Something strange, very strange is going on. Take two sparky young, very young men, watch them launch their media careers a couple of years ago by creating zany videos and putting them up on YouTube. Witness the impish, imaginative duo going viral, followed by millions across the globe. Note that what they’re famous for are the videos, the visual gags; not for music, for sound, for aural wizardry. Who, then, might you expect to snap them up as the next best thing? The head of Sky TV? Or the controller of Radio 1?
In this topsy-turvy world, it’s Radio 1 who’ll be hosting Dan and Phil from 13 January onwards, giving them their own Sunday-night request show (produced by Alistair Parrington). That’s news enough: an internet phenomenon being taken up by radio, not TV or Hollywood. But as an added ‘wow’ factor Dan and Phil’s show will be the first radio programme that’s also at the same time ‘fully visualised’. Not just podcastable, streamable, downloadable or plainly and simply listenable, it will also be watchable, live on air, via the internet, for the whole two hours. As Dan and Phil chat and play their listeners’ favourite tracks, so they will create on camera the kind of visual mayhem they’ve been dreaming up for YouTube.
‘Visualisation’ is not entirely new to Radio 1. The powers that be (or rather the techies) have been experimenting with it for a while, but with nothing much as yet to show on screen except paunchy DJs getting up to embarrassing dance moves in the studio. (There was also a Radio 4 play about 18 months ago that you could at the same time watch on the website, but weirdly this was not a video, just a collection of stills.)
AmazingPhil and Danisnotonfire (as their fans know them) are very watchable; and logging on to catch their latest antics is rather like taking a peek inside the teenage mind. You can see why Radio 1 is so excited. It’s the perfect way to entice back the 15–25 audience that long ago went Awol, tempted away by the interactivity of the internet. It’s also intriguing that radio, fusty old wireless, is leading the way here; intriguing but not so surprising. With their radio audience, Dan and Phil can interact with their listeners, no apparatus required, except a good internet connection. Their charm is all about immediacy, on the button, in the moment, communicating as if from bedroom to bedroom, the adults safely downstairs. This is so much more possible on radio than on TV, which is just too cumbersome for the deft style of Dan and Phil.
I could say bring it on. Except that I can’t help wondering where all this visualisation might take us. What will happen to listening when, as they probably will, the pictures take over? Dan and Phil verbalise non-stop about what’s going inside their heads. But as soon as you ‘visualise’ this, put images on to the words, the listener/viewer can no longer do the imagining for themselves. Their thoughts are trapped, pinned down, ‘visualised’ — with no room for the imagination to wander where it will.
Sunday night’s Words and Music on Radio 3 gave us plenty of opportunity for that. ‘Perchance to dream’ took as its theme dreaming, good and bad, with excerpts from Shakespeare, Orwell, Lewis Carroll, Freud and Moby-Dick. But what’s so clever about this series (produced this week by Ellie Mant) is the way the excerpts, so crisply and feelingly read by Chiwetel Ejiofor and Sophie Thompson, are woven together with the music to create extra dimensions of meaning, deeper imaginings.
There are no props in Words and Music to help us, no guiding lights or keywords. All we can do is listen and let the stream of thoughts, ideas, musical themes flow through us. Adding pictures would never allow this to happen. A picture of Alice waking up from her dream of Wonderland would add a reality that would at a stroke take the magic away. To see an actor dressed up as Caliban, or a false picture of the imaginary isle he is describing, would immediately destroy the fascination of ‘Be not afeard/ The isle is full of noises… Sometimes a thousand twanging instruments/ Will hum about mine ears…’
On Radio 4, Mark Tully and his co-presenters do something similar on Something Understood, wrapping words and music around a chosen theme. On Sunday morning, Tully talked about the necessary pain of letting go. It’s a terrible mistake, he reminded us, not to accept change, getting older, children leaving, the death of a close relative or friend. To dwell too much on the past prevents the future getting in. This was such a refreshing way to end the year and look forward to the next, weaving the smulchy love lyrics of Michael McDonald with the wise words of an Indian sage. How could an image add to the potency of phrases like ‘the tender gravity of kindness’?
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