During the pandemic, I did a lot of interviewing of people and there was one man who got quite anxious before the call. He was a very good, very interesting interviewee and I’m sure he’s rarely anxious, but he was then and for one single reason.

The time.

He told me that he had been on a Zoom meeting that was overruning and all the way through, he could see the clock on his computer and knew I would phone at exactly the time I said. Exactly. And that because we were all in lockdown, because we were all on computers, my exact time would be the same as his exact time.

We talked about that after the interview. How it used to be that you didn’t assume people would turn up on the stroke of whatever time it was, since your clock and their watch would be a bit out.

He was right, that’s gone now. And I like it: if I arrange to meet or to phone you at a certain time, you can be certain I will. On the button. So our use of internet time servers to regulate our computers and our phones and our smartwatches suits me fine.

Only.

On New Years’ Eve, we were watching BBC1 for the countdown to 2023 and because we were watching on the BBC iPlayer, it was late. We’d done the “Watch Live” bit, we weren’t ten minutes behind on demand, but the time it took that countdown to go from BBC1 through the internet to our smart TV, it was a significant delay.

And it always is. I’m shocked how little I listen to BBC Radio 4 these days, but I know it still has the pips to mark the top of the hour — and I know they’re wrong. It used to be that you couldn’t broadcast those pips under any circumstances other than the top of the hour, so dramas that used them had to find some reason to cut away before the full pip time signal was given.

Now you can hear it anytime you like on the BBC iPlayer, because the playback from that is not a discrete recording of any individual show, it is a time-based slice of BBC output. If you want the 18:30 comedy, you get it, plus anything else aired from about 18:30 to about 19:00, sometimes a little before and after.

So here we are with instant access to everything. Here are major global news operations like the BBC, still just occasionally putting out this fiction of the time being what they say it is.

Mind you, you know the BBC started its coverage of the 2023 countdown at exactly the right time, it was internet connections and latency and all sorts of things that delayed at my end.

Whereas CNN just cocked it up entirely through human error. They were playing live music, they forgot the countdown. There was some issue with a technical problem they hadn’t bothered to fix, but that’s just more human error in the end.

And I don’t know why, but in this age of picosecond precision, as much as I like that, I enjoyed hearing about CNN. I know it wasn’t deliberate but, still, good on them.