cosmopolitan scum

Good ol’ Igster has become the darling of the London Paper and BBC London AND the Metro with this lovely little film, which turns Google’s Streetview into a narrative device as opposed to an orientation device. Tellingly Igster created the film first, taking about 6 hrs to record the footage. Then he sped it up around 1500%. It was only then that the he wrote the song and recorded it with friends as a bit of a laugh. 

I’m not a huge fan of the song but the video is brilliant. (It might be worth turning it down.) Without wanting to get too BLDGBLOG about it, the film imagines what it would be like if the underground was overground, which is a nice inversion. It’s a lovely bit of wish fulfillment too speeding through the city.  It also neatly references the London to Brighton series of films, which began in 1953 with a 4 minute time lapse of the journey, then went down to three minutes in the 1980s. And then two minutes a bit later. Igster’s journey though was never undertaken by a single individual. It is the result of one individual finding his way through the exhaustive photographic work of a whole fleet of photographers. 

Despite having several branch lines, the Northern is still the spine of the city’s transport infrastructure north to south and much improved on the dark days of the 1990s. It would be strange to have it split into two separate lines as was planned, although this does seem to have gone on the back-burner since Crossrail was announced and the Olympics development got undeway. It seems as if London is becoming increasingly divided along its east-west axis by planners rather than its north-south one as it still the way most of its inhabitants do, I think.

Great little documentary on Pirate Radio in London, first broadcast around 1995 or so if the total fixation with all things Jungle is anything to go by. The documentary comes down pretty firmly on the side of the broadcasters and all the more admirable for doing it in their slightly stuffy voices. “From trip hop to handbag house” “it’s all very different from Radio Caroline” – all pronounced in perfect RP.

Nice bit in the third part of the documentary in which a police appears on a pirate radio station to talk about race relations and another nice little bit in which one of the Department of Trade Industry’s foot soldiers expresses sneaking admiration for the pirate broadcasters ingenuity, technical skills and determination. 

However, it does reveal how little the ridiculous situation has changed. Authorities have been increasing their efforts to crack down on pirate radio stations in the UK. Now though it is the regulator Ofcom which is trotting out the tired old line that the broadcasts interfere with emergency service frequencies. In 2008 Ofcom raided 43 studios used by illegal stations and shut down 838 illegal transmitters. Even if technology is getting better, the pressure by big business on smaller illegal operations is getting stronger.

This top little documentary also highlights the fact that mainstream broadcasters are today operating at a level consistently below standards just over ten years ago. So as underground broadcasters hold the line, the mainstream ones deteriorate.