Three Minute Warning

Bright young things eager to get their foot in the industry door have always seen writing and/or directing a short film as a way in. According to an article in The Times yesterday, from the looks of things the average ten-minute short will soon be considered long form and may well need an intermission.

Blame it on 7 Minute Sopranos, the “whacked out” refresher that condenses the previous 77 episodes of The Sopranos, just prior to the transmission of the drama’s final nine episodes. Loaded on YouTube in March it has been viewed almost 336,000 times.

While certainly tongue-in-cheek, and technically seven minutes and thirty-six seconds for all the pedants out there, it appears to have sparked something of a “TV revolution.” Sony Pictures have already put their minions to work, trawling through the archives. 300 hour-long episodes of dramas, including Starsky and Hutch, Charlie’s Angels and TJ Hooker, have been whittled down to three-and-a-half to five minute (including credits) “minisodes” to be loaded onto the internet.

When the Creative Archive finally becomes available online, the BBC is hoping that viewers will re-edit and reinterpret the hours of comedy, drama, and even documentaries in the vault to produce their own “artistic creations”. Although they are already at pains to point out that the material must not, of course, be used for “derogatory” or “commercial” purposes).

Which means we can now see the infamous 1997 Newsnight interview in which Jeremy Paxman now asks Michael Howard, the Conservative Home Secretary, just the once whether he threatened to overrule Derek Lewis when the then-Director of the Prison Service sacked a prison governor.


But before all that, there’s always the quartet of Die Hard movies reduced to four and a half minutes and set to music. Yipee-ki-yea!