As soon as the fast horses of the federal news program come to a sudden halt, words appear on the screen: “LOCAL TIME”. And we understand that life in the big menacing world has stopped and the time has come for a little puppet show. And every region has its own. What’s good for is bad for . What they talk about in is a mystery to the region. We don’t even have to go that far, let’s look around – we have a lovely example ourselves.
By some mysterious agreement, it seems that for every day until doomsday , the Leningrad Oblast TV company, will be broadcast 6 p.m. As much as the dark forces try to oppress the valiant , this agreement has such a shattering force that dark forces have broken their ferocious teeth on it. And have a look at , although the foot of man hasn’t trod in that place for a long time. I assure you, you will be rewarded, as you will find yourself in a fairy tale. That is, you and Channel 5 will be in fairyland, but with LOT you will be instantaneously transported from the of to the , where there will be no recollection of Mamelfa Timofevna! You won’t find a trace of cheap entertainment there – old talk-shows and movies bought for $100 a bundle, and there will be no kissing the feet of the fairy queen, for which the Fifth channel is famous. You will see the austere northern expanses of cast-iron serious and truly Leningrad TV of about thirty years ago, and Eruslan Lazorevich, will reign, all by himself. You’ll also see programs by journalists who were fired from Channel 5 (Innokenty Ivanov, for example) and out of an understandable feeling of malicious joy went to . Channel 5 drove them out (because there they haven’t the least idea of what talent and professionalism are) and the same Fifth channel has to suffer them on its broadcasting body! Now that should be appreciated, that is some exclusive stuff – “local time”…
There used to be a time when our entire country lived by this “local time”, almost totally isolated from the rest of the world. That was a time of wonders. For example, several thousand poets lived and ate well, chiseling their typewriters every day, and the results of that chiseling were published with a circulation of ten thousand copies, and it all went to bookshops and libraries, and was even read, and further still there were parodists who wrote witty parodies on these verses, read them out on the stage and also ate well. But that is not everything. There were critics who analyzed the parodies of these verses, and published their articles in serious magazines, and those articles also were read, and so the critics also got something to eat. In other words, a huge number of people lived as if in paradise, on a few coils of whipped air, doing something completely removed from the needs of lowly life. Marvelous!
I remembered about this stage of development of “local time” when I recently turned on the channel STO. I used to work there for some time when the administration of the channel (Andrey Maksimkov, Viktoria Korkhina) with touching and doomed seriousness tried to create original city broadcasting. With live on air programs, discussions, real city news, polemic journalism and analysis. Now all these stunted sprouts of TV hydroponics have been eradicated. The new administration of the STO channel, unlike the old one, are experts on “local time”. And so they broadcast TV series that were on other “grown-up” channels three or four years ago, and programs like “Woman’s outlook” by Oksana Pushkina of five years ago. Because there are no problems in the city any more – not with the municipal economy, education, or health system, or with science or culture. The residents of don’t have to know anything or worry about anything. Let the young weirdoes on the Internet worry about all that, and try to do something to prevent the demolition of the historical center, cursing the notorious “Gazprom” tower every now and then. City television has created its own world where the residents of the city with their live voices and eternal problems have no place. They are supposed to sit and study the details of the problems and poetics of the “Woman’s outlook” programs or the literary association in the TV series “Truck drivers”. One could even write a thesis on that. A straight road to Soviet paradise with its criticism of parodies! Pure “local time”!
There’s no idealization of the 1980s-1990s in my world outlook whatsoever. I’ve lived together with everybody else, I’ve never been away for longer than two weeks, and then not very often. I’m a local, I’m from the local time myself. I’ve seen everything. But still an information field in was created, and it worked. Today this field has been completely destroyed and doesn’t work. One can’t get any information on the real life of the city from television, nor radio or newspapers. Only a few fragments are left, small oases like the “City” magazine. As Mayakovsky it: “the road writhes tonguelessly” – only in this case a megalopolis of millions writhes that doesn’t even have an adequate TV channel. In any Siberian city there are two or three local channels, but we don’t have a single one!
Young talents – actors, directors, musicians – suffocate without air, as there is no one there to tell people about them. Scientists live in a total information vacuum – what is the situation with science in the city, who knows? In complete silence town-planning decisions are made which later cause a wave of public indignation, but these don’t reach anyone’s ears – there is no information! So we rush about, send e-mails to each other, and ask each other again and again – what is going on? Who said that? Where should we go?
That’s how it is. That’s the “local time” that we have. With the thick moldy smell of a dreary province.