Reyner Banham loves Los Angeles

In heated staff meetings here at Watchification HQ, usually over custard creams in Charlie Drake (we’ve named the conference rooms after TV stars of old), we’ve been wondering how to develop the site. We’ve been talking about looking beyond iPlayer for full-length programmes to embed here. It’s tricky because the other mainstream broadcasters haven’t got their embedding thing on yet and YouTube et al are full of clips and trailers that we don’t like much.

Anyway, Russell suggested Google Video as a source of good stuff so I went off to take a look and almost straight away found Reyner Banham’s brilliant documentary about Los Angeles from 1972. I first saw this programme while studying for an A-level in art history at prestigious North Herts College in prestigious Hitchin in about 1981. Back then the film felt right up-to-date and it was obviously kind of cool and punk to take pleasure in something as trashy and demotic as LA in the days before postmodernism made it, well, compulsory. Banham became a kind of idol. Marvelous loose and quite funky documentary making, especially for a man with such a bushy beard (I particularly like the 8-Track ‘SatNav’ at the beginning).