Anthony Hancock has taken up amateur radio as a hobby but is dissatisfied with his conversations with other users, which consist mainly of remote games of chess and Snakes and Ladders, as well as discussions about the weather with a fellow operator in Tokyo who speaks poor English.
Hancock tries to help but struggles to copy down the man's location details correctly, suffering numerous inconveniences and interruptions such as a broken pencil, having to put another shilling in the electricity meter, having his radio set forcibly disconnected by his burly neighbour, getting the longitude and latitude mixed up and/or completely wrong, and, finally, the radio's valves (which he had just replaced at the start of the episode) giving out.
One of the police officers then reads in the newspaper that the yachtsman was rescued with the assistance of a radio operator in Tokyo, whom Hancock assumes with dismay to be his interlocutor from earlier.
The re-recorded Pye version has a different ending from the original, with Hancock instead announcing over the airwaves that he is selling his radio equipment and inviting bids for it.
from the Pye re-recording has seen common use in royalty-free sample libraries, leading to its use in singles such as George Michael's "Too Funky" and Hideki Naganuma's "Let Mom Sleep" in the video game Jet Set Radio and the No Sleep Remix in Jet Set Radio Future.