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Build your own TV station

Thursday, April 26, 2001

TV schedules, who needs them? Shouldn’t I get to decide when I want to watch my favourite programmes? In the last week, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing and it’s been great.

Using the rather low-tech method of an aging VCR, I’ve been creating my own schedule, working my way through series one of ?The Sopranos?, plus all my current favourites whenever I felt like it. Need a bit of Tony S to start the day? I got your episode right here, buddy. Want to watch Simon and Jenny in the ‘Teachers’ stationery cupboard instead of Richard and Judy? Go right ahead.  I don’t think I’ve watched a programme in its own timeslot all week. I feel liberated and in control of my addiction.

And this is how it should be. With the exception of live sport and news, all the good stuff is sitting around on tape at the TV stations, so wouldn’t it be great if we could gain access to a pile of shows all in one go, letting us have at them when we’re ready?

No more missing programmes because you also have a life, or because your video recorder refuses to obey orders. And if you came into a series halfway through by chance, you could go back and watch all the earlier episodes to catch up. If you can’t wait to see how Dr Green’s brain tumour works out, you can watch a dozen ?ER? episodes in one go. I dare you.

And once we’ve got beyond the idea of TV as a push medium, all sorts of opportunities open up. If it’s a pull medium instead, then you’d obviously need a menu structure to help you navigate through the options. And once you have a menu structure, then you can create collections of related shows – a season on particular actors or themes, for example.

And since this menu would be linked to the Internet, then think of the surrounding materials you could provide, with the shows embedded into a range of resources, links and interactivity. TV would become another form of media accessible from the Web, with all the flexibility and creative chaos that implies.

Of course there are moves towards this. TiVo systems allow you to dump your favourite shows onto a hard disk and watch them at your leisure. Tell it that you like Frasier, and it will record every episode on every channel without any further prompting. It also cunningly lets you pause live TV, caching the show to disk – perfect for when the phone rings during a penalty shoot out. Or if you want to take bets on whether Beckham’s going to score with the next free kick, or hoof it into row Z.

And digital TV also offers a limited range of options – movies on demand that start at a range of times during the day, for example.

Look at how Napster and CD burners are changing the way we use music. Now imagine a similar freedom with relation to TV and films. I can’t wait, but in the meanwhile I think I’ll just dash downstairs and watch half an hour of ?The West Wing?. So long as my housemate hasn’t taped over it.

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Articles Film Square Eyes UK

Forever England – Bridget Jones’s Diary reviewed

Wednesday, April 18, 2001

What are the hallmarks of an English person? Ask the English and they might say a stiff upper lip, a sense of fair play and a gutsy determination to get the job done. Ask other people from around the world, and you might get hypocrisy, bad food and imperialism. (Here, in the interests of full disclosure I must tell you that I was born and raised in England, but I’m feeling much better now).

But as the film version of ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’ shows us, the real attributes that describe the nation are embarrassment, understatement and friendship.

The film is less a slavish representation of Helen Fielding’s book and more the conclusion to Richard Curtis’ loose trilogy that started with ‘Four Weddings’ and ‘Notting Hill’. Essentially the same premise is observed in all three films – a good-hearted, slightly clumsy, rather under-confident main character gets put through the mill of love before living happily ever.

Let’s look at those attributes – first, embarrassment: as a people, the English are hyper-sensitive about appearances and hate standing out – it’s just so undignified. (On the other hand, there’s something so liberating about just doing what you want to, and not giving a shit, which is one of the many reasons that English people have a grudging but definite respect for the Irish).

So Bridget spends most of the film being mortified in various ways. It’s bad enough that she has to dress up in the outfit her Mum has laid out for her, but it’s so much worse when she overhears Mark Darcy slagging her off, since the rules say that everyone has to try hard to avoid embarrassing everyone else – so even if someone is wearing curtains, it’s very bad form to mention it.

Then she turns up to a garden party dressed as a bunny girl, when everyone else is in civvies, and later reveals her shapely backside to the world while sliding down a fireman’s pole.

