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Bruce Willis films,” he says. “I’m waiting for the first
new religion on the internet. One that is unique to the
net and to the modern age. It’ll come.”
Although he reads across the board of popular science,
he says that he steers clear of cosmology books
because “they are a happy hunting ground for, frankly,
cranks. Multi-dimensional universes or strings and
black holes – all this stuff is totally hypothetical.”
His friend Martin Bax wrote that Ballard has this
amazing ability to know what’s going on in Cape
Canaveral or anywhere without ever seeming to
leave Shepperton, his home for the last 40 years. Sure
enough, he’s got the goods on Channel 4’s Big Brother,
although he claims not to have seen that much of it:
“My girlfriend has been absolutely glued to it, she
voted something like 30 times one evening! I think
we can therefore discount the huge voting figures,” he
says, with a warm, expansive laugh. “I’ve got a feeling
people are just pressing the redial button.”
He doesn’t believe the official 7.5 million viewing
figures (“that’s more than the number of votes that the
Tory party got at the last election”) but he likens the
interest in the programme to a Zen-like absorption: “If
you focus on anything, however blank, in the right way
then you become obsessed by it. It’s like those Andy
Warhol films of eight hours of the Empire State Building
or of somebody sleeping. Ordinary life viewed obsessively
enough becomes interesting in its own right
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and
by some sort of neurological process that I don’t hope
to understand.”
Is there not an echo of Big Brother in Super-Cannes
when Paul Sinclair is at the Croisette in Cannes? “Without
realising it, the crowds under the palm trees were
extras recruited to play their traditional roles, when
they stepped from their limos, like celebrity criminals
ferried to a mass trial by jury at the Palais, a full-scale
cultural Nuremberg furnished with film clips of the
atrocities they had helped to commit.”
Ballard disliked the self-consciousness of Big
Brother and would of liked to have seen more of a Truman
Show element where the participants don’t know
that they are being filmed. “It could be done. Candid
Camera approached that slightly. You could just take
people in a small holiday hotel on the Costa Brava and
film it.” I suggest that this, as with certain psychology
experiments proper, probably wouldn’t get past the
relevant ethics boards. “Yes, that is the problem,” he
says, as if it’s a minor but frustrating obstacle. “But
then, afterwards you could say ‘yes, we did it without
your permission but here’s a very large sum of money,
sign this release form and you’re all going to be stars!’
“ In fact, the very next issue of New Scientist magazine
that I picked up after speaking to Ballard had an article
about a psychology professor at Stanford University
who, frustrated at just those obstacles put in the way
of research by ethics boards, is now running his own
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