Do you have an internet problem? Do you switch on the computer with the best of intentions, only to spend hours on Wikipedia learning facts you don’t need to know? Are you Google-crazy, stuck like a bluebottle on the world wide web?
For those of us who spend most of our downtime and perhaps a regrettable amount of our work-time pottering around on the internet, along comes another site that keeps on giving and giving. It’s called You Tube, it’s all about sharing video clips and it’s hours of fun. As with Google, you have to kiss some frogs along the way: there’s no shortage of US teenagers behaving badly and the like. But amid all that, such gems.
If you like your pop history, type “Grace Jones” and delight in her Slave to the Rhythm video, or compare her singing La Vie En Rose with Edith Piaf’s, extracted from a black-and-white movie from the Forties. And if you like your history history, you’ll find speeches by Stalin and Hitler and Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, along with an eerily beautiful clip of the Hindenberg floating over the Manhattan skyline one sunlit day in the Thirties, before it goes up in flames in Lakehurst. Be canny with your searches, though. Type in “Churchill” and you’ll get someone taking their pony, Churchill, over some jumps; type “Winston Churchill” and you’ll see the Greatest Briton in our finest hour. There’s funny stuff: Dawn French’s piss-take of Björk is a personal fave. There’s scary stuff: such as an amateur video of a shark stealing a marlin from an angler. And camp stuff: friends of Dorothy can luxuriate in clips from The Judy Garland Show (one clip – and it doesn’t get camper than this, surely – is a duet with a young Barbra Streisand).
While the bootlegging is lovely for us, it alarms the entertainment industry – You Tube recently had to take down some Saturday Night Live skits, for example. But the information superhighway is a two-way street, and agents, managers and scouts troll You Tube looking for fresh talent. Bands use it as a promotional tool, while two Californian teenagers, known as Smosh, won a contract to make videos for an internet network after their lip-synching clips of TV theme songs proved such a You Tube hit. The Smosh web-rags-to-riches story echoes that of You Tube’s founders. A little over a year ago, San Franciscans Chad Hurley and Steve Chen were unemployed and in debt; now they’re presiding over a successful site that is several steps ahead of big-bucks competition such as Google Video. It has to be one of the ironies of the internet that while its manifold charms lure millions of us away from the task in hand – whether that’s doing the cleaning or meeting a deadline – it’s the making of other people. Chad and Steve, we salute you, we salute You Tube.
coolhunter@thetimes.co.uk