But it’s not just Bridget who suffers from this. In the most convincing fight scene I’ve seen in ages (compare and contrast with the Nietzschean self-belief of ‘Fight Club’), the two leading men apologise profusely to disrupted diners as they tumble across their tables during a brawl. You also get the sense that being thrown through a window actually hurts.

Of course, if you’re afraid of being embarrassed all the time, the you’re automatically very suspicious of love because it makes you do stupid things. Which is where understatement comes in, offering a roundabout route to avoid saying anything so clumsy as ‘I love you’. As Anthony Lane in the New Yorker points out, when Colin Firth says, ‘I like you very much,’ that’s ‘Englishman’s code for uncontrollable lust’.

And even getting that out of him is a real effort – it’s not that he doesn’t have the feelings (Colin Firth is excellent at showing himself suprised and uneasily amused at what he feels for Bridget), it’s just that he’s incapable of revealing its true depth.

Of course Bridget undestands this code and uses it herself, ‘If you wanted to pop by sometime, that might be nice,’ is her deepest profession of love for him.

(Of course sometimes this understatement is entirely appropriate. For example, when it allows for one of the few good anal sex jokes in modern cinema.)

The final characteristic on display in buckets in ‘Bridget Jones’ is friendship. Richard Curtis has a very good line in sketching in a set of supportive and understanding friends, who are always there to give advice, and act like a Greek chorus in the proceedings. If you’re constantly embarrassing yourself, and can’t quite say what you mean when it matters, then you certainly need a good set of friends who don’t care about any of that, and will love you even when you serve them blue soup.

So apart from a few missteps – like the excessive use of fake snow in the climactic scenes, the film is a success. Rene? Zellweger masters the same middle class South East accent that Gwywneth Paltrow aced in ‘Sliding Doors’, Hugh Grant shows that he can convincingly cross over to the dark side and use his charm and floppy hair for evil, while Colin Firth reprises his stern but upright Mr Darcy role from the TV version of ‘Pride and Prejudice’. He even has the big house (but we didn’t get to see if he’s got a lake round the back).

Of course, Colin Firth’s character in ‘Bridget Jones’ being called Mr Darcy is no accident. Not only did Andrew Davies share screenwriting credits on both projects, there’s another Jane Austen reference thrown in, when Bridget remarks at one point, ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged . . . ‘

This depiction of English life, with embarrassment, understatement and friendship playing crucial roles is as much a part of Jane Austen’s world as it is modern London, and seen in this way Bridget Jones comes across as quite old fashioned. 

The rigid set of acceptable social behaviours and expectations that power the humour in ‘Bridget Jones’ is a world away from the good-natured anarchy of ‘Teachers’ or ‘Spaced’, for example. And while it’s only a certain type of modern Englishman who would wear a reindeer jumper with the same degree of pained perserverance shown by Colin Firth, the world would be worse off without them.

Posted by David in • Square Eyes • Film • UK

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Forgive us our trespasses – review of State and Main

Wednesday, April 11, 2001

In an early episode of ‘The West Wing’, a character remarks, ‘There are two things you don’t want to see being made – laws and sausages.’ It’s a nice line, but I’d add a third thing – films.

David Mamet’s ‘State and Main’ is a satire on movie production, and he shows us underage sex, rampant egos, bribery, towering hubris, incompetence and more scheming than the average GAA Congress.

Of course, this is Mamet’s territory (the nastiness, not the GAA), but his story of a small Vermont town overrun by a Hollywood film is also surprisingly warm and tolerant. There is the usual rapid-fire dialogue and spiky characters, but we also get a sweetly natural romance and more compassion for people’s faults than you might expect.

The performances are excellent. William H Macy plays the director who simultaneously wheedles and cajoles on one phone while berating and bullying on the other. When he’s trying to persuade the shallow starlet (well played by Sarah Jessica Parker) that she doesn’t need an extra $800,000 to show her breasts in a scene, you know he’s lying like a carpet, but for as long as it takes him to say the words, he entirely believes them. It’s not a lie, he argues, it’s ‘a talent for fiction’. And what’s a movie anyway, if not a big lie?

Mamet’s wife, Rebecca Pidgeon, also shines as Annie, the local bookshop owner who falls for the movie’s writer, combining grace and intelligence with a good-natured wisdom.

