‘Some thoughts on the phone,’ the Observer Magazine cover of 2 November 1986, with its nod to Rodin’s The Thinker, was not, in fact, a philosophical treatise on the nature of human communication but a guide to the many goods and services one could then buy over the phone.
The introduction began with one eye clearly on BT’s recent privatisation in 1984 – ‘Dial P for Privatisation, a nasty new phone book and commercially sponsored pips.’ It was also the beginning of BT’s speaking clock sponsored by Accurist, beloved of pranksters who would call its premium-rate line at friends’ homes and leave it to rack up costs. I’m saying nothing.
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Originally posted in the guardian.
