If I Ruled Television: Less is more

This is the speech that Will Self delivered at the Broadcast and Beyond conference on 19 May 2010 in which he addressed an audience of professional broadcasters and told them what he would do if he ruled television:

To me, if there’s a spirit of British television it’s this: a title sequence for a current affairs or news programme that unites the individual viewer with the commonality.

Crash: Homage to JG Ballard

In memory of JG Ballard, who died a year ago today, here is the catalogue essay that Will Self wrote for the Crash exhibition at the Gagosian gallery in London recently:

“Illuminated arrays glowed through the night, like the perimeter lights of a colony of prison camps, a new gulag of penal settlements where the forced labour was shopping and spending … ” So wrote JG Ballard in his final novel, Kingdom Come, a dissection of crap modern Britain before the bubble burst. In Ballard’s evocation of society drifting waywardly into an elective collective psychopathy, it is the shopping mall that is the cynosure – at once a temple of consumerism and biosphere that, poisoned by re-circulated air and piped muzak, becomes wholly decoupled from the dull Surrey dormitory towns that surround it.