The scenario is hardly original, and there’s more than a nod to Frank Capra and Preston Sturges – the Mayor of the town is named for James Stewart’s character in ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’, and just like that George Bailey, a lot of the characters get second chances.

Alec Baldwin (reprising his obnoxious film star cameo from ‘Notting Hill’) escapes the consequences of sleeping with Carla, the underage waitress from the hotel, but Carla was intent on giving him more than a tuna BLT anyway, so they probably deserve each other.

The writer Joe White almost quits the movie but returns with Annie’s help, and also gets two attempts to do the right thing in court. Annie herself gets a second chance at romance with Joe, ditching her ambitious politico fianc?, who’s made so little impression on her that at one point she can’t even remember his name to introduce him.

Her relationship with Joe is one of the quiet delights of the film. Joe has very little choice in the matter, underlined by the way he’s hooked and burned while Annie looks on with kind amusement. 

The small touches show Mamet’s personal experience of life on the set. Nobody gets to finish a conversation without being interrupted by news of the latest crisis, and quality and commonsense are sacrificed for expediency. Crew members run tap water into the stars’ Evian bottles before melting the seal back together with a lighter – a perfect symbol for a shoot: subterfuge and behind the scenes trickery, but it looks like the real thing in the end.

In true comedy style, everything works out fine, and as they finally start shooting the film you see that Mamet has managed a deft maoeuvre with his gentle satire. He’s shown the film people as selfish, unfeeling, arrogant and corrupt, but we already knew that, so he also makes us forgive them their trespasses. 

Movies revolve around the suspension of disbelief, and the process of their creation seems to demand a suspension of normal rules of behaviour. So we give them a second chance to make the same mistakes again.

Posted by David in • Square Eyes • USA • Film

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sex, lies and mobile phones – UK advertising

Friday, March 23, 2001

An approachably handsome young man sits on a tram in a snowy city. With a friendly English accent he tells us that in Helsinki it gets very cold (no shit, Sherlock- he’s wrapped up nice and warm, anyway). 

Finns embrace new technology, he continues, and HP are working on a wireless system that will let people know exactly when their tram is coming so they don’t have to wait outside in the cold (we cut to a bunch of blond kids checking their mobiles indoors).

It’s small scale and personal – a practical use for new technology. The ad closes with a nice twist when the kids rush out just in time to throw snowballs at our hero’s tram; he modestly concludes “It’s pretty cool.”

This ad isn’t selling us anything tangible. A project in Finland isn’t going to help me, and if I didn’t already know that HP are Hewlett Packard, formerly humble makers of printers and large bits of hardware, the ad isn’t even going to tell me much about what the company does.

Instead, it’s trying to sell me a company’s changed mission statement. HP are now moving into the services side of IT (for example, they made an unsuccessful bid for PricewaterhouseCoopers’ global management and consulting organisation last year), and this ad tells us about their new direction.

It works pretty well – we don’t see any physical products (the mobile phones on view aren’t made by HP), instead we see HP people and ideas, which is what consulting’s all about.

The other ads in the series (mountaineers watching daytime soaps and an Internet guru not being accorded the fame he deserves) also try to show us that the company is clever, witty, globally attuned, human, and quietly confident – ‘pretty cool’. This is a big change from the old HP image, which was steady, workmanlike and absolutely not cool.

HP have altered their product, and so they’re advertising this. Guinness, on the other hand, haven’t changed what a pint tastes like, but they too are trying to change their image.

Faced with younger drinkers who like Red Bull and vodka, alco-pops and Belgian wheat beers (just not all in the same glass), St James’ Gate is trying to tell us that the old blond in the black dress is really sexy too.

We’ve had suicidal horse-riders racing passionately off cliffs, and a feisty couple stripping off their clothes in a rain storm (if they’d had their Finnish mobile phones wiith them, they could have stayed dry and still caught their bus in time). Now we’ve got a sweaty, moody fire dance. (They’re going through the elements, as it was pointed out to me: water, fire . . . clever, huh?)

