It was a small but pleasant coincidence that Sheret posted a Time Lord themed post on the same day that I stuck a new poster to my bedroom wall:
Not that I want to align myself with a Dalek’s attitude to the future. It’s just a great image, and a decent enough message to wake up to in the morning. A message, to put it in less imperious terms, that says Make Today Awesome. I’d even go as far as arguing that all of Doctor Who’s rhetoric, subliminal or otherwise, boils down to that basic principle.
But the TARDIS isn’t the only phonebox I’ve encountered recently. I spent August in Scotland, working at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Walking around that city for a month, you pass many a phonebox in the street:
The thing is, if you take a look closer, it’s not just any old phonebox. This phonebox, and three others that were scattered around Edinburgh for the duration of August, is owned by a organization with the sort of name that the Doctor tends to run into, on a space station somewhere miles into the future:
Upon entering the telephone booth, for absolutely no cost at all, anyone can listen to a short story, written by a comedian or an author, delivered via a ‘bespoke high tech automated handset’:
I loved this. I loved passing the phoneboxes and almost always seeing someone inside, sitting, standing or leaning, phone pressed to ear as a story was piped down the line, seemingly from afar. At the height of the festival’s mania, when the streets were packed and the venues were full, when my feet ached from flyering every day and my head ached from tearing tickets every night, I loved seeing people in the phoneboxes, calm little isolated units physically shut off from the rest of the crowded pavement. Five, ten or twenty minutes just listening, listening to a story.
But (and there’s always a but, isn’t there?), I would have changed one thing. I would have introduced more locational specificity. Or, to put it bluntly, I would have made each telephone box a bit more unique. You see, each box had 9 stories available, from a total possible selection of about 13:
At a glance, those four lists look fairly identical. It took me a couple of visits until I realised that there were slight variations in the stories on offer. But imagine if there had been four completely different sets of stories? So, if you had the time and the inclination, you would then have the incentive to travel to each of the four kiosks and listen to a completely different set of stories. Incentive beyond a completionist attitude, that is. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to purposefully visit all four kiosks across the city just to complete the set. Besides, it’s a very pretty map:
Had each telephone box had an entirely different set of stories, had each location provided more of a unique, specific selection, I’m almost certain more people would have visited individual kiosks for their particular offerings. Picture a Will Self fan stumbling across the phonebox outside of Pleasance and scanning the list, only to discover that they need to trek across the city to George St to hear his dulcet tones. I bet they would.
Inconvenient? Perhaps. Ultimately the telephone box is little more than an overblown story-tape. But I kind of like that inconvenience. Having to travel somewhere physically, to receive that age-old thing, the humble short story, via a phonebox of all things. Physical format fetishism taken to the extreme. It’s a far cry from a click and a download, and even from the paper pages of a book. I like that something so solid and durable dispenses something so fleeting and intangible. And most of all, I like that it happens on the street. I like that someone, anyone can just be passing by, slip into the kiosk and listen to a story, receive a bitesized chunk of culture for free. There needs to be more of this kind of disposable, easily accessible culture-in-the-wild. I don’t know that listening to a short story in a telephone booth can Make Today Awesome, but I think it can probably Make Today Marginally Nicer.
http://www.theinvisibledot.com/1693/
I like the idea of different stories in different locations, but if you want to encourage interactivity then I think an even better method would be to have different parts of a story scattered across the city. To really increase the location-specificity the story could be set within the city, referencing places (even shops or cafés – plenty of sponsorship and funding opportunities there) that the listener would pass on their journey.
That kind of option would almost be prescribing a particular route or walking tour, though. If you want to give more choice then you can leave options for the listener to make a choice about what happens next in the story – different decisions will lead you to seek out a different telephone box to continue with the story. Check out the ‘interactive audio novel’ from Hurts on Spotify for a similar sort of experience (only with less walking): http://bit.ly/d6OFQj