Insidious Lassitude

Perhaps unsurprisingly, neither Louise Minchin nor Colin Jackson is a natural TV presenter. One’s a former hurdler, and the other is apparently a radio presenter. Shunt them in front of a camera, as it appears increasingly habitual for the BBC to do, and they’ll grin at each other until the glaring intrusion of the lens becomes unbearable and digging their finger nails into their palms no longer relieves the tension and they must at last speak. To each other simultaneously, naturally. Then it gets even worse. It’s as though the viewer is privy to some nightmarish arranged wedding and the camera is a priest who the couple must be polite to, and simper social embrassment at, whilst cloying to be free of his presence so they can crack open the Keighley mini bar and get on with their joyless wedding night.

The other day I saw them presenting Sunday Live - or Sunday Life, I can’t recall what it’s called, I’d guess it’s the former because of the surfeit of dead-air/forced-grin time. Whatever it’s called they had on it had a story about a guy who’d home-videoed his family every day for the past 30 years. He’d got a cine camera in 1978 and had moved onto a VHS camcorder in the eighties, and then through to a digital one now. They showed some bits of his films while Jackson gayed it up with his Golden Retriever-enthusiastic commentary. As well as recording all weddings, birthdays and Christmases, the guy had - as one would inevitably have to if everything had to be filmed - trips to the shop, meals, evenings playing board games, and other dramatic everyday moments, like sunbathing and watching TV.

Currently the guy was engaged with transferring his archive from VHS - which is magnetic degradation prone - to DVD - which is apparently ‘indestructible’ - one can only imagine the hours of enjoyment the future desert-adapted species of beings are going to have when one realises that in millions of years the only thing that’ll remain from the Anthropocene is boxsets of Lovejoy and Bergerac. Ah, only then will the true nostalgia of antiques, classic cars, and drama from the eighties apogee of TV really matter. But I digress. As well as the Sisyphean project of transferring the past to the medium of the future, the guy also has to make sure he films every day’s events. He is endlessly engaged with the peculiar obsession of futureproofing (as I note the curiously modern term now is) both the past and the present simlutaneously. By futureproofing the media, of course, what he’s really up to is futureproofing himself; giving himself the best chance of living on when he dies. Then there’ll be an almost real-time record of his life. And since it is nearly real-time, should anyone want to watch it then they’d have to give over their own life to watch his. Which is almost what he’s doing himself, because he spends so much time protecting the past from the fututre that there is no present. It’s a baffling conceit. I love it. And it allows me, for the umpteenth time, to reference the scene in Back to the Future where Michael J. Fox is in the past and looks at a photo of himself in the future and sees the effect his curerent actions are having on the future by whether he is represented in the image or not.

The guy’s life is like one prolonged legacy tour, where he permanently clamps a camera to his eye to make film to corroborate his own image to the self that he can’t otherwise engage with or recognise. It reminds me of Martin Parr’s photograph of the tourist on horseback with a camcorder pressed to his eye whilst being led through sights by a disinterested local. Much of the set of photos that one comes from (Small World) lays open to ridicule the curiously tyrannical stupidity of the tourist process - where people aeroplane around the world with a compact camera recreating scenes from tourist brochures; photographing the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or Mount Rushmore, or filming the Statue of Liberty so they can draw the curtains and watch it on the idiot box when they get home. Or too, it reminds me of a the oddly poignant photograph I took of an elderly man gleefully filming Stonehenge. It didn’t move, and nor did the man for quite some time; it was like he’d become stuck there, staring at his future in the stone past, and tormented that he’d have to press stop and move on. But, for what it’s worth, once he did press stop and his wife dragged him away, he had it captured for posterity.

On the following episode of Sunday Live, they had another man on who had filmed his life. This man was now blind. But in attempting to reach for the poetic, poignant and profound, the camera-jittered Michin could only ham-fistedly retrieve and polish the reflection of her face into the absurd. To the blind ex-filmmaker she said, ‘And what does seeing these films now show you about your memories of the past?’

One can only hope that when the desert-beings of the future unearth from the sunken landmass that was Britain a carton of indestructible DVDs there are some Sunday Live episodes along with the Lovejoy boxsets and the amateur films of stones. Nothing else could so eloquently demonstrate the futile, poignant absurdity of the Anthropocene.

And because Insidious Lassitude now comes music-enhanced:

Ani DiFranco - Studying Stones