Thursday 30 December 2010

Top 5

This time of year, everyone has a top 5 or a top 10 or some kind of round-up, so I thought I'd get in on the act. I've been researching weird things for Japanese TV for over a year now. Recently a broadcaster we contact often suggested I try adding the word 'wacky' to any searches in their online archives for finding topics we'd been charged with digging up. That's the kind of research work I do.

At the beginning, I tried to note down what I was researching with the intention of writing about them all here. Soon enough, I realised it would be pretty much every topic we research. The list grew longer and longer until it was entirely unwieldy. Top 5 makes sense.

In no particular order:

- Jim Le Fevre



This man is a hero. Jim Le Fevre uses record players and revolutions per minute to make smart animations. He dubs his creation the Phonotrope (formerly the Phonographantasmascope), itself modelled on a Zoetrope.

His website is packed with wonderful things too.


- Cat Gets Stuck in Window



From the wildly imaginative and inspirational, to the wacky, the most lowly of low-brow entertainment available (that no one else in Japan has broadcast yet). That's how my job rolls.

Pretty funny though.


- And one giant mirror



Viganella: a small town in Northern Italy with no sunlight for three months every year, due to it's location nestled at the bottom of a valley. The mayor instals one giant mirror to rectify this.

The Japanese featured in the trailer had nothing to do with us and I don't think the people in Japan we were working for even used the footage in the end. Didn't stop me burning a copy of the entire documentary to take home and watch (it's office policy - eurgh what a phrase!- to burn copies of everything that comes in anyway).

The array of characters is the most compelling thing in the documentary. The guy playing a caisa (the instrument you can hear at the beginning) plays all kinds of instruments throughout but never utters a word. There's a brooding, quiet type who lives at the top of the hill near where they instal the mirror. And the mayor is delightful and gregarious and determined throughout. I love how he gets nearly blown backwards by the helicopter down-thrust, as he tries to take pictures with a pocket camera of the mirror dangling. Landscape then portrait, then back to landscape.

- Solar Impulse



A solar plane that can fly at night.

I spoke with the PR who was lovely but who told me there was no footage of the plane flying. They hadn't got it off the ground yet. Two months later it hits the national press with the maiden flight. Now it seems it's flown at night too.

- World's Deepest Bin



I love this.

Tuesday 28 December 2010

Finally, carols


All has been said and done now, but in the run-up to Christmas I was really craving carols. Various plans fell through. Audience participation is not always welcome- who knew there is difference between carol concerts and carol services? Even Midnight Mass turned out to be a lot more Godly than I had remembered. Much less clementines with candles and more, well, like you'd expect from a church I suppose. No less enjoyable for that, mind, in it's own way.

So it was nice, really nice, to get word from the school I'd visited on work experience during the summer, inviting me to their carols and staff party. I don't think I've sung Away in a Manger since I was 7 years old myself. Certainly not Little Donkey. Plenty of candles too, and a few Kings and a Joseph and a Mary trembling on the stage after holding pose for 10 minutes. Back at school, the staff had transformed the corridors into The Lion the witch and the wardrobe. They even has an Aslan (pictured). The picture doesn't really do it justice.

Monday 20 December 2010

Essentials: sign of the times

BAA spokesperson:

"People are in the lounges and all over the airport. We have given out thousands of blankets, food vouchers, bottles of water and there is free wi-fi. Things are improving slowly."

Sunday 19 December 2010

Snow, snow, snow




Christmas shopping

This is very much a traumatic affair, an annual, traumatic affair.

This year I found myself in an awful, traumatic human tangle on the ground floor of the Oxford Street branch of John Lewis, fighting for access between display stands bearing thoughtfully packaged and well-presented foodstuffs, perfumes, lotions, superfluous stationary and all the other accompanying accoutrements of Christmas (board games, wooden toys, cards and gift wrapping, bored children with mittens on strings), in this mind-numbing, department store light. It all came to a head as I debated spending five pounds on gift tags- nothing more than a folded piece of card with a hole punched in one corner and a barcode on the back.

Even my attempts to skip off the masses with a digital bounce were thwarted this year. The book my brother wanted wasn't in stock. The snow and the ice has stopped any postal guarantee for internet purchases. The cheese website crashed, or wouldn't load, or something. I don't recall why I thought buying cheese over the internet seemed like a good idea, but it did at some point.

I finally caught a break yesterday. I had one more little something to get and the shop I had in mind was a ways away, but I had time and the inclination to wander.

I passed by L'Occitane on my way and a sales assistant inexplicably spraying the area around the door with one of those perfume atomizers with a cord and a spongy ball at the end. I walked past, stopped, turned back and went in. Could have been the perfume. Not really sure. In any case, I was presented with a glass of champagne the moment I entered. Here was something for nothing and I instantly congratulated myself on the best Christmas shopping decision of this year. I found something and bought it from the same sales assistant that had sprayed the door space and offered me the champagne. She processed the transaction, slipped the product in a bag and then she did something else inexplicable. She took a sheet of pink crepe paper, loosely stuffed it into the bag and then jammed the bottle of perfume in and sprayed a good puff-puff-puff, and another puff for good measure. People always seem to want to go the extra mile at Christmas time, even if it's a bafflingly strange gesture, like spraying the inside of a bag.

Friday 10 December 2010

Something wicked this way stalks



Yesterday marked the greatest moment of my working life in London. That’s not to say much, given it’s been only a year and in an entirely one-dimensional capacity, but even so, this was big. This was a coup, this was an Everest: Attenborough.

A brush with a hero is a rare occasion indeed. That’s part of heroes being heroes: they have a distance and an impenetrable aura about them that underwrites your reverence. If you bumped into a hero in your local cafe week, it would take a little lustre off. At least in my book, that’s how it works.

When I was a kid, at one stage, I remember liking two things in life quite obsessively: collecting books I never read, and animals. I was going to be a vet and one day I was going to read all of the books I had collected, just as soon as I finished the collection. All three of these things never happened- I’m not a vet, I never read those books and I still haven’t finished collecting books. I gave away all my old CDs, I streamlined my stuff between England, Scotland, Japan and England again and I toss out old clothes before I’ve bought new clothes. Books, though, I can’t really bear throwing away or donating or ditching.

So, I grew up with David Attenborough on the TV, sweating in a jungle and a headlock at the gangly, orange arms of an orangutang; at the poles, with the penguins and much later, just an absorbing voice speaking over gorgeous footage of things I’ll never lay eyes upon at the bottom of the sea or deep in caverns or stashed in wild ravines. He was always around animals. Not so much books. He became, and remains, a hero of mine.

Yesterday, investigating rights of some early ‘90s nature footage to license for broadcast in Japan, our contact at dear old Auntie came back with a message- we would have to run it by David Attenborough if Japan wanted to broadcast anything with him or his voice. And there was his address and his phone number.

As it turns out, Japan only wanted the penguins. King penguins. That wasn’t going to stop me calling up David though. Except, when the phone had rung through a dozen or so times and an anonymous, computerized approximation of a voice had invited me to leave a message, I thought it more respectful to call him Sir Attenborough. I explained the situation and asked him to call us back, although I thought this a ridiculous proposal. Imagine, Sir Attenborough telephoning T--------! Ha!

So today I drafted a letter. The printer at work (we have only one) is playing up and there are two white smears that run down the printed page it spits out, down the right side. I shifted everything left and tried again, but this only eliminated one white smear and left one column of letters half-way between type and hallucination. This simply wouldn’t do. Not for Sir Attenborough. Instead I plan to print it out from the library and send it myself. Or maybe even hand deliver.