Granny takes one step back too many and falls in the duckpond. Puppies turn somersaults mid-yip as they collide with bicycles. Brides slip on dropped bouquets, landing in heaps with their knickers showing. These are the kind of images that probably spring to mind when you think about amateur TV footage, by which I mean footage filmed by members of the public enthusiastically brandishing handheld video cameras. Images like those, and, of course, and Lisa Riley's cheesy linking of the week's selection of "home video howlers."
When Jeremy Beadle first presented You've Been Framed!, the public were so tickled by these images of kids falling in cakes, kittens doing backflips and fathers falling off stepladders and through garden shed roofs, they watched in droves. The network high-ups suddenly realised that despite their output of cinema-quality filmed dramas shot in supersaturated colours, featuring big names and with 10-scenes-a-minute strobe lighting-style editing, as flashy and hip as pop videos (and usually with the same depth of dramatic substance), the TV viewing public were, in fact, perfectly happy to watch grainy, wobbling camcorder footage. (And now, of course, thanks to three film students who allegedly went missing in the woods while searching for a certain Blair Witch, cinema audiences are equally happy to make the same adjustment.)
This was all well and good - because it was cheap! The schedules began to flood with all manner of amateur footage shows: from CCTV cameras snooping on shoplifters pilfering Mars Bars to home video footage of big bad weather on the rampage and people narrowly escaping from death and disaster, merrily filming as they went. And, of course, lots more grannies falling in duckponds.
This was something new on mainstream TV: real life filmed by real people with few technical skills; the kind of ordinary, everyday people who would normally be denied access to the mechanisms of TV production - the type who would get less than nowhere if they applied to any of the ads in the Media Guardian. It was real life on TV (although in a world where national newspapers begin campaigns to free EastEnders' Matthew Rose from prison, it's altogether possible that a good number of the public do actually regard TV in quite the same way that the late medievals regarded the spiritual cosmos - as not only real life but the primary reality, with the physical cosmos around us a mere allegory of this ultimate domain.)
The amateur footage shows were initially diverting, perhaps, but does the mass market availability of video systems offer more potential than this kind of broadcasting?
Ever heard of guerilla TV?
Let's go back to when video was unexplored, virgin turf; when the flowers under the trees hadn't yet been trampled down and nobody had dropped any sweet wrappers or coke cans. In the late '60s, the Sony Corporation introduced portable video cameras and recorders that the public could actually afford and, in the States, groups of radical young people, filled to bursting with ideas, suddenly began wielding Porta-Pak units. So the story goes, one of them even turned up at the doorstep of a big Hollywood writer keen to expound upon some of those ideas. The stench of Charles Manson's recent murdering spree still hanging heavy in the air, the writer's wife's reaction when she opened the door was only natural - long haired guy in fatigue jacket and pants on the doorstep; weird looking equipment in his hands which just had to be some kind of a machine gun - of course she ran back inside screaming.
To these people, video was an exciting new medium for art, activism and information. When we research into what these video pioneers got up to (not an easy job - this is very much a hidden history), we discover a fascinating story of video collectives and communes with colourful names like the Raindance Corporation, the Ant Farm, Videofreex and Global Village.
One of the more interesting of the guerilla TV groups was TVTV; an amalgamation of several video communes from the East and West Coasts, who took satirical comedy out of the theatres and onto the streets, improvising in conjunction with real events - such as the 1972 political conventions - as they happened.
Another, Channel One, was started in New York by a 24 year old former child actor named Ken Shapiro, who had played a brat on Milton Berle's Texaco Star Theater in the early '50s. He spent just over $1000 on the first mass market Sony video system and, with it, produced the first direct connection of underground comedy to television in the States. He began the Channel One Video Theatre in East 4th Street in the hippy pleasuredome of the East Village, presenting video programmes which he described as "psychedelic satire" (although some critics considered "scatological satire" a more apt description); sketches that rubbished the most stale elements of mainstream TV, from soap opera to commercials. The 25 April 1970 issue of TV Guide wrote a feature on Channel One titled: "Television Goes Underground", enthusing that the group gave a gadfly's eyeview of how much fun could be had on TV without censors, stereotypes and stuffiness; if sacred cows, play-it-safe programming and condescending ideas of what viewers were "ready for" were swept away. In basing most of its satire on TV itself, Channel One was a kind of Stateside parallel to what the Monty Python team were doing in England, though no doubt much more explicit. Shapiro himself said to The East Village Other magazine: "The heads are a gorgeous subculture, with their own language, their own jokes - and since so little of it can be broadcast over regular media, drugs and sex and such, it gives us a whole world of totally new material to work with. We like to think we're providing heads with their own CBS."
