Don’t Hang Up

October 10th, 2007 by Russell Davies

In celebration of Steve getting us up and running as a podcast I thought I’d post one of my favourite programmes from the hard-drive archive. It’s an episode of Don’t Hang Up - a programme constructed from a presenter (Alan Dein) ringing phoneboxes around the world and waiting for people to answer. The conversations are fascinating but I particularly love the textures of the sound; the accents and the bleeps, cracks and hisses of global telephony. Lovely stuff. Why did they only make three? (mp3)

4 Responses to “Don’t Hang Up”

  1. mark burman Says:

    Russell, we made 9 in total over 4 years and stopped! I think we pushed tt as far as it could go aesthetically and quite frankly as 2 middle aged blokes with kids the promise of more 4 am calls in a lonely studio in BH didn’t appeal much any more.

    Glad you liked it- it’s had a remarkable little life.

    Cheers

  2. russell Says:

    hello Mark,

    Thanks for saying hello. I can see how it would be hard to do more than 9. Do you think they’re all online somewhere? I’ll have to have another dig around.

    cheers

  3. Marcus Says:

    Brilliant stuff that.

  4. mark burman Says:

    Russell,
    none online as yet although I think they are about to enshrine the award winning one in digital aspic-so to speak. We toy with a sequel every now and then- is it avatars, skype or….but the phonebox is such a beautiful, simple image. One day our fingers might do the dialling. One day…

    Of course anyone can try it for themselves, you’ll find a couple of websites with 1000’s of numbers on, a lot of which don’t work!.

    Cheers

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