Next week marks the centenary of the pips. On Monday at 9 p.m. a documentary will be broadcast on Radio 4 debating whether the six little tones which ring in each hour ought to be axed as obsolete or preserved for tradition’s sake. Some contributors will speak of them as annoyances – ‘the cockroaches of broadcasting’ is a memorable phrase – and others will ask what could possibly replace them. By the end of the programme, whatever your view, you will have the pips lodged firmly between your teeth.

If we so worship the pips, ought we not to have some worthy shrine to their existence as well?

The first pips, which represent the Greenwich Time Signal, were transmitted at 9.30 p.m. on 5 February 1924. Discussions had been held the previous year between the BBC’s John Reith, astronomer royal Frank Dyson, and Frank Hope-Jones, chairman of the Wireless Society of London, about catering to the public desire for accurate time-keeping. The broadcast of the chimes of Big Ben at New Year had proven popular, and one of the clocks at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, made by the same manufacturer, Dent of London, was chosen to be adapted to produce the six notes, initially all of the same length, spaced one second apart.

The final pip in the sequence, which marks the new hour, was later lengthened to orientate listeners who tuned in while the signal was sounding. The devices – by then there were several – had been relocated to Abinger in Surrey during the second world war and thence to Herstmonceux in Sussex. Everything changed in 1990, when the BBC created its own pips box using signals from the GPS satellite network. Next week’s documentary opens with presenter Paddy O’Connell tracking down the unremarkable-looking device in a cold basement of Broadcasting House.

This revelation rather undercuts the romantic argument for retaining the pips on the basis of their history. If you’ve visited the Royal Observatory you will know that the early clocks look as beautiful as they sound. A ‘time historian’ interviewed for the programme praises the pips for providing a soundtrack to our lives and even ‘the tempo of our existence’ – but if we so worship them, ought we not to have some worthy shrine to their existence as well?

The argument for saving them is akin to that for saving most harmless old traditions: the case against is cold and practical. The signal is now slightly behind time, due to the nature of digital broadcasting, and no longer provides the accuracy listeners first desired. Presenters trip over themselves to avoid crashing the pips; Mishal Husain likens the challenge to that of driving a speeding car towards a roadblock. ABC Sydney dropped its pips last year and, according to the station manager, has never looked back.

An accompanying 2018 drama, When the Pips Stop, is being repeated next week on Radio 4 Extra. It is less a paean to the pips than to Radio 4 as a cultural institution. Two recently orphaned adult sisters are living on a remote Scottish island with nothing but the radio for company when, all of a sudden, Radio 4 stops. This is a disaster, because the sisters haven’t spoken to each other for more than two years, and are evangelical about the station. One claims that the sum of her worldly knowledge has come from Radio 4. She pictures radio waves floating above the waves of the sea carrying music and ideas to the island through ‘a miracle’. The Shipping Forecast had long since taken the place of bedtime stories and prayers in her life.

The writer Oliver Emanuel, who died in December from brain cancer at the age of 43, won the Tinniswood Award for ‘best audio script’ for the play in 2019, and it’s easy to see why. The tension between the two sisters as they are forced together in the silence is perfectly drawn, as is the oppressiveness of the landscape that hems them in. Why has the radio failed? Where is the daily boat? Has there been some disaster on the mainland? Who can say without the pips and the news which follows?

BBC bosses might embrace it for its praise of the varied programming and international appeal of Radio 4, but the drama is saved from being saccharine by the fact that it’s the absence of the radio that forces the two sisters to reconnect. Radio 4 salvages their relationship by failing rather than playing. The story’s resolution diminishes any sense that it was intended purely as panegyric. It takes such an extreme case, we may suppose, to justify stopping the beloved pips.