The ads are brilliantly shot, with great soundtracks, and you do indeed think ‘passion’. Just to underline this, they finish with a coda that shows the couples in the pub all over each other and their pints. The fire-dancers ad overdoes this slightly, when in a passionate embrace the guy spills his creamy white love juice on the floor. (I can just see him sheepishly explaining, “This has never happened to me before. Really. I must be tired.”)

But Guinness just isn’t that sort of drink. It might mean many things – quality, tradition, integrity, humour, even – but however sexy the ads they produce, none of the sexiness rubs off on the product.

Change your advertising if you’ve really changed what you do. If not, don’t bother. A sheep in a Prada dress is still a sheep.

Posted by David in • Square Eyes • UK • Television

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Celebrity Confusion – UK reality TV

Thursday, March 15, 2001

If ordinary people are on TV, does that make them celebrities, or just the subjects of documentaries? What about famous people doing ordinary things? Or people that start out ordinary and become famous?

It’s been quite a time for celebrity confusion. First ‘Popstars’ showed us ordinary folks being turned into celebrities with dramatic success, culminating in their number one single in the UK over the weekend. Then ‘Celebrity Big Brother’ sought to turn famous people into ordinary folks by allowing us to see what they looked like in their dressing gowns.

A lot has been written on the explosion of reality TV shows recently – from the scheming and salacious American offerings like ‘Survivor’ and ‘Temptation Island’, to the more character-driven and prosaic British programmes such as ‘Airport’ and ‘The Hotel’. (As a quick aside, has RTE done one yet? I’ve been away for a while, so might have missed it, but given their penchant for plagiarism it seems a startling ommission.)

Even knowing what to call these things is actually quite hard. The original ‘Big Brother’ had real people in it, but everything else was completely unreal – even the house was designed for the purposes of the show. It came off like it was adopting a fly on the wall approach, but of course deep down it was a gameshow, with the contestants asked to do artificial things to try and win the money. Much more ‘Generation Game’ than Nick Broomfield.

But if that’s a docu-gameshow, then some of the others have been more like docu-soaps, which are a little truer to the tradition of documentary, since in theory the people are doing their regular jobs, and the camera crew just happens to be there to capture it all. 

But ‘Popstars’ was a particulary weird amalgam of the two forms. It was a gameshow in that people entered a competition, and the winners got a prize – a recording contract and all that. But then it turned into a docu-soap, as we followed their adventures in the real world (well, as real as the music business can ever be), as they set about their new jobs.

I found myself completely hooked on the show, mainly because I grew to like most of the people in the band. Myleene came across as a calculating bundle of ambition, but the others had their redeeming features, with mouthy but warm Kym being the star. 

The best of the reality dramas are character driven – Nasty Nigel supplanted Nasty Nick in the popular imagination, and we recall the spiky hotel manageress, and the cruise ship cabaret singer with a heart of gold. But these people are shown being themselves, with no script or expensive production to hide behind. They might become famous, but they’re famous for being real. 

We already knew the people that entered the ‘Celebrity Big Brother’ house as celebrities. Here was the process going backwards, and we had the opportunity to see them as they really were – was Jack Dee really funny, was Chris Eubank as mad as we thought, and was Anthea Turner as annoying as she seems?

In truth, Jack turned out to be both funny and have a warmth beneath his curmudgeonly exterior. Eubank really was hat-stand, Keith a salt of the earth lad who really couldn’t sing, and even Anthea came across reasonably well. 

Always assuming they weren’t faking it for the cameras. That’s the thing about famous people apparently being real – they’re experienced enough in the medium to fool us. Which is why I’m sorry the ‘Popstars’ kids are now off to go and be real celebrities – I liked them much more when they were just ordinary people on TV.

But of course this is the irony of it all – you want to see real people on TV, but the process of being on TV means they stop being ordinary, and we need new blood. Maybe Andy Warhol was right after all – just don’t bother me when my turn comes for the 15 minutes, because I’ll be too busy watching you guys.

Posted by David in • Square Eyes • UK • Television

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Touching Evil

Thursday, March 08, 2001

It’s a staple of the police drama on TV that the hero has some flaw in him – he drinks too much, his marriage has broken down, he’s jaded by the crap he deals with every day.

