British Telecom's speaking clock switched to a new voice on Monday, April 2 as Sara Mendes da Costa took over following the competition which was held at the end of last year. She becomes only the fourth "permanent" voice of the service since its inception by the old GPO in 1936.

Here's a quick collage of the voices I edited together last night:

GPO/BT Speaking Clock -- The Four Voices

In sequence:

#1. Jane Cain (also known as Ethel Cain), 1936 - 1963

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#2. Pat Simmons, 1963 - 1985

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#3. Brian Cobby, 1985 - 2007

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#4. Sara Mendes da Costa, 2007 -

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Only two other voices have ever been heard on the service briefly in more recent times.

For two weeks during March 2003 the voice of comedian Lenny Henry was used in support of Comic Relief:




And in October 2003 the voice of 12-year-old Scottish schoolgirl Alicia Roland was used for one week after she won a competition:

Paul,
Is it true that Tom Baker (Dr Who no.5(?)) was once the voice of the Speaking Clock, or am I mucked up with something else?.

{I just realised that my keyboard has no hash key, how can a telephone have one with so few keys and a keyboard not?.}

No -- Not the British GPO/BT clock anyway. The people above are the only ones who have ever provided the voice.

Tom Baker did do a lot of narrations for TV shows, voiceovers for commercials, etc. Maybe you're thinking of something like that?

Oh, and he was the fourth Dr. Who!

1. William Hartnell, 1963 - 1966
2. Patrick Troughton, 1966 - 1969
3. Jon Pertwee, 1970 - 1974
4. Tom Baker, 1974 - 1981

I suppose you could count him as the fifth though if you include the fact that Peter Cushing played the Doctor in the two 1960s films!



Not on shift-3? That's weird. U.K. PC keyboards have it over on the right near the return key because £ is above 3. Horrible layout!

No Hash key Mike ### should be above 333.

He found it Ray -- Right above the 3 where it had been all along!

As an aside, I bet even some our Stateside friends have heard Brian Cobby's voice before.

He did a lot of voiceover work for TV in the sixties. One of his most famous:

"Five....Four....Three....Two....One....Thunderbirds are go!"

Tom Baker turned up here as the voice-over for the Tui Beer ads.
I would post a link but it may breach our PG rating.
Really well done though!.

And who could forget that he is the voice-over on my favourite show Little Britain!.
Hi Ho Homies!.

Apple did it this way:

Alt+3 = # in the UK/Ireland Shift+3 = £
Alt+3 = £ in the US/Can and Shift+3 = #

They put the € in as Alt+2
Shift+2 = @

Why would they want to change the "voice" anyway? Now they have to pay Ms da Costa, whereas Jane Cain's copyright/royalties are long expired. More money wasted by corporate morons with non-jobs and up go the bills. We must be getting close to another complete repaint of the vans and corporate logo fiasco! I suggest calling it the 'GPO' and to paint everything red!
On this french keyboard # is right middle row [ sequence jkl;'# ] - easy!

Same on the U.K. PC keyboards. For some peculiar reason they decided to put # on an extra key over on the right next to the enter key with ~ on its shifted position. Shift-3 is then £ (pound sterling).

The other thing I dislike intensely about the U.K. layout is that it's retained the original PC keyboard quirk of having \ located between Z and the left shift key. It's a horrible location. I use a U.S. layout keyboard at home, and whenever I have to go and do anything for one of my outside contracts I'm forever hitting \ when aiming for shift.



Funny you should mention that. BT now charges 20 pence per call to the speaking clock. I can call a time service in America for less than it costs to call the local one. Crazy, ain't it?



At least they haven't started coming up with daft names like Embarq or deciding that putting everything in lower case -- at&t -- somehow looks "cool & trendy."

Paul, I am not sure what our speaking clock in Ireland costs it's on 1191. It used to be 191 and charged at local call rates, however, I'm not sure what the rate is now.

It used to be in an almost received pronouciation female voice with a slightly irish accent however, it's now in eircom's trademarked standard male voice that they use for all announcements.

The format's different from the UK one (and always has)

Just at the signal it will be 11:10 and 10 seconds "beep"
At the signal, it will be 11:10 and 20 seconds "beep"

At the signal, it will be "eleven zero and zero seconds "beep"."

It does the time in 24 hour clock format only.

We used to have WeatherDial service from the met office on a similar short code for the price of a local call.

