Minor walk-on part for the BBCi Radio Player in Jonathan Raban’s Waxwings (rough notes on this book), as chief protagonist Tom, splitting from his wife (who works for fictional real-estate site Getashack.com), wiles away the wee small hours in Seattle:
"Although Tom sometimes bought books via Amazon or Bibiofind and hid dickered around on the Getashack site, he’d never spent much time on the Internet, yet every night now he crossed the Atlantic by mouse. He printed out crosswords from The Guardian and The Times, then holed up in the kitchen, trying to figure out ‘In the past, you once strayed disastrously (9)’. At 10p.m. he’d go up to the study with a glass of wine, to click through to the BBC and listen to tomorrow’s news, live on the Today programme with Sue MacGregor and John Humphreys." [p.122-123]
We tend think of the Radio Player as timeshifting radio content i.e. enabling you to ‘listen again’ if you missed a show, or catch a post-broadcast show at your convenience. Raban inadvertently reminds me that distance can seem to timeshift content forward; as in delivering ‘tomorrow’s news’.