There’s no getting around it – life in the 21st century is frenetic and only gathering steam as it powrs along like a bargain hunter at post-Christmas sales.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this of course – thanks to the marvels of technological advancement, we were supposed to be sitting back in Wall-E-like obesity-encouraging lethargy while (hopefully non-sentient) machines did all the drugerous stuff for us.
Alas it hasn’t worked out that way and with life set to fast forward and then some, people are understandably looking for ways to take a step back, smell the roses and chill the ever-loving f**k out.
Enter Slow TV, a “genre of “marathon” television coverage of an ordinary event in its complete length” such as a long train trip where there is only the quiet of un-narrated vision and nothing to absorb but the unadorned scene before you.
It proved wildly popular on Australian TV when one of the public broadcasters, SBS, broadcast a three hour and then 17 hour coverage of The Ghan train silently passing through the ochre-red sands of central Australia.
You can find similarly-enthralling, zen-inducing train journeys – declaration: much as I love the views and yes the idea, I am not Slow TV’s demographic; not that I can’t relax – I can spend hours lost in a book – but just not my thing – on Train Driver’s View YouTube channel, which according to the good folks at Laughing Squid (who must be damn near comatose after researching and writing the article) offers a through the gorgeous Scandinavian winter landscape of the Norwegian countryside, making its legendarily mountainous way from Bergen to Oslo.”
And according to the blurb that accompanies the film, you won’t miss a second of the journey in real time …
“(translated) Experience the whole journey from Bergen to Oslo from the orchestral place, on the day one hundred years after the race was opened. Not a minute we miss, the program lasts for as long as the entire journey takes, that is, seven hours and sixteen minutes with just one person. You have never seen Bergensbanen this way unless you are a driver. Four cameras are on the train Four cameras are on the train, and in addition a quarter of the way, a tunnel becomes a black hole, which used to collect archive taxes from the Bergensbanen.”
There are lots of other trips you can take away from the everyday, a lovely, relaxed departure from freneticism that gets you out of your cubicle and into the vast, snowy beauty of a world that most of people don’t stop long enough to contemplate.
Enjoy your snowy hours-long escape …