Girls On Film/Lame Bitching

There is nothing stranger than being filmed by television cameras. Specifically, there is nothing weirder than having a conversation and pretending to have a conversation at the same time, which is what happens when the crew of BBC 2’s popular Money Programme set their sights on you. And when they ask you to dance for them? That’s when things get really peculiar.

[Later…]

What a palaver. When the researcher from The Money Programme came to visit a couple of weeks back, we had an interesting conversation about bootleg music, about filesharing, about open source software (and about how great it was going to gigs in Manchester 1976-8, but that wasn’t strictly relevant.) This made Leon and I think, not unreasonably, that we’d be taking part in a cool project, and that we’d get to make some valid points about filesharing. We were wrong. After the crew turned up an hour late for filming, I had to spend hours (literally) being filmed downloading tracks by The Corrs, who are representing the money-grabbing-corporate-whore set in the documentary, and it quickly became apparent that us representatives for the pro-filesharing massive are to be portrayed as thieves (um, okay, so we are…) and this was backed up by the interview itself: every time I tried to make a point, I was asked to repeatedly rephrase and dilute, until what I wanted to say was recast to match the producers’ preconceptions. Which is just plain unethical when you are making a documentary film, no? Add to this the fact that Leon was kept hanging around for five hours of a working day, then informed that his input was no longer required, and that the experiences of the other people involved were similar, and my opinion of the BBC just plumetted.

Hey ho, at least Terry, the good guy from the Beeb, lent me his precious copy of Jon The Postman’s ‘Puerile.’ A cracking album, including a twenty-five minute cover of ‘Louie Louie’.

Cex review follows shortly

And did you see this? Rock the genome

Posted at 1am on 10/06/02 by Jack Mottram to the misc. category.
Permalink · Add to del.icio.us