I was sitting in our living room wondering if I should ignore my doctor’s advice, when I started thinking about a really old idea that I once presented to a television station here in Munich. One of the major problems about being unwell is that you inevitably end up watching day time television, which is dreadful. Endemol calls this kind of programming non-scripted entertainment, the rest of the world calls it hell.
So my mind starts to wonder and I start thinking about this old idea and how, surprisingly, no one has done it yet. In fact it amazes me that, with all of the technology around today that the idea hasn’t already been done and been built upon.
You see Peter, I’m a huge fan of stories. Always have been and back in 2001 I went along this television station and presented a really simple story that turned out to be rather difficult to do. Maybe the idea was too grand, the scale to big, not to mention the cost of making it work but sitting on my sofa watching dreadful television I realised that the time now might be right to do this sort of thing.
The idea bubbled up again at the beginning of this year when I was working on a case study for someone; albeit on a smaller scale, but the idea, in essence, was the same and in a way my walk to Hamburg is a low budget version of an idea I had nearly ten years ago:
Combining real life and fiction.
Let me ask you a question Peter; do you like “whodunits?” I’m a huge fan of Edgar Wallace myself. Do you like trying to work out who the murderer is? I know I and most of my friends do. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be in the story and not enjoy the privilege of being able to watch the story as it is served by a director and camera crew but to be really in it? What would be like to go into the story and talk to the characters and try and work it all out for yourself? What would it be like to watch a film, read a book, subscribe to a newspaper, watch the characters on the Internet and then physically go to the place where they live and work; check into the Hotel and have a drink in the pub with the man you think is the villain? What would it like to actually be there when “something happened”. I have. It’s something I think would be fun; something people would be interested in and something that would be difficult to ignore.
I think I had the television station up for it but lost them when I said that we would have to build a village.
Anyway, my leg is feeling good, there is snow in Oberstaufen and I’ve lost Jack who seems to be making his own way to Hamburg.
Hope Hamburg is treating you well and that GREY haven’t stolen too many of your creative staff.
Warm regards,
Marcus Brown – aka The Kaiser.
