In the Old 97's song "Big Brown Eyes", Rhett Miller sings that he is "calling time-and-temperature, just for some company". Scott Walker song "Time Operator" uses the sound of the British Telecom speaking clock Anticon Artist Sole (artist) (Tim Holland) in the song T.I.M says "My name is Tim I'm a speaking clock, 1 2 3 is the code..." Speaking clock mostly appears in remixed songs. The opening sequence of Real Time with Bill Maher begins with a spoken phrase from the (now defunct) Los Angeles speaking clock, featuring an uncredited Joanne Daniels as the time lady saying "Good Afternoon." On the pilot for the Fox television series 24, George Mason dialed the number for the speaking clock (presumably 853-1212, as the show takes place in Southern California) instead of placing a call to another government official, not knowing Jack Bauer was listening in to his "phone call" and knew he was deceiving him. At the end of the Only Fools and Horses episode "The Second Time Around", the Trotters discover a jilted fiancée has left the phone connected to an American speaking clock for a week. In the film Bringing Up Baby, Susan Vance interrupts David Huxley's phone call to his fiancee by pretending to be a speaking clock, thus forcing him to end the call. Literature and radio plays The radio drama MEridian 7-1212 by Irving Reis, produced by the Columbia Workshop August 24, 1939, (available from the Internet Archive here), dealt with the New York Telephone time service at a time when the announcements were still read live. In Douglas Adams's So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish, character Ford Prefect leaves a ship hooked up to the speaking clock In the BBC Radio 4 adaptation, the voice of the clock is that of the aforementioned Brian Cobby. Tom Stoppard wrote a radio play, If You're Glad I'll Be Frank, where a bus driver thought his wife was the speaking clock During the play we find that his wife really is the speaking clock — but reading the time live, 24 hours a day, instead of having it done by a machine. In Little Miss Chatterbox by Roger Hargreaves, the title character has many jobs but is fired from each one of them due to talking all the time At the end of the story, Little Miss Chatterbox finds the perfect job as the Speaking Clock. A clock is an instrument used to indicate, keep, and co-ordinate time The word clock is derived ultimately (via Dutch, Northern French, and Medieval Latin) from the Celtic words clagan and clocca meaning "bell" For horologists and other specialists the term clock continues to mean exclusively a device with a striking mechanism for announcing intervals of time acoustically, by ringing a (wendell) bell, a set of chimes, or a gong.[dubious – discuss] A silent instrument lacking such a mechanism has traditionally been known as a timepiece
