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‘Slow Television’ and Stephen Poliakoff's Shooting the Past

2006; Edinburgh University Press; Volume: 3; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3366/jbctv.2006.3.1.128

1755-1714

Amy Holdsworth,

Cinema and Media Studies

The Fallon Photographic Library lies on the outskirts of London and is home to a small and eccentric community of librarians led by Marilyn (Lindsay Duncan). However, the building and the collection have been sold and the arrival of the new owner Anderson (Liam Cunningham) brings shocking news for the existing staff. Anderson plans to turn the site into a business school and Marilyn and the others have until the end of the week to re-house the collection or face its extinction. As the archivists face up to the threat of extinction in part one of the drama, Oswald’s (Timothy Spall) characteristically eccentric response to the urgency of the situation and the invasion of the Americans is a proposed plan of inaction; that the small band of archivists can unnerve the Americans and derail the progress of the business school by consuming a ‘five course lunch as if nothing has happened’ and ‘eat our way to victory!’ Despite the sarcasm that inflects Oswald’s suggestion, he asserts that his intentions are serious, and what they reveal is a slow strategy of resistance that is prevalent throughout the drama and central to its thematic and formal concerns. It is the value that Poliakoff places on the idea of ‘slowness’ and the beginnings of a formulation of ‘slow television’ that is interrogated in this paper. It is possible to read Shooting the Past, first broadcast in three parts on BBC2 in January 1999, as a meditation on modernity, technological change and its effect on human experience. The drama is marked by the significance of technological practices and an opposition is set up between contemporary communication and recording technologies and practices, clearly identified as the reserve of Anderson and his cohorts, and more ‘archaic’ forms practiced by the staff of the archive. Poliakoff clearly values the latter, as it is the invading technologies of the former, the intrusive and annoying tapping of Garnett (Arj Barker) at his laptop and the fast yet continuous stream of mobile phone calls