Watchification

Imagine The Apprentice with both A-Levels and consequences.

Lex van Dam is clearly an interesting chap. He’s either very confident in his ability to train normal people how to make money in an amateur hedge fund  that he’ll risk his money to proove a point, or he’s one of those worryingly rich people for whom losing a million (even if it’s only a million dollars) doesn’t really matter. Maybe he’s mad. Either way, it makes for surprisingly good television.

It’s better than regular Reality TV fare too. It’s easy to care for the characters (I particularly find myself rooting for the cage fighting promote, Emile) and the direction always seems compassionate, never mocking or exploitative.

I’ve embedded the second of the three episodes, so if you’d prefer to start from the beginning, and/or really want to know what happened next, here are links to episodes one, two and three.

This is the first episode of another brilliant comedy to make its merry way from Radio 4 to TV. It’s one I loved on the radio, and it makes the transition to telly incredibly well. Plenty of awkward, embarrassed silences and random but plausible strangeness.

You might recognise Tim Key and Tom Basden (or rather, their voices) from Mark Watson Makes the World Substantially Better on Radio 4 last year. Together with Lloyd Woolf and Stefan Golaszewsk, they are the Cowards.

A proper film with Alan Rickman, Sigourney Weaver and Carrie-Anne Moss. You may want to give up after 10 minutes. Don’t. It’s worth it.

Original score by the lovely Candian indie band, Broken Social Scene.

Emma’s fashion post yesterday mentioned that there’s some good content in the BBC Archive. If you haven’t spotted it yet, the archive is gradually opening up some fascinating collections, into which I think we’ll be dipping from time to time.

The Men and Money series was a glimpse into banking in Britain first aired in 1964. This, the second episode, deals with confidence in banks and bankers.

There’s something mildly alarming about a financial system and large and highly developed as the one in Britain. The structure looks solid enough but the foundations are mysterious.

Money doesn’t mean gold. It doesn’t even mean pound notes, since these are pumped out by the Bank of England whenever there’s a shortage. Money, in the modern sense, means credit and the one thing that sustains the system is confidence in this credit. People trust banks and the banks trust the government.

One particular highlight is the sequence, starting at 10m40s, about ingenious (and frankly terrifying) experimental methods of preventing bank robberies. Even more interesting, in a world into which Nick Leeson had not yet been born, is the story (at 35 minutes in) of the banking crisis of 1890 in which Barings Bank was saved “and still flourishes”.

If you enjoyed that as much as I did, the archive contains all six episodes of the Men and Money series.

Stewart Brand (now president of the Long Now Foundation) uploaded all six parts of his 1997 documentary How Buildings Learn to Google Video last year. Here’s what he said about it

This six-part, three-hour, BBC TV series aired in 1997. I [Stewart Brand] presented and co-wrote the series; it was directed by James Muncie, with music by Brian Eno. The series was based on my 1994 book, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built. The book is still selling well and is used as a text in some college courses. Most of the 27 reviews on Amazon treat it as a book about system and software design, which tells me that architects are not as alert as computer people. But I knew that; that’s part of why I wrote the book.

Anybody is welcome to use anything from this series in any way they like. Please don’t bug me with requests for permission. Hack away. Do credit the BBC, who put considerable time and talent into the project.

Historic note: this was one of the first television productions made entirely in digital— shot digital, edited digital. The project wound up with not enough money, so digital was the workaround. The camera was so small that we seldom had to ask permission to shoot; everybody thought we were tourists. No film or sound crew. Everything technical on site was done by editors, writers, directors. That’s why the sound is a little sketchy, but there’s also some direct perception in the filming that is unusual.

I’ve embedded part one here but here are links to all six episodes: part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, part six.

I’d love to link to its permanent page on bbc.co.uk/programmes or bbc.co.uk/archive but it doesn’t yet seem to have one at either.