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December 18, 2004
Return to Dogville
[Warning: no, this is not meant ironically. If you want to be ironic, f**k off out of here.]
One Man and his Dog consists of a televised sheepdog trial, that is a competition between several farmers and their working dogs; the farmers make sounds in an amazing piercing bird-whistle language and the dogs respond with the beautiful physical intelligence only animals have, herding the sheep through gates and into circles. As anyone british will know, for many years One Man and his Dog has been a joke, a well-known absurdity, an embarassing anachronism to be elbowed out of the BBC schedules bit by bit. But in fact it's absolutely fascinating, especially in contrast to the prevailing TV monoculture. It used to be on every week, but now it's once a year, and they've long talked of axing it altogether. If you caught it by chance, not being party to the sneering jokes it has always inspired, it would seem a totally innovative concept: it features people and practices that are not seen on TV anywhere else in the world, ever. It shows an historically and culturally important relationship between humans and animals, a form of communication that is kept alive totally autonomously by a few people in remote places, a trans-species cultural artefact, a living distribution-system. It's not the fact that it's preserving some precious "heritage" that makes it worth salvaging, but simply the fact that it's so totally different to anything else; it's not nature programming, it's not sport, it's something totally other to the rest of TV. I fully expect that if Deleuze and Guattari were watching they'd have got a chapter out of it.
photo by Carsten Gyger
The BBC's perennial search for novelty and 'representation' of minority interests has obviously missed out here. Or rather, it's perfectly obvious how, to the metrocentric media folk who run the place, this supposed open-mindedness is in fact slaved to a very narrow view of what could possibly be interesting to people. Snobbishness always blinds people to learning anything outside their miserable ideas of what's "cool".
The Finals are showing on BBC2 at 5pm tomorrow.
ps the apparent dog theme is totally coincidental. I didn't set out to start a dog-blog.
Posted by undercurrent at December 18, 2004 06:39 PM