But in the end he gets the job done, and in doing so acts as a necessary buffer between polite society and the more disturbing world of crime. He might be tainted by the work, but it’s a dirty job and someone’s got to do it.

But ‘Touching Evil’ (currently reprising on TV3 on Mondays) doesn’t leave us with the same warm glow of achievement put out by regular police dramas. Its subject matter is grim enough – serial killers, paedophiles and various other frightening criminals whose hearts are as dark as night – but we’ve seen this aleady (remember Robert Carlyle in Cracker?). Where the show shines is in having the hero as messed up as the people he’s chasing.

In these days of psychological profiling, a good TV detective has to understand some scary minds, but Dave Creegan (played with a sad intensity by Robson Green) seems to empathise with the suspects a little too well.

In a recent episode someone was killing women and putting their hearts in bin-bags. So the heart is rubbish, huh? This isn’t ‘Dixon of Dock Green’, that’s for sure.

The uneasy camera is never still, it’s always raining, and even the most mundane of items can appear menacing. In a quiet moment, Creegan’s sitting in a greasy spoon cafe and we see a normal refillable red ketchup bottle on the table in front of him. The stains of ketchup around the nozzle at the top look for all the world like dried blood. And you know that’s how Creegan sees it.

Even the normal witty comebacks among the cops here take a pretty grim turn. When a colleage comes round to see Creegan at his house, she’s taken aback by the state of the place. “I don’t want to upset you, Creegan,’ she thoughtfuly says, “but the last time I saw a bedroom like this, the bloke in it had just shot himself.”

And Creegan’s not too far from this. Joyce Millman in Salon magazine lists his problems: “Shot in the head in the line of duty, he returned from his near-death experience with a scar on his forehead and a case of the heebie-jeebies that nothing except a brisk walk on the wild side can temper . . . Bad things keep happening to Creegan: His marriage failed because of his work; his girlfriend was murdered by a serial killer he was tracking; he had a nervous breakdown; he came back to work just in time for a squadmate to be murdered by a different serial killer; [next] he was set on fire by yet another serial killer.”

This all sounds a little too much but Green’s performance is riveting, at least partly because he knows how close to the edge he is. The title of the show spells it out – if you touch evil, you will be touched yourself.

Rather bizzarrely, his closest comrade might be Sonny Crockett from ‘Miami Vice’. Quite a few episodes of this better than average police show (overseen by Michael Mann) end with some expendable cops killed and the bad guys getting away. It’s at times like these that Sonny gets into his car and goes for a moody drive.

What both cops share is an awareness that there’s no-one who understands them better in the world than the scum of the earth they’re chasing. This was also the issue driving Mann’s movie ‘Heat’.

It might seem a long way from Al Pacino and Don Johnson to Robson Green, but in their different ways all the dramas look at the price you have to pay if you choose to immerse yourself in a world of cruelty and pain. Even just watching Touching Evil makes you feel like you need a wash afterwards. But you’ve got to love TV that takes you to grim places and doesn’t leave you with a pat happy ending.

Posted by David in • Square Eyes • UK • Television

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Frankie Says – British nostalgia TV

Thursday, March 01, 2001

I was a child of the 1980s, and the pop culture of the time scarred my naive teenage years. My first slow dance was to “Careless Whisper”, and I wore the checked shirts and braces of a devoted Big Country fan. Howard Jones went to my school, and for a while everyone I knew had a haircut like his. Including the girls (not that I knew any).

So the Saturday night BBC2 series, ‘I Love the 1980s’ should be right up my street, reminding me of the delights of ra-ra skirts, Bros and BMX bikes. Looking at one year at a time sounds great, but I can’t quite shake the feeling that it’s a complete waste of time.

It’s just lazy history. Intersperse the period footage with a few quotes from some of the folks involved and some random celebrities or comedians, add the appropriate soundtrack from Kajagoogoo and OMD, and Russell Harty’s your uncle. It’s the TV equivalent of that classic pub conversation:

“Do you remember those sweets, what were they called?”

“Spangles?”

“Yeah, Spangles!”

“Oh yeah, Spangles. They were great. What about Morph?”

“Morph. He was great. And what was the name of that ITV kids’ program that was supposed to be like Blue Peter?”

