Probably a window pane somewhere had broken and a shade pull cord had wrapped around a partially empty Coca-Cola bottle which bumped into a telegraph key when the ocean breeze blew through the window, generating the gibberish signals. ... Neville Schute
As one who watched “On The Beach” only once, well over a half century ago as a teenager, but still occasion hums “Waltzing Matilda” while I walk, I know of what you speak. How many others here, do you think, also know?
I saw the movie and read the book a long time ago when I was but a callow fellow. I remember that scene as well as the sailor who jumped ship to see home one last time, as well as the auto race. We’re all going to die anyway so might as well make the best of the time we have left.
If I had to pick out the one flaw in the plot given what we know today it is the fact that, unless we were lobbing around scads of cobalt bombs, there would have been survivors. The citizens of Kazakhstan who lived in the neighborhood of the Semipalatinsk Test Site had over 100 above-ground tests in their backyard over the course of a 40 year time-frame, and, while somewhere between 25 and 50 percent of the births were of horribly deformed, most of the population of the area lived normal lives.
As far as the WOW signal, I thought everybody knew that it meant “Send More Chuck Berry !”