There are few lengths I won’t go to in order to mess things up for myself. Nothing really spectacular, of course. Not heroin. Not gambling. Just little things that make my life less interesting (and possibly less lucrative) than it could be.
I blame Perfect Documentary Syndrome. PDS is something I first noticed in my schooldays and it still applies as much today as it did in the 1980s.
What is PDS? PDS is the strange feeling that over-takes you when you see listed in the TV guide a documentary on a subject you are REALLY interested in. A subject you know a great deal about. Perhaps a subject that you’re slightly obsessed with. You feel queasy. You feel weird. And you don’t watch the programme.
I haven’t really stopped to analyse the reasons why, but I guess it’s a pretty obvious mixture of envy and ennui. After all, it should be you making the programme, or at least you who’s one of the talking heads explaining why exactly this thing means so much.
PDS isn’t just about TV shows, though. It applies in many spheres of life. Mil Millington has a really nice piece in the Guardian magazine this weekend about his uneasiness when his girlfriend started getting into gadgets. I think there’s a bit of PDS going on here, as there is when I’m luke-warm about the idea of buying a new G5 iMac, when my wife’s quite keen on me spending �800 on a shiny new computer.
I can trace a couple of times when PDS has had an effect, possibly on the entire course of my life. I run a fan-site for an obscure album called Consequences by Peter Cook and Godley and Creme, and once I got an email not only from a big cheese at Polygram records, but it was sent from – of all people – Tony Wilson’s email address. I think I emailed him back, but I never phoned. Consequences hadn’t been re-issued on CD then, but who knows what would have happened had I made the call. But PDS struck…
Another, potentially more disastous, occasion happened… well, I can remember it clearly. Studio C22 at Bush House. I was working on a World Service programme called East Asia Today, and one of the RPAs (I think it stood for Recorded Programme Assistants) got wind of the fact that what I really wanted to do was not wibble faders up and down on a mixing desk, but write TV drama. She mentioned this to the presenter who had similar ambitions. He bounded into the studio and said ‘Hey, I hear you’re interested in writing TV drama, do you know of any good software? What have you written?’. ‘Nothing, really’ I mumbled. ‘Oh. Okay then’ he said and walked out.
That presenter was Mike Bullen who went on to write something called Cold Feet, which you may have heard of.
I have been wibbling faders ever since.