Some correspondence and responses in the week since the Imagine programme was transmitted.

Firstly, Stuart of the blog Feeling Listless was disappointed that the programme had no website with further information about its content. Quite unusual for the BBC, really. You’re used to hearing an announcer over the credits of a documentary saying “If you’d like further help about depression / adult literacy / switching to digital TV / doing the Hokey Cokey, go to www. (etc.) or phone 0800 (etc.).”

Not so with Imagine. The individual programme’s title, “www.herecomeseverybody.co.uk” just led to the relevant short description on the BBC’s What’s On site. Perhaps this was a sly tie-in with the DIY spirit of the subject, with the pitting of Unpaid Amateur Webland against Paid Professional TV in the gold rush for people’s leisure time. That someone out there would do the follow-up research for them, in their own free time, for no payment. In which case, they thought right:

I wondered if you’d seen this annotation I put together for the Imagine
programme …

http://feelinglistless.blogspot.com/2006/12/imagine-links.html

Stuart.

Lovisa writes from Gothenburg, Sweden:

dear mr edwards,
I read in your diary that there was a documentary about you and internet diaries on bbc1. Am very interested in seeing it, but I find the bbc website retarded and cannot find anything about it or if there is a possibility to download it. in sweden you can download everything that has been shown on public service for 30 days, which is really cool.

could you post a link or something..? would be lovely.

Try a torrent site like www.uknova.com. UK Nova has an admirable sense of responsibility: only programmes which are unavailable on DVD or anywhere online are allowed to have their torrents hosted. You can find all sorts of rare gems there, past and present – the 1979 Tom Stoppard play ‘Professional Foul’ starring the late Peter Barkworth, for instance. Last year’s ‘South Bank Show’ on Alan Bennett. It’s completely replaced my video recorder. Though like VCRs, it takes a while to work out how to work torrents, along with something called ‘Port Forwarding’. Which sadly has nothing to do with getting a letter to a sailor boy.

Here’s a blogger’s response that singles me out, via Googling my own name (an ‘ego-search’). Yes, I know that way lies madness, and I’ve more or less kicked the habit these days, but on this occasion of Internet Use As Solipsism I feel it was warranted. From Nathan Williams of Simiant.com (link):

Uh so I sat down to watch Imagine on the BBC last night, the one where Alan Yentob tells us about the Internet, and was disappointed to find that at least, what, 15 minutes (?) of the program was dedicated to shots of Alan either posing or pulling confused and puzzled expressions. Shame, could have been much better. Also who was Toby? And where was Tom Coates et al? And why Dickon Edwards? Why?

As my mother must think on occasion.

Why Dickon Edwards? You’d have to ask the programme makers. I didn’t seek them out; they came for me. Though perhaps it helped that I came with a selection of suits and ties to choose from, and had done my own make-up.

By the way, I’m writing this while wearing a tie, shirt and suit trousers, even though I’ve only left the house to go shopping in Highgate and have barely spoken to anyone else in person today. I wouldn’t want newcomers to the diary who saw me on TV to think I dress that way purely for the cameras. I dress this way so I can think straight.

As for Toby, the young man who sat on Mr Yentob’s Internet Sofa and showed him around the Web, I ‘imagined’ (or rather hoped) he was a kind of BBC Houseboy, an arcane position available to executives during the earliest days of the Corporation, and never revoked. Like the Pronunciation Unit, but more frequently consulted. It’s said Michael Grade was once offered a half-naked Indian boy from the 1930s to follow him around TV Centre whispering into his ear “You ARE right about Doctor Who, memsahib.” Said purely by madmen, I must add.

I didn’t know who Tom Coates was, so I looked him up. It transpires he’s ‘well-known as an expert in Social Software’. Which is where I feel like Mr Yentob somewhat. Mr Coates has been blogging since 1999 and has won all kinds of awards for it. ‘Bloggies’ they’re called. Including a Lifetime Achievement Award, defined as a one-off gong for “Webloggers who have been blogging at least since January 1, 2001.”

Though I’ve written this diary since 1997, and have been quoted in magazines (Select Magazine featured the diary once – that rather dates it), and have a known following of kind readers, I guess these are just not the sort of readers who vote in awards for blogs. They can’t all come here out of sarcasm.

Besides, I’m not part of that gang, by design or default, accident or deliberation. I don’t see myself as part of what some call the ‘blogosphere’. I don’t keep tabs on what other bloggers are saying, I don’t ‘tag’, I don’t allow for comments, and the one time I tried to Join In – converting the blog to a LiveJournal – I realised it just wasn’t me. I’m better off going it alone like this. There is danger in numbers.

Competing with other blogs, counting the comments, is not my cup of Twinings Aromatics. The only competition is with myself – I struggle to write at all some days. I just want to provide something you might not get elsewhere.

“I may not be better than other people, but at least I’m different.’

-Rousseau

I write as if I’m read by people who don’t usually go on the Web. When I began the diary, there were no blog communities, no comments boxes, no sidebars with a list of Blog Friends. I had no Web friends; that was the whole point. I was not so much an explorer on virgin soil as an outcast shipwrecked. When the colonies came, I tried to join in; then I realised they were from the same world which had exiled me in the first place. Although I’m happy to co-exist with them as they draw up new boundaries and name the things I was doing already (‘Web diary’ becoming ‘blog’), I feel a fraud if I try to pass myself off as a citizen of their world.

Am I still talking about blogging? I’m not sure.