Doc/Fest Blog
3MW, the 'miracle'
By Charlie Phillips 04 September, 2008
Look, there's an interesting blog about Channel 4's 3 Minute Wonder, calling it a little miracle.
It's a well-argued piece. Those films are truly brilliant (I was university with Seb Godwin, he ran the film society and was very enigmatic, so it makes me happy to see him doing good) and 3MW is a slot which as he says often feels like the tiny pearl amongst...well, not swine, but definitely the pearl in the pig pen.
But I think he underestimates the potential of its scheduling - one of the reasons it works so well is because it takes you from the misery of the news to the euphoria of the factual format with a total jolt of strangeness. It relies on its surrounding programmes to make you jump out of your comfort zone and it proves that variation makes for a good channel not uniformity of whatever form. I think it's easy to give a lack of credit to its scheduling and indeed to the clever way it's commissioned for that slot. You don't watch 3MWs in a vacuum.
So instead of complaining that it's isolated there, can't we start claiming that Kirsty and Phil only exist because of 3 Minute Wonder and that they only get recommissioned because they are a good foil for 3MW? No?