Intervention Day
Intervention Day is an Earth-specific holiday* celebrating the intervention of the Galactic Community to prevent the termination of Earth’s life support systems by its own leaders’ short-sighted policies.
Decades of denial about the extent of man’s damage to the Earth had ravaged the planet’s ecosystems, but the GC’s non-intervention policy is specific about interfering with an indigenous civilization: “Intervention is allowable only to prevent a Global Life Termination.”
When the planetary pressures of flooded coastal cities, diminishing harvests, failing oceans and radically reduced livable regions finally spawned a nuclear war, intervention was decreed. The planet was saved, the ecosystem repaired, the defective leaders were replaced with people capable of keeping the planet’s best interests in mind and Earth was slowly welcomed into the Galactic Community.
Intervention Day Survivors know this, of course. But many Intervention Day Survivors may not have experienced every Intervention Day production. What survives of them needs a place, so I’ll collect the available archive here, for now.
—Jeremy McCaleb
Performance History
There were three versions of Intervention Day over 12 years at KBCO, with varying numbers of performances. The first was started in 1979 and grew from an idea I’d been batting around for several years, but not when I was with a station willing to put in as much effort as it takes to cast an entire day’s programming 50 years into the future. KBCO Program Director Dennis Constantine took a chance with it on the first edition. It aired on April 1, 1980. After seeing the response, Dennis was an enthusiastic supporter of the other editions.
I had done a lot of the preliminary writing already, and when we decided to do it at KBCO, I sat down and fleshed out what I had, but after that, the process became collaborative. For the first edition, the principle collaborators were myself, Jon Steele and Richard Ray with such help from David Hartley as his KADE PD duties allowed. Other material was written by other airstaff members, then run through for continuity before production. Each edition, therefore, took on the characteristics of the principle collaborators and the then-current format, music and station staff. I was going to telescope them all, but decided to leave the intact ones as an archive of the station, not just of Intervention Day. The beauty of it is that it’s the then current music mix and DJ style, so they’re audio snapshots of the station in time.
Intervention Day v1.0 to v1.3
The 1980 version was reprised live in 1981, after its ‘surprise’ success, with some additional material, and when we skipped 1982 and listeners complained, in 1983 I culled those down two down to a 2 1/2 hour synopsis to run that year. It’s immediately below. Much of both live versions were from airchecks on random cassettes in the studio, so audio quality is what it is. (Pretty good, considering. I did what I could.) They were represented by one cassette tape from each shift, with varying amounts of music saved or breaks caught, so entire shows are not represented. We were kinda busy. These are condensed down to mostly one song between breaks.
Intervention Day v1 (1983 Recap Part 1)
Intervention Day v1 (1983 Recap Part 2)
Intervention Day v1 (1983 Recap Part 3)
[This edition bears the most resemblance to a projected v4.0 in that it didn’t rely on Intervention to have fixed EVERYTHING before we first enter the scene. Some of the presented alternative timelines in a new version would assume that everything went to hell on our current plotted trajectory, but address them as quantum bleed-through from an alternate time track. Fixing a rip in SpaceTime is a messy process.
Some of these realities may seem harsh, but the HappyTalk™ patter will always make light of the problems. [This is where one of my favorite John Bradley breaks came in. Coming out of a suspenseful, action-filled newscast, he said off-handedly “Well that sounds pretty complicated, Hedley. <beat pause> Meanwhile, we’re having an Intervention Day party here at KBCO!”]
Other presented realities may have solved the problems without Intervention. This is where we can tweak the Authors’ Message.]
Intervention Day v2.1 to v2.3
The second distinct version was first run in 1985 with extensive new material, but it was the stepping stone to the finished edition in 1987, where we tied it all together with a Rip-in-the-Timeline news story. The core collaborators of these versions were Richard Ray, David Hartley and myself, with additional input from the rest of the ‘BCO staff, who were veterans at it by then, and had their own ideas to produce. It was a huge production, tapping into David’s and the station’s connections in the Denver voice-over community. The production rooms were rarely empty. When it came time for the on-air performance, everybody nailed it.
The 1987 performance won the 1988 International Radio Festival of New York Grand Award for Entertainment. Our 41 minute IRFNY entry tape is below in the chronological order. (Unlike the timeline in 1987.) The complete taped performance was rebroadcast in 1989 as an encore the year after the award.
There were some pretty choppy airchecks of the 1985 edition. Everybody forgot to start the tape or let it run at some point in their shift, so there were breaks missed — the astute will notice that the live open was one of them — and there are longer sweeps of music, which I’m leaving intact in this version.
Intervention Day 1985 Part 1
Intervention Day 1985 Part 2
Intervention Day 1985 Part 3
Intervention Day 1985 Part 4
Intervention Day 1985 Part 5
Intervention Day 1985 Part 6
Intervention Day 1985 Part 7
Intervention Day 2027: The 1988 International Radio Festival of New York Grand Award Winner
The following telescoped synopsis of the 1987 version is the entry submitted to the IRFNY competition. It boils the complete 14-hour production down to 41 minutes.
Intervention Day 1987 Synopsis Part 1
Intervention Day 1987 Synopsis Part 2
Intervention Day v3
The 1991 version eliminated the Time Anomaly except as a retrospective news story. It added The Galactic Elections and The Yesterday and Today concert at Red Rocks as late day focus points. It also included, for the first time, actual spots for actual sponsors mocked up into the concept.
Unfortunately, in one of those events that happens in radio stations from time to time, there was some confusion after an 18-hour performance day and the DAT tapes of the air presentation disappeared, apparently bulked and recycled into production use. Unless some listener recorded it, there is no record of this performance. I’ll string together the extensive production bits to give an illustration of it, but there was no music or DJ banter saved.
Intervention Day Universe
In 2016, I produced an April Fool’s hour for Ozcat: what I envision any v4.0 to be: gloves off, no Intervention, here’s what that looks like 50 or 100 years into the future. I randomly chose 2056. Since it was just a standalone hour, I filled it out in a space theme. The newscast was done with the help of Facebook radio friends and Ozcat’s sports man picking up a few lines. It was a quick project, last minute, and I used a heavy voice effect to mask the fact that I could barely breathe with the flu. As such, it’s not so much a demo for v4 as a sketch.
Space Station Tango: April 1, 2056
This Ozcat staff page had more.