someone at Paramount tunes in, steals their idea, and turns it into a summer blockbuster.
Most of the videos are simple clean fun, however: there’s loads of teenagers mucking about and giggling, performing interpretative dances to Kate Nash, and a fair few endearingly unsexy people gamely wobbling around to sexy songs. One of the more prolific contributors, a bloke called Ian, specialises in dressing up as a girl and looking moody; he’s weirdly good at it. In one video, he simply sits on the floor by a bin, disconsolately miming ‘Torn’ by Natalie Imbruglia. Somehow it’s better than the original.
And when someone nondescript comes on and mimes a nondescript song, you can simply look over their shoulder, inspect the state of their home and wonder why they bought that Shrek poster, or what’s in that binbag on top of the cupboard. Keep your eye on the background and you see a lot of things you don’t usually see in music videos, like infrared burglar alarm sensors, Firefly box sets and multi-bag sacks of Walker’s French Fries. This automatically makes it vastly superior to MTV. At least until the novelty permanently wears off, some time around March.
– At the time of writing, Bedroom TV appears to have disappeared from the Sky EPG altogether .
All by myself [19 January 2008]
Hey sugar. I’m stimulating you. Right now. Can you feel it? No, really: when you’re reading, your brain’s constantly stimulated. And it’ll continue to be stimulated when you put this down and do something else. Even if all you do is gawp listlessly at a tea towel, the information keeps flowing in, and your brain keeps chewing it up.
And that’s a good thing, because left to its own devices, the brain gets fidgety. Switch the lights off, deprive it of stimuli, and after a while it starts daydreaming. And if the lights never come back on, those daydreams become reality.
Your brain transforms into the ultimate unreliable narrator and soon you’ll believe all manner of disjointed oddness. One minute you hear the theme from Hollyoaks playing from nowhere, then you’re INSIDE the theme from Hollyoaks , which by now is full ofcolours, and they’re grinning at you, and then you realise you’re one of them: you’re a grinning blob of colour that lives inside the theme from Hollyoaks . Or maybe you’re a mile-wide pool of pork-flavoured honey with a bus and a hook for a face. Either way, you’ve gone bonkers.
That’s the basis for this week’s creepy Horizon special on sensory deprivation, in which six volunteers get slammed up in the dark for 48 hours. How creepy? Way creepy. The experiment takes place in a disused nuclear bunker; one of the men running it can’t be shown on camera ‘for security reasons’, and we’re told research like this was abandoned 40 years ago when the scientists conducting it decided it was ‘too cruel’. It’s the Fact Ents equivalent of a horror movie.
Three of the guinea pigs are simply kept in dark rooms, while the rest are made to wear eye masks that reduce the world to a grey blur, headphones that pump a continual white noise drone into their ears, and gigantic foam mittens so they can’t even scratch their bums for entertainment.
Meanwhile, a psychotherapist with an unnerving omnipresent grin monitors their progress using night vision cameras, taking notes each time they pace up and down, talk to themselves, or hallucinate. One sits on the end of the bed watching snakes and cars and the occasional human visitor; another (the comedian Adam Bloom, oddly enough) strolls round a non-existent pile of empty oyster shells.
These laugh-a-minute sequences are interspersed with talking-head testimony from former victims of sensory deprivation: a guy called Parris who was locked in solitary for years for a crime he didn’t commit, and former hostage Brian Keenan. Parris invented a fantasy world, then couldn’t escape it; Brian was tormented by imaginary music that wouldn’t stop playing
Most of the videos are simple clean fun, however: there’s loads of teenagers mucking about and giggling, performing interpretative dances to Kate Nash, and a fair few endearingly unsexy people gamely wobbling around to sexy songs. One of the more prolific contributors, a bloke called Ian, specialises in dressing up as a girl and looking moody; he’s weirdly good at it. In one video, he simply sits on the floor by a bin, disconsolately miming ‘Torn’ by Natalie Imbruglia. Somehow it’s better than the original.
And when someone nondescript comes on and mimes a nondescript song, you can simply look over their shoulder, inspect the state of their home and wonder why they bought that Shrek poster, or what’s in that binbag on top of the cupboard. Keep your eye on the background and you see a lot of things you don’t usually see in music videos, like infrared burglar alarm sensors, Firefly box sets and multi-bag sacks of Walker’s French Fries. This automatically makes it vastly superior to MTV. At least until the novelty permanently wears off, some time around March.
– At the time of writing, Bedroom TV appears to have disappeared from the Sky EPG altogether .
All by myself [19 January 2008]
Hey sugar. I’m stimulating you. Right now. Can you feel it? No, really: when you’re reading, your brain’s constantly stimulated. And it’ll continue to be stimulated when you put this down and do something else. Even if all you do is gawp listlessly at a tea towel, the information keeps flowing in, and your brain keeps chewing it up.
And that’s a good thing, because left to its own devices, the brain gets fidgety. Switch the lights off, deprive it of stimuli, and after a while it starts daydreaming. And if the lights never come back on, those daydreams become reality.
Your brain transforms into the ultimate unreliable narrator and soon you’ll believe all manner of disjointed oddness. One minute you hear the theme from Hollyoaks playing from nowhere, then you’re INSIDE the theme from Hollyoaks , which by now is full ofcolours, and they’re grinning at you, and then you realise you’re one of them: you’re a grinning blob of colour that lives inside the theme from Hollyoaks . Or maybe you’re a mile-wide pool of pork-flavoured honey with a bus and a hook for a face. Either way, you’ve gone bonkers.
That’s the basis for this week’s creepy Horizon special on sensory deprivation, in which six volunteers get slammed up in the dark for 48 hours. How creepy? Way creepy. The experiment takes place in a disused nuclear bunker; one of the men running it can’t be shown on camera ‘for security reasons’, and we’re told research like this was abandoned 40 years ago when the scientists conducting it decided it was ‘too cruel’. It’s the Fact Ents equivalent of a horror movie.
Three of the guinea pigs are simply kept in dark rooms, while the rest are made to wear eye masks that reduce the world to a grey blur, headphones that pump a continual white noise drone into their ears, and gigantic foam mittens so they can’t even scratch their bums for entertainment.
Meanwhile, a psychotherapist with an unnerving omnipresent grin monitors their progress using night vision cameras, taking notes each time they pace up and down, talk to themselves, or hallucinate. One sits on the end of the bed watching snakes and cars and the occasional human visitor; another (the comedian Adam Bloom, oddly enough) strolls round a non-existent pile of empty oyster shells.
These laugh-a-minute sequences are interspersed with talking-head testimony from former victims of sensory deprivation: a guy called Parris who was locked in solitary for years for a crime he didn’t commit, and former hostage Brian Keenan. Parris invented a fantasy world, then couldn’t escape it; Brian was tormented by imaginary music that wouldn’t stop playing
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