Here’s the Q and A which became this piece on Channel 4.
Can you briefly fill me in on your background and what you’ve worked on prior to 230 Miles of Love?
Sure, when I was growing up I was always interested in writing and drama – I was a member of the National Youth Theatre and I studied drama at Manchester University. Since I left in 2000 I’ve been working as a freelance writer doing various things like journalism for The Guardian and Arena, restaurant reviews and some odder things like murder mystery plays and speech writing. I was also lucky to be one of the winners in two of the BBC Talent competitions and basically I’ve got to the point now where my job is as a writer of strange and occasionally wonderful things; things like www.230milesoflove.com
Where did the idea for 230 Miles of Love come from?
It was a perfect storm of nerdiness, circumstance and alcohol. I love the web, I love GPS stuff, I’d read about developments in satnav technology that would make a satcom possible and I make my living as a writer. Mix up those elements with wine, beer and too much of that thin green liqueur that we brought back from Corfu and you have an accurate genesis of the satcom.
How would you describe the premise and its purpose? What were your aims when you started off on the project?
The premise was that this was potentially a new way of reaching an audience and a new way of looking at a piece of existing technology, so it seemed like a fun thing to experiment with. The over-riding purpose was to make people happy. While I was developing it, it seemed like it had the potential to be successful so I thought it would be good if we could channel that into something so I spoke to the Motivation Charitable Trust (www.motivation.org) and we decided to use the project to try and raise awareness and money for them as well.
How successful do you think it’s been in fulfilling those aims? How do you hope to build on its success?
So far it’s been an amazing success, I’m really pretty stunned. It’s only been going now for 16 days and we’ve already had over ten thousand people listening to the show, downloading it, asking questions about how it works, getting interested in it and telling us it made them laugh. We even had our first donation this morning! On that basis I think it’s safe to say that it’s the most successful satcom about the M6 motorway that has ever existed. I think that’s pretty incredible given the fact that people have to get their head around a pretty weird concept (that the comedy knows where you are on the M6) to fully get it. Plus it’s also a show about a motorway, so you’d think that’s got to be a subject with niche appeal.
There are an exhausting amount of plans for building on its success. It strikes me that satcoms and geographically-aware writing in general are an industry waiting to happen. Give me five minutes and I could give you details of five different satcom-style projects that could make millions. Unfortunately, at the moment I haven’t got the time or resources to focus on them all but I’ll certainly be doing more in the future and I think writers and performers looking for a new way to reach an audience should jump all over it. It’s basically free, involves no commissioning process and doesn’t require massive amounts of tech skills – if you can record an mp3, have some comedy talent and read a map you can make a satcom. If anyone wants to know more about how to do it then have a look at box 4 of www.230milesoflove.com or just drop me an email movingaudio AT gmail DOTCOM and I’ll do my best to help.
What are your thoughts on how sat-nav technology – and the uses and situations associated with it – lends itself to comedy, and other forms of rich media content?
Comedy gets better the more you know about your audience. Stand-ups often spy on crowds before they go on stage to pick out various people, or elements of the situation that they’re about to go into. Then when they’re on stage they can talk about those specific things and they usually get a laugh because the audience appreciates the shared knowledge. Writing comedy with GPS assistance gives you a similar sort of advantage because you have masses of information about your audience such as where they are, where they’ve been, how fast they’re going and so on. In 230 Miles of Love we’ve got a sketch that ends differently depending on whether a driver takes the M6 toll or not and there’s a sketch that only plays when you drive under the variable message signs. The level of information you can bring to a sketch really enhances the audience’s enjoyment.
Using the technology for distributing entertainment/content is still a very new idea – what possibilities do you think there are for using the technology in this way? As far as I’m aware – and Guinness are in the process of verifying this – 230 Miles of Love is the first time that a satnav has been used to broadcast comedy, which means that this is pretty much year zero for the satcom. Extending that to thinking about the satnav as a broadcast medium, it’s basically radio v2 because it can do all the things that radio can but it knows that much more about your circumstances, allowing you to deliver content that’s tailored for a very precise situation. There are ways of broadcasting GPS-aware video as well, so that’s basically Television v2.
One of the projects that I’m doing with www.movingaudio.co.uk which gives you an idea of the possibilities this medium has is a horror story which would be broadcast via your satnav when it became foggy. So as you start driving into the mist and the visibility reduces to the extent that you have to slow down and all you can see in front of you are one set of red brake lights, suddenly this creepy story starts up. It would be infinitely serendipitous for that to happen with radio but for satnavs you can plan for it. How cool would that be?
You’ve only just scratched the surface of ‘locative’ media – I believe 230 Miles of Love is the first in a series of location-specific comedy/media projects you’re working on. What can you tell me about what’s in store for the future, and what innovations will be involved?
230 Miles of Love is the first episode in a series of six programmes called Moving Comedies that I’m producing via a project called www.movingaudio.co.uk. The series was something that I wanted to do that looked at entirely different ways of broadcasting and making people laugh. The broad theme of the Moving Comedies is transport and places and each show will be delivered in a different way.
I think advances in technology are presenting some really new and valid ways of approaching audiences and I believe there are even new types of audiences to approach. The next four shows in the series need to be secret because I’m relatively sure I’d go to jail if word got out. However, I can tell you about the last show which is a comedy about who we are as a species and our place in the universe and it will be broadcast towards as many habitable regions of space as possible.
So the Moving Comedy series runs all the way from the world’s first satcom all the way through to the world’s first SETIcom and hopefully stops off at some interesting places in-between.
What impact do you think it has on the relationship between people and places? Obviously it’s based around the concept of connecting with your surroundings while driving, by being specific to your location at set points of the journey. More broadly, what do you think is important about this relationship people may have with their geography, and how do you think new media can perhaps become more effective in stimulating this?
It is funny to think that when people first started commentating on the web in the mid 90s, there was an initial hysteria that this would spell the end of human-to-human interaction as we knew it. People would basically just become hermits with modems and increasingly poor skin. Of course, as the web has progressed it’s become more and more about enabling interaction. So whether it’s finding people with the same interests or just organising great big pillow fights that anyone can join in with, it seems that people have used the web to create more human interaction, not less.
I think a similar thing could happen with the geospatial web as it connects people to their immediate environment in a very direct way, plus because it’s accessed out in the world it should totally avoid the bad skin issues. It would be nice to think that communities will be able to harness that to create a stronger sense of place and belonging which could be an amazing force for positive change.
New media are seen as being a disruptive force due to how they remove the constraints of space and time (we have access to much of what we want when we want it, rather than waiting for the evening edition of a local newspaper, for example, and can construct relationships with people all around the world). This project would seem to be reclaiming some of the ‘old media’ ground by directly connecting people with their surroundings, but with the new media advantage of it being in real-time? What’s your take on that, and what do you think are the advantages of 230MoL in doing this?
Sorry Simon I’m not sure I understand this question.
What entertains you during car journeys?
My wife.
What are your ambitions for the future?
I want to keep making people happy in odd and exciting ways.
