The National Media Museum - Bradford, UK

16th July 2013, Free (joined by Kieron Casey)

Hello you

For my maiden voyage into all this, I thought I'd take a trip down memory and Little Horton Lane to visit the place that saw me and many of my generation through the tedium of an adolescence in the provinces. However, this is not the overture for a nostalgic tongue-bath from yours truly. I just have to look at other teenage comforts such as Red Dwarf and The Deftones to see how vulnerable my younger days really were.

As a child, this place had magic - we filmed mannequins of Beauty and the Beast before riding a magic carpet in front of a blue screen that dazzled reticent Northerners into sitting rigidly still, whilst on screen they were dodging Krakatoan eruptions.

As a Bradfordian child, this place had to be consistently so - friends and I talk about this place like unfunny students talk about Button Moon.

The museum stands on top of a hill by the temporarily defunct library and decrepit ice-rink in a once-proud huddle of culture presented in 1960s' brutalism. Look at my works ye mighty and despair! Like so many others, the National Media Museum has tried to hide its concrete soul with a swirl of post-millenial glasswork in an effort that seems an apt nimism. There's an air of constant regeneration, not always for the better. Even the name 'The National Media Museum' is an understandable rebranding of 'The National Museum of Photography, Film and Television', which itself is an expansion of simply 'The Photography Museum'. This museum, much like its glass facade, is a fluid concept.

Foyer

The Media Museum presents itself well. Its clean lines and pervading coolness are a snug fit for the subject matter. It offers an IMAX, an excellent art-house cinema, a middle-class cafe and a decent enough gift shop selling your usual school-trip bibelots (rainbow-print rubbers, et al). It's an inviting space, all clearly signposted with lanyard-clad folk loitering here and there, handy for those of us with the concentration of a spaniel.

Basement - Photography

It figures that the museum's oldest collection is also its grandest. The Media Museum boasts the greatest collection of early photography in the world. Big words, I know, and I'm not taking them back. Showcased in the entrance is the world's first negative. The first. In the world. Despite my disappointment in it not depicting a cat in a box or a selfie outside the Berlin Hard Rock Cafe, one can't help but be moved by the humility and gravity of the ghostly bay windows in their tiny glory. Further along is a Victorian photography parlour in which you are invited to throw a blanket over your head, look inside a wooden box and shout, 'Watch the birdie' while your friend sits there looking bored (an easy target for the sardonic critic, but I was enjoying myself). The cavalcade of cameras through the ages displayed in seaside kiosks was charming enough but, without meaning to sound like a beastly philistine, seen one camera... etc.

The real coup-de-ace in the collection are the items belonging to film pioneer George Albert Smith. His studio in Hove saw the birth of colour film, editing and (rather wonderfully) the close-up and it's all on display here, including the very first colour motion camera. Needless to say, I was tumescent throughout.

The basement really feels like the most 'museumy' area in the building and it boasts some internationally impressive artifacts. It also has the most academic tone of the collection which is why I was kept here longer than anywhere else.

Ground Floor - Internet Exhibition

For a free exhibition, these criticisms may be a little harsh. After all, its topic is explained in some depth. My problem, however, is whenever people talk about the internet there's more back-slapping than at an Apple Corps Christmas party and we fail to mention spam, trolling, grooming, piracy or the dark internet and whatever monsters lie therein. To this tune, our little gallery sings in perfect harmony: Tim Berners-Lee's efforts are like prehistoric man smashing a skeleton to bits with a bone to the sound of Richard Strauss. Perhaps they were. Maybe I'm so jaded in the twilight of my twenties that any achievements of the modern era seem like fiddling while Rome burns - or maybe I just long for some fucking balance!

Either way, it was nice to see their timeline of home computers.

 

'Ooh! Weren't old machines funny looking?' 

Shut up. They were.

1st & 2nd Floors - Exhibition Space

With the summer holidays just around the corner, it's no surprise that these areas are kiddicentric. One regards animated films, the other, onscreen fairytales. Both were fine. It's unfair to wax cynical on stills from films I didn't know existed, but to be fair they also had models from Fantastic Mr. Fox, stills from Studio Ghibli and Roald Dahl's note book so I'll knock this sneering tone right on the head.

I'm evidently not the target audience, but I tell you where I might be...

3rd Floor - Experience TV & TV Heaven

Dixons, 1952

A newish wing of the building is dedicated to television history (from a more technical angle than one of content). It was interesting enough with some nice set pieces like a wall of old tellies and even a telstar (a communications satellite with an offensively catchy 60s hit in its honour). It's about here the sheer amount of reading to be done to get the full Media Museum experience becomes clear. I'm not averse to a bit of reading, but when you've been stood for an hour, are surrounded by screaming kids and have Domesday Book to get through, one longs for the comforts of home and a relevant book.

