Nothing wrong with white noise, I love it. One of my most missed cassettes was one consisting entirely of shortwave radio noise, oh man I loved that tape. I'd discovered that by carefully tuning the SW band on my dad's radio cassette player, I could pick up these weird and wonderful sounds and in particular one that was like a continuous sustained low guitar power chord blended with a very loud fuzztoned bass pedal, with slight undulations. It was gorgeous and I recorded this whole tape of it. It was great to listen to over earphones in the dark and perfect for lulling me to sleep. I still occasionally conjure it up in my mind.
Incidentally, through this SW radio experimentation I realised what Gabriel meant by "When the night shows, the signals grow on radios". The sounds only happened in the evening, during the day there was virtually nothing.
You'd also get those distorted morse code transmissions. Bob Mould used it brilliantly at the end of Tilted, on the Sugar album Beaster.
I used to be a SW listener, I bet your dad's radio cassette was a Grundig? I have a bunch of radios still, including 3 Grundig Satellit 700's (see https://www.universal-radio.com/catalog/portable/sat700.html - Universal radio was a good place to hang out if you wanted to meet Joe Walsh, so I was told) a500, a 400, a 300, a 210 and a couple of Yacht Boy 500's.
Gabriel's experience with radio is that of most people, who use LW & MW, but actually, what happens is lower frequencies, (below 10 kHz, so both those bands and the lower 3rd of SW) improve at night, and frequencies above 10kHz are better during the day, night and day of course referring to the area which you, and the transmitter, and most of the area between, is currently in. 20-odd years ago, Radio Australia was an easy noon catch on 11660 Hz, as was Radio Jordan on 11690, here in the UK. Deutche Welle is relatively local to us, so their main European transmitter on 6075 was easy all day. the Night effect is more pronounced the further the station was, as anyone who used to listen to Radio Luxembourg in summer well knows. 208 metres, 1512 kHz, is now Radio China's European service I think.
The morse signals were distorted because you need a radio with single Side Band capability to receive them properly, same with voice radio hams. They use SSB because you only need 25% of the power to get the same coverage if you remove one of the sidebands, and the carrier wave, but your radio needs a beat frequency oscillator to re-insert the carrier wave to make it legible.
SSB was also used for lots of other stuff, like Slow Scan TV, faxes, and even spy numbers stations, like Lincolnshire Poacher (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…_Poacher_(numbers_station) & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station) ) which I've often heard. Boring, yet exciting because you knew you were listening in to something very clandestine.
Being Genesis fans, the makers might read this & given that all musicians are currently unemployed & TV is desparate for new programmes, it’ll be dragged out into an hour-long concert performance on BBC2 next month, with each band member on his individual Skype screen …. & I bet they won’t even credit you. 