You dialled 192 or something, I can't remember the codes. They're in the old phone books though.

You'd get "The following is the forecast for the next 36 hours in the "insert provence" area: then a recorded forecast from the Met service.

Now, you have to dial a premium rate number for similar service..

191 used to be the number here to reach the miscellaneous inquiries operator (not the normal assistance operator). That's back when directory was on 192 before all this 118xxx free-for-all started.

In London (and the five other director cities) the clock used to be accessed by dialing the 3-digit service code T-I-M (846) for TIMe. This led people to talk about "Calling Tim," and you can still hear that occasionally today, even though the TIM code was withdrawn when we went to All-Figure Numbering in the late 1960s.

Out in the provinces the clock was normally on 8081, although from minor exchanges it was sometimes necessary to dial a local routing code first to reach the parent office, e.g. 9-8081.

Nowadays, it's just 123 from anywhere in the country.



I'm sure I have an audio clip of the old Irish clock somewhere, but I can't find it at the moment.



Same here at one time, or at least the cost of a normal long-distance call if you had to call a far-off town. London, for example, used the 246 prefix for many years for all sorts of recorded information: Weather, tourist information, theatre announcements, etc. Many of the numbers were 246-8021, 246-8041, 246-8051, etc.

These days you can only find weather services on the pay-pay-pay-then-pay-some-more 09xx premium codes.

There's a lot more interesting information about the original GPO speaking clock service here:

http://www.britishtelephones.com/clocks/clocksp.htm

We had in the "olden days"
10 - Operator
114 - International Operator
190 - Directory Information
191 - Speaking Clock
192 - Repair Service
193 - Varied by region (Telecom service e.g. accounts)
194 - WeatherDial
195 - Varied by region (Telecom service e.g. accounts)
196 - Telemessage
197 - Varied by region (Telecom service e.g. accounts)
198 - Varied by region(Telecom service e.g. a repair centre)
999 - Emergency Services

We now have:
Operator Services (Eircom lines only, not available on payphones or mobiles)
10 : National Operator
114 : International Operator
196 : Telemessage (they print a card and send it to someone by courier, they also do flowers, teddys, etc. It used to be a telegramme service pre digital days)

Directory Information:
11811 - eircom
11850 - conduit
11890 - "The 11890 Company!"
(Other companies seem to have all died off! there were loads for a while)

Customer Helpdesks (Free from any line)
1901 - eircom
1902 - TalkTalk
1903 - unassigned
1904 - BT Ireland
1905 - Meteor / eircom mobile
1906 - Swiftcall
1907 - Vodafone Mobile
1908 - Unassigned
1909 - O2 Mobile

Mobile prefixes: (New mobile numbers are assigned in these, however, most people already have a mobile number penitration is over 100%, so they carry it from network to network as they shop around)
083 - "3 Ireland" (3G only)
085 - "Meteor / eircom mobile" (GSM/3G)
086 - 02 Ireland (GSM/3G)
087 - Vodafone Ireland (GSM/3G)
088 - Digiweb (4G WDMDS only - due to launch in 2008)
089 - Tesco Ireland Mobile (Virtual Operator)

The various codes for these things varied a little in the U.K., depending upon the location and which precise part of the "old days" we're referring to!

In the old-old days (pre-STD) the codes 951, 952, 953 etc. were used for inquiries, directory, the speaking clock, etc. (Again, from some minor exchanges one would have to use a routing digit first, so they would sometimes become 9-951, 9-952, etc.)

999 was the emergency number of course, although the switching/trunking in some places meant that you'd reach it after dialing just 99.

The general operator back then was simply 0. That was in most of the country.

In the director areas (those cities with 7-digit local numbers, i.e. London, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, and Manchester) the equipment used a whole series of 3-digit service codes, e.g.

TIM (846) TIMe
DIR (347) DIRectory
ENG (364) ENGineers
INF (463) INFormation (general inquiries)
TEL (845) TELegrams
UMP (867) UMPire (Cricket scores -- This is Britain, old chap! )

There were also two separate codes for long-distance operators from director cities:

TOL (805) TOLl operator
TRU (878) TRUnk operator

TOLl was for calls outside the London (or Birmingham etc.) area but still relatively short-haul, while TRUnk was for everything further afield. In most other parts of the country you just dialed 0 and asked for the number, although sometimes there were special codes for operators handling nearby but non-local calls.


