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Friday 9 January 2009

Death of television

The City Speaks (BBC Radio 4)

In ten years’ time, I suspect, TV as we know it will have disappeared. There’ll be no more small-screen boxes in the living-room (or the bedroom), no more daytime shopping programmes, no more celebrities prancing semi-naked through the jungle. We’ll either have a mini-cinema in the basement, or be watching Bruce Forsyth via our miniature laptops.

TV News is struggling to keep up in the race to be first with the story, first with the eye-witness accounts of major events, whereas just minutes after the Earthquake Radio Five Live was airing on Up All Night vivid, breathy accounts of what it felt like to feel the earth move. In Africa and other parts of the developing world, where electricity is in short supply but batteries are on sale on every street corner, radio is king. It’s also a far more flexible and effective political weapon than TV, which still needs a camera and a cumbersome satellite transmitter.

But enough. If you’re not convinced, just take a look at The City Speaks via the Radio Four website. You’ll discover that this wasn’t ‘a film’ in the conventional sense of a story unfolding through a sequence of moving images with the actors telling the story. But a series of still snapshots threaded together to accompany a quite separate soundtrack. It was as if, rather like a Victorian lantern show, the images were intended to enhance, not tell, the story. I gave up after a few minutes and decided just to listen.

Pushing (by Lin Coghlan) took us to a sink estate in south London where an ex-soldier was struggling to carry a fridge from his tower-block flat to Bread Street to see the Virgin. But the words were drowned out by the sound effects — the fridge being scraped across the pavement, whining traffic, an electronic, pulsing beat. It didn’t need them, or the TV pictures (apart from the rather gorgeous dog). The rest of the plays were all rather flat, as if something was missing. As if they lacked a sense of purpose, of deciding whether this was meant to be a visual or an aural experience. Except perhaps for I Am Not You Are Not Me (by Mike Walker), the only play told by a single voice, Jack, who is struggling to reconcile his conscience with a shocking memory.

None of these plays could have worked on TV without the radio soundtrack. Maybe with hindsight The City Speaks will be seen as the moment when TV suddenly gave in and admitted it can’t keep up.

More articles from: Kate Chisholm | this section

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