“Magpie.”

“Magpie! God, I haven’t thought about that for ages.”

The BBC 2 series just replaces your mates with minor celebrities. Do I really care that Jamie Theakston had a cool Mongoose BMX bike? And while I like Louis Theroux, his recollection about his first trip to McDonald’s hardly rivalled Oscar Wilde for its witty apercus.

Even if it’s famous people telling me stuff I already know, it’s still stuff I already know. Rather than a dash through the obvious highlights of each year, there are a number of other approaches that would have been more rewarding. For example, an in-depth look at a particular area that illustrated something of the spirit of the time. As it is, every time I think the show’s about to explore a more interesting area, we’re on to a two-minute profile of Bananarama or the like.

Or if you’re going to do oral history, spend a longer time with fewer (real) people, and build up a more detailed picture of their lives at the time. 

But that’s not what the producers of this show are trying to do. Their lowest common denominator, list journalism approach is aiming only at recognition. You sit there stupefied on the sofa, just about managing a response such as “Oh, yeah. Rick Astley. I remember him.”

So I’m far from impressed. But if I’m home on Saturday night this week (as I was last week, when I turned down an invite to a lap-dancing club – you tell me if I made the right choice), I’ll be the one in front of the TV with my Frankie Says t-shirt on.

Posted by David in • Square Eyes • UK • Television

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Shining Surface, Hidden Depths – review of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Thursday, February 22, 2001

‘It looks great, I like the fight scenes, but it’s unbelievable and the story is really thin.’

Heard this judgement on Ang Lee’s ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’? Yeah, me too. It’s both right and so far wrong that it demands a closer look.

‘It looks great’

No argument there. From the gorgeous Michelle Yeoh to the serene forest scenes, and from the exquisite interiors to the epic scale of the desert, the film positively glows.

‘I like the fight scenes’

Thought you might. This is, after all, a genre movie – a homage to the tradition of martial arts movies, and with The Matrix’s fight choreographer on the case, we get combat that deserves the oft-misused adjective balletic. There’s a grace and precision that mocks the leaden clumsiness of most Hollywood portrayals of swordplay. ‘Gladiator’ might be stirring but most often you can’t tell who’s doing what to whom amidst the sweat and the sand (a bit like ‘Temptation Island’, come to think of it, but that’s another story).

‘It’s unbelievable’

The longer version of this argument goes, ‘It was fine until they started running across the rooftops. And when they’re standing on the branches of the trees? I mean, come on, that could never happen.’ Since when do movies have had to be believable in the strictly limited sense of what’s physically possible? 

It’s the movies. Luke Skywalker can use the force and no-one complains that that’s impossible. The kid who’s going to be King Arthur pulls the sword out of the stone, and that’s fine too, because it’s part of the story.

Maybe it’s a cultural thing. For a Western audience, the milieu of Crouching Tiger is so alien that we try to judge it by the rules we feel most comfortable with – like gravity. It shouldn’t have to work like that.

‘The story is really thin’

This inability to suspend disbelief is also at the root of the last criticism. It’s true that the story is simple, but that’s simple like a folktale, or a myth, and creating this atmosphere in a movie is a remarkable achievement. The big stories and ideas are simple and profound (God sends his only son to die for our sins; Boy meets girl; Why can’t we all just get along?).

These are often driven by the conflict between what want to do and what we must do: love vs. duty, family vs. country, passion vs. fate. The simple stories tell us about ourselves and the values that matter to us. And Crouching Tiger talks of beauty, grace, wisdom, discipline, love and humility – a long way from our more workaday values of logic, efficiency and reason.

So ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ is more than great photography and kick-ass fights. If we look closer, there’s a tenderness and depth you don’t come across very often.

Posted by David in • Square Eyes • Film

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Accidental Autobiography

Monday, February 19, 2001

Should you keep five year-old email messages? I’m currently tidying up the contents of various hard drives and floppy disks (remember them?) to prepare for the arrival of a new machine. But how much to throw out is proving a difficult question.

You keep photographs to remind of the things you’ve done, and the people you were with. To remind you never to grow your hair like that again, or for many other reasons. And it feels right to keep them. 

