Viva VHS: the nostalgic charm of wobble and hiss

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/may/06/joseph-morpurgo-viva-vhs

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October 2008 was, all told, a tough month. The UK financial sector almost collapsed; global stock exchanges hit record lows; and, most alarming of all, JVC announced that it had retired the VCR player. Thus ended the imperial reign of VHS – unassailable in the 1980s and 1990s, until DVDs gatecrashed the party. JVC’s wuss-out proved that VHS was now officially obsolete, consigned to the same junk pile as the Commodore 64, the Zonophone, the hand flail and “using your imagination”.

Related: Rewind and recoil: Joseph Morpurgo's twisted world of VHS comedy

As with many people of a certain age, I have a deep affection for VHS, the home-entertainment goliath of my childhood. With their propensity for wear and tear, these tapes offered a very particular way of seeing: botched colour schemes; unforecasted blizzards of static; music that wobbled perilously out of tune; and an endless parade of Kenco adverts. It was – with the possible exception of a gone-off rusk – the closest thing a five-year-old could get to a psychedelic drug.

Maybe that’s just blue-remembered-hills wistfulness at play – I watched VHS as a kid, and it reminds me of being small and curious. But I think it’s also got a lot to do with the medium’s strange sensuality, its ability to appeal to more than just the eye. As you watch, the ever-present tape-hiss becomes oddly soothing, like pink noise or cricket song. And that weird surface shimmer, as if the images are being viewed through sheets of running water, makes it feel like a medium you can reach out and actually touch.

Indeed, this sort of sentimentality for not-so-vintage technology isn’t hard to find these days: look at the phenomenal success of Instagram, or the recent social media excitement over the hideously dated official Space Jam website, still online in its all its horrendous splendour. But I’d go so far as to say that, for me, VHS footage has become a sort of folk art, something rich with nostalgia and magic, and a dozy charm that verges on the pastoral.

My recent comedy show, Odessa, produced by The Invisible Dot, is steeped in this idea. At the start of the show, I present a two-minute clip of a shonky 80s newscast from a Texas TV station. Over the course of an hour, I tell a comic story where I play all the characters in the clip: a bouffanted newsreader; an awkward extra in a naff advert; a deer, momentarily caught in the corner of the frame; and, at one point, static itself. The result is a sort of found-footage whodunnit that’s been described (to my delight) as a mongrel cross between Twin Peaks and Adult Swim.

I’m far from the only one taking inspiration from VHS, either: there’s a mischievous underbelly of artists exploiting (or exploding) the medium’s quirks and deficiencies. Ross Sutherland’s recent theatre piece Standby For Tape Back-Up uses looped home video as a means of connecting with his dead grandfather; mash-up artist VHS Head builds sonic collages out of shredded video soundtracks; James Ferraro’s head-spinning Rapture Adrenaline is one of many VHS transmissions from the US underground; and electronic music act Boards Of Canada – veterans of this sort of wheeze – have built a massive cult following by playing with mildewy textures and crackle’n’hum.

VHS might be dead, then, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun channelling the ghosts locked inside these chunky black oblongs. And if none of this sounds like your bag, stay tuned for my 2016 show: a six-hour cosmic opera about the playback cycle of a water-damaged MiniDisc.

Odessa is at Soho Theatre, W1, 14-16 May