drawings from popular and reality television by Jenny Robins. Suggestions welcome - use hashtag

Monday, June 29, 2015

Just Another Day: Soho 1985 - Ian Board

The history of Vox Pop of course goes back as far as the Latin suggests, this is not so far but it was filmed the year I was born. Which is to say 1985. On the BBC Four London Collection, this episode of Just Another Day focuses on the ever evolving face of Soho, doing that charming BBC thing of just trying to capture the everyday and the extraordinary side by side as they do exist. Ian Board was owner of the infamous Colony Room a Soho institution and members bar for artists and outsiders which sadly closed in 2008. Quite a lot of the episode is older Soho residents reminiscing about how they miss the lovely friendly whores they used to know round there when they were young and I loved how Board indulgently cuts through the crap with this line at the end.

How deliciously nostalgically cyclical and unlikely, to sit in 2015 watching an old lush from 1985 reminisce about fraternising with ''some of the richest and most famous and successful people...a lot of homosexuals as they were known in those days" some 40 years before that. And if you google Ian Board this video clip is the first thing that comes up - a fragment in the internet ether.

Think how much footage of Soho must have been taken on smart phones in the last few days (Pride 2015) and let your mind boggle at the enlarged world of data we live in. It definitely isn't what it used to be, but I don't know that the technology we have today will give us any more insight into what it actually is, when we come to look back in 40 years ourselves.