As I've said, I'm fascinated with broadcast interstitial material. Primarily because that's my job but I'm also a longtime television viewer and I know how much things have changed over the decades. And since so much of this airwaves ephemera is just a YouTube entry away, I hereby present one of our sign offs from days gone by...
First things first: Yes, we used to sign off and on, years ago before PBS NC was a 24-hour-a-day channel. And when a TV station signed on or off it was usually represented by a special announcement. Honestly, it's been so long I can't recall if these were legally required by the FCC but I suspect they were. Since so few channels sign off any longer, interstitials like this are a forgotten artform. Some were businesslike (as was ours at the time) and others were more creative. Still, if you are younger than, say, 30 you may have never seen one of these as it aired.
I cannot pinpoint the exact year this ran. The name we used then was the UNC Center for Public Television, which I don't think we've used since the 1980s. As you can see, we only had 9 stations then (we have 12 now) so that definitely makes it way old.
The voices you hear in this sign off break are Kevin Wolf, Jake Dunlop and a third person whom I cannot identify. Kevin Wolf, a longtime WUNC-FM announcer, did voiceover for our breaks for years (his is the "you're watching" voice). Jake Dunlop was the Director of the Center for some times, retiring in the early 90s (his was station ID voice). The third person delivering the sign off itself was more than likely someone on our staff at the time, possibly in engineering or production. I don't recognize the voice as somebody who did a lot of VO for us so he may have even been before my time.
Regardless, there's a piece of PBS NC history up there. I hope you find it half as fascinating as I do.
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