Snipping and marking up cuttings can be the worst kind of drudgery and I would much sooner have been at Graham Marks' launch party, but the act of scanning through saved papers from six weeks back inevitably throws up one or two pieces that were turned back and put aside but never actually read at the time.
One such piece was 'Bring back the talking heads' from The Times, December 20 2003, in which Philip Pullman, in the course of appraising the Big Read, came up with this suggestion: "Imagine this: every night for a year, say around the time that Newsnight finishes, there's a very short straight-to-camera piece - no longer than five minutes - in which a different person each day speaks about a book they love. No competition; no voting; no distracting visuals; no ranking in order; literary people and non-literary people, old books and new books, fiction, poetry... It would be the best thing on television."
Well, in these days when most families have digital camcorders, and Windows Movie Player is freely available to compress movies into web viewable format, this is an idea that ACHUKA could take up. Shall we say 3-minutes and 3-megabytes as our maximum length and filesize, in the first instance? Who's up for talking about their favourite book first? I'm not expecting an onslaught, but we'll see.
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