In other words, people in the street were bypassing the major broadcasters by shooting their own programmes with the newly available video technology, then finding ways of presenting it to the public.
I'm not presently aware of any kind of British parallel to this period of Stateside activity, though I'd love to learn of the presence of early British video collectives. The only instance of ordinary people suddenly being given access to the mechanisms of broadcasting and getting themselves heard that immediately springs to mind is the BBC2 late night '70s series Open Door, a series which existed "to open up the airwaves to the public" (and which eventually became the early evening series Open Space.)
Not the same thing, but it could certainly make for unusual television. To wit: one week an anarchist group rang up the Open Door office demanding airtime, describing themselves as Albion Free State, a major political force for anarchy. They were invited - and just imagine even the remotest scintilla of a possibility of this happening now! - to turn up at the BBC where they would indeed be put on the air live. Two of them turned up, one dressed as a gorilla, the other as a wizard. When the wizard threateningly produced a knife and the gorilla kicked him in the nuts to deprive him of it, the producers probably realised that they were in for something unusual. But - good old early '70s BBC - they still put the show on.
The transmission began with a masked individual holding a placard explaining that, as the BBC would only allow one of them on-air at any time, "the tree" would represent all of them, and, for the next 15 minutes, the camera repeatedly zoomed in and out on a tree in a pot while a tape of the Albion Free State Manifesto played. A scary, weird and, indeed, incredibly boring 15 minutes (although still preferable to yet another modern makeover show).
The hidden history of the American video pioneers is an interesting and inspiring one. The new mass market technology meant to these people nothing less than an incredibly potent new medium for art, activism and information. A case of why put up with the banality of the mainstream stations when you can go out and film your own ideas?
So ... have you got a video camera in your pantry? Were you just planning to use it to film your sisters wedding and your five year old's eyes widening, Macauley Culkin-incredulous, as he unwraps his new gameboy on Christmas Day?
Maybe you could be doing something more interesting with it, too.
As the quality and range of mainstream British TV continues to sink due to cuts, centralised decision making and focus group mentality; as soap operas devour more and more of the schedules like maggots let loose upon a rotting corpse; as the schedules become merely formulaic fast food, with little social comment or talk about the state of the nation, but just more heavy sell, sapping your will and burning out your brain as they go; taking this incredible medium and never doing anything much more with it than just lulling you and impressing Pavlovian buying habits into your alpha-state mind, the idea of non-industry professionals being creative with video technology seems more and more appealing and apt. Surely we can find ourselves sharing the same mindset as those late '60s heads, bored and frustrated with mainstream TV and thrilled by the newly available video technology and its possibilities. The only difference is that this technology is now much cheaper and more easily available. The success of the distinctive and snappy home-made Adam & Joe Show should perhaps offer further hope that enterprising people with ideas and suitable technology can put together interesting and watchable programmes.
Was the initial burst of video activity from 30 years ago a potential unfulfilled? Something still to be fully realised? A small handful of gargantuan corporations now dominate the bulk of media traffic across the entire planet and the entire planet is their marketplace. Is it possible to bypass them?
Broadcasting may be strictly regulated - but no less so than in the days of the early video communes. They found ways to get their work seen - venues can be hired, tapes can be copied, and sold or circulated. And, ultimately, the main potential on offer was to bypass mainstream broadcasters completely.
Reality check. Though the time might be ripe for similar movements, it's not likely to happen. People aren't going to get enthused in the same way. Video is no longer virgin turf: the flowers under the trees have long been trampled into a messy pulp and the territory is now knee-deep in sweet wrappers and coke cans.
But perhaps one day, at least, each city in Britain will have its own public access channels like the States and, though you're just as likely to get some old drag queen in a bubble wig dishing out recipes, maybe something interesting will come out of it too, and mass market video technology will go some way further towards fulfilling both the liberating and democratic power, and creative potential which TVTV and Videofreex and their like saw in it back in its early days.
Until then, have a think about what creative shenanigans you and your friends could be getting up to with your video cameras. And keep your granny away from the duckpond.
