Merit in slowing down to take whole lot in

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Perhaps the future of television is watching paint dry or kettles boil, after all – given the triumph of the BBC’s recent experience with slow TV which in turn mirrored the success of similar experiments in Scandinavia.

Highlight, if that’s not too dramatic a term, of the BBC Four Goes Slow series was a two-hour show featuring nothing more than barge making its way slowly down a becalmed canal – with no editing, music or commentary – which attracted more than half a million viewers.

All Aboard! The Canal Trip was filmed with one camera strapped to the front of the barge gently floating down the Kennet and Avon Canal, capturing nothing more than other boats, beautiful scenery and the occasional passer-by.

The show, in which the only sounds were birdsong, barking dogs, rippling water and the chugging of the engine, averaged at 506,000 viewers and a peak of 599,000, above the BBC Four slot average of 340,000.

And this wasn’t a once-off either; BBC Four’s earlier efforts included Dawn Chorus: the Sounds of Spring, which attracted 423,000 viewers, followed by another 423,000 viewers for its documentary that was about nothing more challenging than the making of a glass jug.

A three-hour tour of the National Gallery, also without any commentary, drew 252,000 viewers – and another Handmade programme on the making of a steel knife, pulled in 339,000 viewers.

None of these would qualify as a massive hit in terms of audience percentage – a new Channel 4 cop series called No Office, written by Paul Abbott, the man who made Shameless, drew two and a half million last week – but it still shows that not everyone wants to see life living at breakneck speed.

And whether it’s on the telly or in reality, there are few things in life more soothing than the sight of still water gently lapping off the bank or the side of a boat.

But this isn’t just about the effect of water; slow television – and indeed slow movies – work across a whole variety of fronts to prove that sometimes we just want something that doesn’t make us concentrate so hard.

The artist, and now film director, Sam Taylor-Wood for example once filmed David Beckham asleep and turned it into 107 minutes of a movie for the National Portrait Gallery back in 2004 – and the sad truth for the rest of us is that Becks is so damn perfect that he doesn’t even snore or break wind when he’s out for the count.

Long before that, Andy Warhol’s slow movie Sleep from 1963 showed poet John Giorno sleeping for five hours and twenty minutes.

It’s a concept that Big Brother have taken to new depths – putting cameras into the dormitory that houses wannabes, has-beens and never-will-bes so that we can see the nocturnal habits of people we’ve never heard of.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.