From The Archive: The Solitary Life of Cranes

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 smile

If 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.

Last night: Horizon - What Happened Before The Big Bang

Until recently, sixth form science had taught me that to start with there was nothing, and from that nothing came something. And that something came about with a massive explosion patronisingly called the Big Bang. Fine.

Apart from according to last night's Horizon, that's not exactly right, and if I've learned anything, it's to trust the television above all else.

So what happened before the big bang? Perhaps it's just me, but it seems you can reel out a scientist who will have a hypothesis to back up any wild theory you may care to construct, and another 8 scientists happily willing to shoot it down. Unless you've got Stephen Hawking attending your lecture of course. Fortunately for the producers on Horizon, these scientists appear to live in a sort of hippy commune for physics somewhere in Canada, and spend their days playing cricket and nonchalantly scribbling on blackboards. They must spend a fortune on chalk.

According to our hippy physicists, the universe is everything from a Swiss fondue to one of trillions of universes triggered by black holes. Throughout the show, I’m half expecting one of the scientists to remark “Look, we give up, it was God ok?” or to say "Really, we're just ants, and a light year is actually a centimetre, and the entire universe is another massive scientists petri dish" Ok, I'm obviously far from qualified, and to me the most plausible theory that's not my own seems to be a constantly inflating and deflating universe, in which gravity becomes repellent instead of attractive. I like that. Disgusting, repellent gravity making physicists lives hard.

All in all, an interesting documentary, and the BBC should be lauded for making such programming, but please, please, don't try and explain to me how there can be different kinds of nothing, because one nothing can actually have something. My brain bleeds.