The Depiction Of Amateur Radio In The Movies And TV

A constant in film and TV if you work with technology is to continually see wildly inappropriate depictions of it on screen. Whether it’s all those hacking scenes in which …. The Depiction Of Amateur Radio In The Movies And TV.

Whether it’s all those hacking scenes in which the teen wizard mashes a keyboard and instantly gains access to the military grade computer system, the infamous NCIS sequence in which two people work simultaneously on the same keyboard, or CSI ‘s magical video enhancement technology, we’ve seen it all. But there’s one area of technology which surprisingly has had a few accurate portrayals on screen, and that’s amateur radio. Yes, just sometimes, film crews do their homework.

Writing this from the rainy edge of Europe, the depiction of a radio amateur non screen that first comes to mind dates from the early 1960s. The British comedian Tony Hancock devoted a whole episode of his series to it, in which he plays an inept operator with hilarious consequences. It’s not in any way accurate and some of the comedy is … dated, but it’s interesting to watch.

There’s a whole genre of comedic episodes featuring the hobby, in researching this piece I found a 1965 episode of The Munsters in which Herman minstakes some kids at play for real Martians, and a Simpsons episode in which Principal Skinner is revealed to have a licence.