INTRO
As the camera pans slowly, wordlessly around a dimly lit flat in the opening scene of Chris Petit’s “Radio
On” (1979) it lingers on a hand-written note, the last lines of which read - “All change in society passes through a sympathetic collaboration with tape recorders, synthesisers and telephones. Our reality is an electronic reality”. A downbeat version of David Bowie’s “Heroes” plays, meandering between English and
German. The note’s presumed author lies naked in a bath and quite dead…
1.
The future that Chris Petit suggests in “Radio On” - future of bleak hinterlands, declining industry, a remorseless slide into technology, fresh descent into conflict, neutered masculinity - all captured in “uncanny realism”.
Petit welcomes viewer into new world, a world of modern inertia – to be explored with reference to Frederic
Jameson - the “very triviality of daily life in late capitalism is itself the desperate situation against which all the formal solutions, the strategies and subterfuges, of high culture as well as of mass culture, emerge”.
But what does “Radio On” hero do? Does the “banal isolationism” (Sandhu) of the film point towards the banal isolationism of future technologies? Does it create a hero incapable of agency and why? Heroism intrinsically linked to the past, to repetition - This hero meanders through a grim present without regard for influencing it. Society change is to be borne.
Ideas of Neo realism - “cinema of the seer and no longer of the agent” (Deleuze) - Hero ultimately plays himself out of the film with Kraftwerk “Ohm Sweet Ohm” and takes a train for anywhere.
2.
Kraftwerk, a sonic road movie - the embodiment, of a motorik dystopia – of a cold emotionless future that could never come to pass? A future of constant motion, but no progress?
To be looked at with - Le Carre – perceptions of cold war, drudgery, tedium – or the beauty of war as merely threat, menace, subtle agency, without recourse to actuality of violence.
Kraftwerk to be explored as outsider robotic heroes. What do they do? How do they conceive future? Love songs to computers, the synthesised hero, the digitisation of their past on “The Mix”.
Explore ideas of music for a road, with the past no place to linger, the future a goal without hope.
3.
But let us continue on the road. Take away the asphalt and try another road. Another road movie - ITV’s
“Sharpe’s Peril” (2008) – Can Sharpe, dismissed as a relic in his own age, be seen as a truly dystopian hero for our times? - Diffused uncertainly into the world, limping out on a troubled television channel’s website -
& only to PC computers – He roams an Indian landscape he does not understand, endowed with prosthetic death, seeking mere survival in a despised world he cannot escape.
– A pastiche – explored with concepts of “nostalgia” Frederic Jameson. “Sharpe’s Peril” representing nostalgia for the perceived certainties of the 90’s original series, which itself represented a nostalgia for the
50’s and the western – linked to Slavoj Zizek (awry essay)
Sharpe as throwback to political agency? To the possibility of class insurrection? To working class potentiality? – The ideas of “the ideological project to return to the hard certainties of a more visible and rigid class structure” Jameson. What direction can Sharpe point us for digital future? The antithesis of “Radio
On” hero – but with a markedly similar fate…

4.
To another rebel outsider –another maverick - Bill Drummond of KLF. Subversive class conscious pop hero?
– Ideas of technological utopia to be found in KLF/The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu “It’s Grim up North” –
Bleak motorway techno journey building into socialist rave communality.
The sound of the past, reimagined for the future, replete with the sounds of factory clanking and forgotten raves – linked back to Jameson’s ideas of nostalgia.
KLF – examined with reference to split personas, reactive agency, and ideas of this (self styled) disgusted outsider hero figure present in their work. (- Linked to Sharpe) What future do these subversive heroes imagine?
CONCLUSION
How do the above heroes come together to point a way in a digital future? Could they change society in this electronic reality?
Some Selected Reading
Slavoj Zizek – Awry essay
Frederic Jameson – The Shining essay
Mark Mazullo – Remembering Pop essay
Giles Deleuze – Cinema II
John Le Carre – The Looking Glass War; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Radio On essays - Sukhdev Sandhu
Film
Radio On – Chris Petit
Sharpe’s Peril – Tom Clegg
Slavoj Zizek – A Pervert’s Guide to Cinema
O Lucky Man – Lindsay Anderson
Music
KLF – It’s Grim Up North
Kraftwerk – Radio-Activity, The Mix