When your resident factual expert isn’t busy grooming his beard and nibbling on scotch eggs, he likes to spend his time hunting through tellyland for the more obscure documentaries. Sure, we all love to watch some Attenborough or catch up on Hitler’s secret shark, but there’s something satisfying about learning something entirely new, isn’t there?
Which brings me neatly to the (award winning) Solitary Life of Cranes which I discovered recently, nestled deep in the SeeSaw vaults with the VHS tapes and IT department.
There are three layers to every city: The network of tunnels beneath our feet, street level, and the buildings that bend into the sky. And voyeuristically perched above all of these are a small group of isolated people peering down from their glass bottomed cabs. Anonymous, forgotten, and disregarded by the marching feet below them, crane drivers see the world from a God-like perspective.
You see these little glimpses of people's lives as they go past, and views you're never going to see anywhere else of city life, looking down on it. And that has probably given me a really different perspective on life...it's just odd little vignettes of people's lives that make you smileIf you suffer from vertigo being a crane operator probably isn’t the job for you, and yet as you descend into the tube after a day in an office, you can’t help but feel envious of the drivers as they clamber hundreds of feet to work every morning. The sense of wonder they describe is contagious. There's a beautiful paradox in the crane driver, sat alone in a glass cabinet and yet completely out of view, and while it's easy to believe they lead a solitary life, the truth appears far from it.
Set to a mesmerizing electronic-mechanical soundtrack that’s part Sigur Ros part Portishead, this isn’t a documentary about construction, it is poetry and it might just change the way you look at your surroundings forever.