Maybe emails are in the same category, and by this I don’t mean every purely administrative work-related mail, or the newsletters you subscribed to, but the notes to your friends, the jokes, the abuse. 

Photographs and emails are part of your personal history. Every day you’re making memories, and this stuff marks the paths you’ve been down. Maybe burning old mail onto a CD is the equivalent of sticking stuff up in the attic. You don’t need it around every day, but you’re not going to throw it out either. 

And it’s the ephemeral nature of emails that makes them such good markers. It’s a truism in historical study that you get much better information when your primary source isn’t trying to tell you what happened than if you’re reading a considered history from the period. Documents that were written not with a view to posterity ironically live a longer life. 

So the stuff you dashed off to your mate when you were bored in the office one day catches you like a candid photograph. You might acknowledge at the time that this mail could be preserved, but you don’t write it like that. And unlike real letters, you get to keep the mail you send too. It’s an unmediated account of your preoccupations, your worries, your day to day life. An accidental autobiography. 

Some people might argue that you shouldn’t keep carrying this baggage around with you, that you are yourself only in the present, and all that stuff happened to someone else.  It’s certainly true that you can dwell too much on your former self. But if you maintain the right attitude to this personal detritus – a good-natured distance seems about right – then having it around is surely a good idea. 

But why, exactly? You keep all your photos, but you don’t look at them very often. And even when you do, it’s hard to explain what’s going on. 

Wordsworth argued that poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility. Scrolling through ASCII email archives is also recalling your old emotions and feelings at one remove. We can’t say why poetry matters but we do it anyway, and maybe the same is true of keeping and looking through our personal archives. 

So I won’t worry about all this crap I’m pouring on to CD, because in some way it’s poetry. 

(first published as a Modest Proposals newsletter, February 2001)

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Survivor of the Fittest – Survivor 2 reviewed

Thursday, February 15, 2001

Forget the fly on the wall drama of The Hotel or The Airport, forget the social engineering of Castaway 2000, forget even the claustrophobic hype of Big Brother. You want reality TV? Survivor 2 is the real deal.

Two teams of gung-ho Americans are abandoned in the Australian outback with little more than the clothes they stand up in. As well as building shelters, trying to make fire and avoiding the scary bugs, the teams compete against each other for possession of the Immunity Idol. It sounds pants, but lose immunity and you have to vote off one of your own team.

Every three days, someone has to go, and at the halfway stage in the series, the two teams will combine, and the competitions become individual struggles for immunity. The denouement is perfect, since when the last two survivors remain, the final winner is determined by the previous half dozen folks voted off.

You might get muddy and hungry and more than a little uncomfortable in the outback, but the real challenge is to survive the machiavellian intrigue and chicanery of your fellow competitors. Too nice and you’ll not form the alliances necessary to get you into the last stages, but too nasty and no way are those people you shafted going to vote for you to get the million dollar prize in the end.

The original Survivor took the US by storm last summer, and TG4 are running the current series twice a week, while in the US, NBC has supersized Friends to 45 minutes an episode to try and compete with the show there.

No chance. The makings of another great series are there. Conflict is crucial of course, and the contestants have been carefully chosen to rub each other up the wrong way. But given the voting structure, everyone has to appear to be friendly (you never know when you’re going to need that support), while at the same time eliminating the competition.

The challenges are also designed to test individual abilities and the cohesion of the group. On Wednesday’s episode we saw Rodger, the mild-mannered Kentucky farmer, jump off a cliff into a lake, then wrestle with a huge crate as it and he went careering through the rapids. All the other survivors did that too, but Rodger can’t swim.

And then Kimmi the vegetarian New York bartender was forced to try to eat cow’s brain (CJD, how are you?) to win immunity for her team. She failed, but then got the chance to redeem herself in a sudden death eat off of foot-long worms. I didn’t see that on Big Brother.

So we’ve got intrigue, conflict and triumph over adversity, all carefully managed to heighten our viewing pleasure. Throw in sex – most of the competitors are beautiful bronzed people in their 20s sitting around in their swimming togs – and it’s a winning combination.

Posted by David in • Square Eyes • USA • Television

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