Sunday, February 10, 2008

Nostalge.

Do you remember Bitsa? It was a bit like Scrapheap Challenge without the competition and the alpha males.
It had a great theme tume
Bitsa this, bitsa that, put 'em all togetha and whaddya got? etc etc etc
And two scruufy presenters, scruffman and scrufflady, who pulled a lever and down fell a selection of plastic bottles, cardboard tubes and other waste materials that they looked at for a second in puzzlement before an exaggerated lightbulb moment, after which they selected various items and built things- silly things like puppet shows, grabbing-hand things, and other pointless gadgets.
It was great, it made me feel really happy watching it because it created its own little Bitsa world, somewhere in the same solar system as Sesame Street with its wacky songs and kindly logic.

I'd thought of making a little cardboard or wooden shop to sell CDs at gigs. I'm useless at it. I could never run a business, even though I was a shop assistant in my former life. If it was someone else's CD, I could, but my own... it's a bit like selling my eyelashes or something, very personal.
I mean it, you know. I am just trying to work out what to make the little shop out of. I wonder if you can still get balsa wood?
I think I would really like making it and I could paint it all sorts of colours, a bit like my friend Joan's tiny Indian wooden storyboard, which unfolds with little bits of the story painted under each folding section in bright glossy paint.
It got woodworm, which I thought was marvellous- a living, breathing occupant changing the storyline by nibbling through it, reality meeting fantasy in miniature.

1 comment:

Nick Campbell said...

First time I read your blog in ages and you mention Bitsa! A beautiful programme. You're right about its Bitsa-world, and I was in love with the presenters. One day in Brighton I saw the bloke drive past - a bit of Googling revealed that the pair of them now run a kind of 'landscape art' thing in East Sussex called "Red Earth", but I never managed to get along to anything they did, and now I live in North Wales, sigh...