Ian Sansom

Go slow

The video has clocked up more than 1.8 million views and exemplifies Slow YouTube

issue 14 July 2018

You remember slow TV? Pioneered by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, with its classic Bergensbanen — minutt for minutt (2009), which simply stuck a camera on the front of a train and recorded the seven-hour journey from Bergen to Oslo, slow TV is a nice idea, unless you’re in a hurry, or you have an actual life.

The advantage of what you might call Slow YouTube is that it’s pretty damn quick in comparison to the original hardcore Scandi stuff. Slow YouTube — a term I’ve just invented — tends to consist of short documentary-style pans and long shots of everyday things, places and people, a bit like watching your uncle’s old cine-footage of your aunt walking down the street sometime in the 1970s.

Some of the best slow stuff on YouTube is on a channel called Morthren, which seems to belong to someone called Daz.

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