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Saturday 22 November 2008

Slow Life

Baton twirling

Brad, who has been my constant companion for the last couple of months, was just starting to appreciate the strange power of television. The terrible authority, the ridiculous effects of time on the small screen had taken a while to become apparent. By the time the first show went out, we’d already been filming for a month, shadowed by camera crews, asking us to say things again, do things again, explain how we felt about this, that and the other, and after the first episode he was a bit ruffled. ‘I can’t believe it! Four weeks of cameras and microphones and I was only on screen for three seconds! What a waste of time.’ It was probably a little bit longer than three seconds, but television time doesn’t obey the laws of physics. It is all in troy measures. Four weeks of panning, all those days, distilled with precision into three seconds of hyper-reality.

‘Ivor was on for less than three seconds and my wife can tell he’s an a***hole,’ I pointed out, which seemed to cheer Brad up, and as the weeks went by and the show became a cult hit Brad told me people he hadn’t seen for years were getting in touch and, confusingly, when he took a break from filming for a week to fulfil a work commitment, he noticed even people that he didn’t know were reacting towards him in a different way from normal. People, he said, seemed more willing to listen to him, as if his whole being was legitimised in some way just by dint of being broadcast. That must be really scary for someone who was perfectly legitimate to start with.

It wasn’t as scary for me as I’ve already been on television enough to lose my grip on reality altogether. That happened years ago. Ironically, we were making a ‘reality’ show called Maestro. I’ve touched on it before in this column — the premise being to take eight contestants from different walks of life and try to turn them into conductors, with the eventual winner conducting the Last Night of the Proms in Hyde Park.

More articles from: Alex James | this section

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