You know those media-based clichés? The kind of imagery that television has served up for years? You might not see one for ages, then unexpectedly there is one right in front of you.
Last Monday evening I went in to the East End (or is it ‘east end’?) of that London to help Ash (the coolest guy in the world) make a video.
The venue was the office of the music magazine, The Wire.
I shall not open up what was done, who said what or the things that were discussed.
Instead, I’ll just concentrate on the offices of The Wire magazine.
If you were watching a TV dramatisation, and the scene shifted to ‘the offices of a music magazine’, you would, with a sense of inevitability, find yourself looking at a converted loft in the east end (East End?) of London.
Inside the TV set of the converted loft, we would see an open expanse of trendy office space. Large, metal-banded windows would throw an expanse of sunlight across the stripped-pine floor. Artificial light would beam down from spotlights set high in the vaulted ceiling, throwing oases of illumination across the office expanse.
Racks, made from pale wood, would line the two longest walls; open-ended boxes of paperwork and magazines would share shelves with industry-defining books and acres of vinyl – of all shapes and sizes.
Island-clusters of desks, littered with paperwork and stacked high, in hap-hazard towers, with CDs would share the office space; computer monitors and keyboards would be festooned with post-it notes.
Music would be leaking in to the office atmosphere from industrial-sized loudspeakers.
That’s the TV set that the designers would show you.
And the offices of The Wire magazine?
Well, they might have looked something like this (click on the image and when it has loaded, click on it again for the big view):
I’m not too sure what might be imitating what…