I was on the way back from the conference in London today, when the announcement came that the train was being diverted. If we wanted to carry on to Birmingham New St, we could stay on, and have an extra 90 minute journey that took us through Stafford, or we could get off at Nuneaton, get a train to Coventry and get to Birmingham International from there.
We chose the latter… which turned out to be a mistake. The train to Coventry had already been cancelled, and there was no sign of any more trains to come. So Tim, Nick and I found ourself in a taxi van with three strangers heading towards Birmingham.
Interesting bunch. One man was a logisitics consultant for the newspaper industry, the woman worked in e-commerce solutions for businesses, and the other guy was a voiceover for cartoons and radio – a guy called Marc Silk.
The cats in Ashleys Worlds
Of course, meeting Marc reminded me of a cartoon (for radio) series I’d created about thirteen years ago with Belinda Todd, Craig Parker, Merv Smith, Carl Bland and David Weatherley. Ashley’s Worlds was a great fun series to make and played on about 26 radio stations around New Zealand.
There was talk about turning it into a tv series – and at one point, into a motion-capture live-animated chat show with real guests and an animated Ashley (voiced by Craig) as the host. Never got anywhere with it, but always wish we’d gone further with that.
I’m going to give Kerryn and Haydn a copy of those shows, because I think their boys will really enjoy them. Unfortunately, when I went digging, it turns out that of the one hundred 4-minute episodes we made (two 50-part series), four five consecutive shows are missing. Hopefully someone out there has a recording of them, or they’re gone forever.
Birmingham voice talent
I looked Marc up when I got home, and I found an article about him in the Birmingham Post from late last year. I didn’t really know most of the characters he’s known for – mostly because I’m not under five, and we don’t own a television – but I was familiar with his work in what (through no fault of his) was the most disappointing movie in cinema history.
Still, an interesting ride back from Nuneaton, a winter wonderland outside the window, and a bunch of half a dozen strangers who were able to get it together to organise transport more efficiently and effectively than National Rail.
In the last three days, I’ve been delayed through train faults, staff non-arrival, ice on the tracks and other events that you would expect might be foreseeable and avoidable, what with the seasonal nature of winter (it being a season and everything).
But it’s nice when muckups like that lead to encounters with talented and interesting people.
The MeCCSA conference
Incidentally, if you’re interested, I recorded the conference presentation by Nick about the unreliability of research into online music that informs the public debate on filesharing, and the one by Tim and Simon about the creation of an online archive of a British jazz legend.
We didn’t record my presentation, about digital narrative and the Aftershock Project, but let’s pretend it was amazing, and the hundreds of people there were interested and impressed (in fact, it went okay and the audience both clapped at the end).
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