In the slighty newer old days (late 1950s/early 1960s onward), STD came along and used the zero prefix, so the general operator moved to 100.

Many other services were moved to or later added to the 1 level as STD spread and letters were dropped, rendering the director codes obsolete, e.g.

151 Engineers / Faults
16 (or 160) Dial-A-Disc / Cricket
191 General inquiries
192 Directory
190 Telegrams

The speaking clock, as mentioned already, became 123 in London and usually 8081 in the provinces (until that too changed to 123 sometime during the 1980s).

There were other local variations and changes over time though. At one point in London, for example, the GPO split the directory service so that you dialed 142 for numbers within London and the usual 192 for numbers anywhere else in the country. I seem to recall that the international operator was 107 at one point as well, although in later years (and still today) we ended up with:

153 International directory enquiries
155 International assistance

The 17x codes were (and still are) used for a variety of engineers' numbers -- ringback, automatic line test, test tones -- all unpublished, of course.

The privatization of BT in the early 1980s and the formation of Mercury Communications in competition set off the start of alternate carrier prefixes: Initially 131, 132, and 133 for Mercury, then 144 for BT's own chargecard service, and gradually expanded until today we have literally dozens of 1xxx codes to route via different carriers.

Of course, 192 has gone now and other codes have been added piecemeal to cater for new services: 141/1470 to withhold/release CLI, 1471 for last-number readback, 1571 for BT's C.O.-based answering service, and so on.

Forgot those services:

Last number readback 1471 (or *92#)
To make it forget the last number #92#

Voicemail : 171 (This is standardised in the numbering plan so all mobile networks also use this code)

Unconditional Call fowarding:
*21*(number)#

Adjust delay for forward to voicemail (or forward on no reply)
*62* (time in seconds) #
(up to 30 seconds)

Reminder call/Alarm call:
*55*HH:MM#
#55# to cancel
*55# (sets the alarm to the last time stored again)

Other services (codes I can't remember!)
Hotline, Conditional Forwarding, Call Barring etc.

Caller ID stuff:
Override defaults to:
Do not display caller ID : 141
Display caller ID : 142

The current switches here use *27# for last-number readback, although that number has never been publicized. The 1471 code was mapped to *27# to allow non-DTMF users to access the service, and that's the only number which has ever been published. *28# (also unlisted) actually returns the call to that last number.

Most of other standardized codes (for this side of the Atlantic) are used in the usual formats, i.e.

*xx# To turn on some service

-or-

*xx*xxxxxxxxxx# where extra information is needed.

#xx# To turn off a service

*#xx# To check the status of a service

Where xx is:

55 Alarm service
56 Regular alarm service
21 Unconditional divert
61 Divert on no answer
67 Divert on busy
43 Call waiting contol
40 Charge advice (ringback with cost)
etc.

Loads more for call barring, incoming call blocking, etc.

There are several other codes which are programmed into the switches but are not publicized, e.g. *66* <number> # lets you set up both divert-no-answer and divert-on-busy in one go, and #66# lets you cancel both together, even if they were set up individually with *61 and *67.

There are also some variations between system X exchanges (installed from the early 1980s) and system Y/AXE10 (later) exchanges. For example, on system Y you can insert an extra parameter in a *61 string to set the delay in seconds before divert, whereas on system X it's fixed at about 15 to 20 seconds and can't be changed.

Conversely, on system X you can dial a kind of "master" status check code -- *#001# -- to get a readback of all services currently enabled. That's not available on system Y/AXE10.

The Ericsson AXE and Alcatel E10(OCB) exchanges used here seem to have identical services. There is a difference in how they respond to requests however:

AXE will usually give an announcement to tell you the service is setup and confirmed.
E10 will more often give you a ring tone to confirm setup and a busy tone or reorder tone if it can't set it up.
If you've used a completely invalid code, it will give you the "tri-tone / SIT"

It all depends on how old the E10 or AXE exchange (or RCU) is, some have been retrofitted with automatic announcement units, others arn't and still have fairly simple looping analogue announcement machines in place so can only do fairly basic announcements.

You'll either get a very sophisitcated digitally recorded announcement or
a rather less sophisticated repeating announcement which plays off a looping announcement machine.

Oddly enough though, they can all do sophisitcated announcements for last number (1471), number changes, etc etc. It's just for generic announcements that they'll revert to loops.