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.
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