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.
issue 06 September 2008
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