my childhood, I vividly remember The Clock.
Polish state television had then but two sorry channels, so there was little actual competition. Although it would soon be gone, communism meant scant advertising. And TV in general wasn’t nearly as precious about on-air saturation as it is today — meaning there were no multiple commercial breaks, no ads for future programs infringing on current programs, and no end credits sped up spastically to make room for the next item on the breathless, never-to-be-halted schedule.
My childhood TV had none of those things. In Poland, in the 1980s, the dead space in between programs was filled with… a clock.
Or, to me, The Clock.
This was still before the digital age, so The Clock must have been put together by hand, hung on one of the walls of the television headquarters at Jana Pawła Woronicza Street in Warsaw, and assigned the saddest of cameras which permanently, year after year, kept pointing at its face. It was a minimalistic clock, with three off-white hands, and — for today’s standards — an oddly small Telewizja Polska logo. The background was dark blue. There were no sound effects or music.
Recently, I learned this is what insiders call “a clock ident.” Clock idents were popular in other countries in Europe and Asia, and still exist in random pockets of our planet as an odd, half-forgotten tradition, similar to striking clocks mounted in towers. There’s something calming, almost meditative, imagining it being broadcast to millions of people at the same time; it ties neatly into the queue reality of countries in similar situation to Poland.
I didn’t have any of that context then. Back then, I simply loved The Clock to death. Not for what it was, of course (time-telling was provided by our own wall clock that didn’t require aerials and cathode ray tubes — and later on, a prized Casio electronic watch on my wrist).
Like Pavlov’s dogs, I loved The Clock for what it promised. I would stare at it just minutes before new adventures of Crockett and Tubbs. I would twiddle my thumbs in anticipation of the resolution to last week’s Crime Story — or, in the years before I was allowed to watch those series, another episode of a Polish, Czech, or Russian cartoon. The Clock was not unlike that Universal Studios globe, a reliable entry gate to a new grand adventure, but one that didn’t require an expensive trip to the movie theatre. It was right there, in my home.
Recently, I remembered The Clock as I was preparing a San Francisco event where I subtitled a vintage Polish TV show and showed it to my friends. And, of course, always at the ready for idiosyncratic long-tail interests, YouTube had a video of a VHS recording of The Clock, complete with that annoying beeping message meant to wake you up to turn off your TV after the programs ended (again, weird on so many levels today):
Then, just as I sometimes do with other artifacts of my youth, I recreated The Clock in JavaScript.
And I had a little déjà vu: I remember having programmed a version of that clock once already, on an early computer of mine. I wish it was possible for that me, from 25 years ago, and me from 2 weeks ago, to have a conversation: programmer to programmer, one of us deliberately tapping into nostalgia and skeuomorphism, one of us simply believing in magic and trying to summon it by whichever means possible. (Although perhaps that encounter would end just as badly as this experiment.)
Check out that clock recreation. To many of you it might mean very little. To some, it will bring back memories. And if you’re like me, you will remember that little delay between the second hand hitting a full-minute mark, and the operator starting the playback of whatever was supposed to go on air. That blink of an 1980s eye, filled with excitement and anticipation, will too be your favourite nerdy childhood moment, one you never knew you so appreciated.
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