There are some welcome nods to the museum I used to know. The newsreading desk is back: you sit behind a desk and read the news. Mardi fucking gras! There's the good old film set. Whereas before you messed around with extreme close-ups of the Beast's tusks or Beauty's cleavage, we're now treated to a blank slate: a sofa in a house. Dream a dream, Science Museum Group. The format seems to prove a little fruitless as the great British public would sooner perform self-dentistry than do something film-worthy unless they really had to. So we were left with an awkward dad and his likewise daughter filming an empty settee like some desperate post-funeral home video.

There's an editing room too, which hit me as particularly strange as editing is a job so boring, directors get someone else to do it. I mulled on this until I saw the production desk next to it. No, really. There's an admin desk in the middle of a museum. Merry Christmas, sweetheart. 

The afore mentioned suite invites you to edit a scene from Emmerdale. The 'delete' key was smashed to bits (it took a team of writers three weeks to write that gag).

Then came 'TV Heaven', a service that lets you pick from a selection of television programmes to watch for free at your leisure. If you think this sounds like an inconvenient YouTube, you'd be right. They must be aware of this as, by the end of the month, they plan to shack up with the BFI and provide a similar service as they do on the South Bank: showing things no one else has. A step in the right direction, of course, but I can't help wondering if this format is becoming irreversibly obsolete. We'll have to see. This said, I harbour a deep nostalgia for 'TV Heaven'. My friend and I visited the place so often, the script of the Hotel Inspectors episode of Fawlty Towers is written in blood behind my eyelids.

"Is it possible for me to reserve the BBC2 channel for the duration of this televisual feast?" No need, mate: TV Heaven!

Naaaa, nah nah, na NA nah nah nah naaaaah, Telstar 1962

4th Floor - The Magic Factory

It's by the time you climb to the 4th floor that The Media Museum's colours as an arrant kid's museum are unfurled. Aside from its insidious and plain creepy name, The Magic Factory is a proto-circus sideshow where its victims are subject to magical light and factorial sounds. For me, it smacks of effort and I think even as a kid I'd have seen right through it. It acts as a respite for the children of cinephilic parents bargaining,

"If we can just look at this dusty camera that doesn't even work, I'll let you put your head in a shiny bin that goes whoosh."

To put it bluntly, I've seen this idea done a thousand times and with a thousand times more charm.

5th Floor - Animation Gallery and Games Lounge

By the fifth floor, fatigue was winning and the reams of text festooning the walls of the Animation Gallery served only to exacerbate, which is a shame as these exhibits are the most impressive since the basement. An astonishing object is Louis le Prince's Single-lens Cine Camera, arguably the world's first film motion camera (if you ask me, which you pretty much are, it definitely is). Why they think it wise to put such an impressive item in a gallery that shares a colour scheme with a footballer's away shirt from the early 90s is beyond me but there you go. As long as the kids are entertained, ey? Surroundings aside, it's an astonishing thing. The rest of the gallery's not so bad either, some lovely pictures of The Wyfe of Bath's Tale from the animated series The Canterbury Tales but, oh boy, bring your reading glasses.

I don't know what this is

The Games Lounge is a good idea, kids love video games and this kid is no exception. My problem here is the implementation; there's nothing about it that doesn't feel tacked on. It's a shame as this format could be well executed and I think, further down the line and with a little imagination, it's possible. But Oh!, dear reader, please don't get me wrong: the opportunity to play Goldeneye once more is a treat in any room and the selection of games is solid and relatively broad.

Here, I saw a woman in her 80s playing the first Prince of Persia. She was really good. No reason she shouldn't be, I just didn't expect to see that.

6th Floor - Profiles

Unfortunately, this area of the museum was closed for refurbishment, much to the delight of my feet. I seem to remember enjoying it in those halcyon days. They had an Oscar and some Golden Globes on display, if I recall. Maybe I'm getting 'The Media Museum' mixed up with 'The Telly'.

I'll find out next time...

Overview

And I hope there will be a next time because the museum's future is in some doubt. With high staff turnaround, cuts to funding, threatened closure and declining visitor figures, things look bleak.  

I dressed up, he just made faces

I said before, "There's an air of constant change, not always for the better". Sure, but not always for the worse either. One has to admire the National Media Museum's moxie and willingness to adopt, adapt and improve. 

It's clear to me the right change needs to be made right now for the future of one of this city's greatest assets. Here's what I'd suggest:

Firstly, know thyself: is it Eureka or the British Museum? As it stands, it's chasing two rabbits and losing them both.

And media? Where do you start? It's like having a museum on 'people' or 'the earth': you can't help but spread yourself thinly. So maybe trimming some of the fat wouldn't hurt e.g. ditching The Magic Factory and Games Lounge (perhaps housing these in a dedicated museum elsewhere) and focusing more on film and its craft.

Finally, there needs to be less reading and more guides. For me, these are signs of a confident museum because I reckon The National Media Museum should be strutting down the street, skiving school and winking at girls. As it stands, we have an A-grade museum, stood in front of the class with stage fright.