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The terror of the Emergency Broadcast System (and other warnings)

I must say your test cards are quite creepy. Ours were pretty straight forward and didn't include scary little girls. I remember when channels would still stop broadcasting programmes and just show the test card. Nowadays, they all broadcast continuously and test cards are reserved for technical problems.
 
The British ones are just creepy, not only do you have that little girl a la The Ring or something, you have that damned doll in the background, just staring, endlessly.
 
Emergency Broadcast System tests for me were always pretty dry and matter-of-fact and never carried any particular terror freight - they were merely annoying for being an interruption to a program I was trying to watch. I can't recall ever having a single duck-and-cover drill in school, either, though I know that more than once I saw them enacted in films which were shown in class.

It's not as though they wouldn't have been relevant; I was around during the Cuban Missile Crisis, though not old enough at the time to appreciate what it meant, and we lived only about ten miles (as the crow flies) from Vandenberg AFB, where my Dad was a civilian contractor working on the Minuteman program. It's just that I never felt the threat of nuclear annihilation as any sort of constant, looming presence. Never thought about it at all, really.

It's only relatively recently that I've ever heard the Emergency Broadcast System used to announce a real emergency, and that not impending Atomic Doom, but rather an Amber alert with abduction in progress and the suspect actively being sought by law enforcement, who believed him to be on the roads in my vicinity.
 
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