The History of Crowds.

Today I was interviewed by Juliana Vandergrift from the Victoria and Albert Museum as part of an oral history of the UK toy industry. To be honest I’ve never come across a name that would 99% of the time upstage its owner. ‘Juliana Vandergrift’ is a super model of a monica. She would at least have to be the woman Sven Goran Erickson ditched Nancy Dell,Olio for to have better sex and a decent conversation, or the spy that finally made James Bond celibate. It’s like calling your kid ‘Goliath Hulk’ and expecting him to have a successful career in dentistry. But if I was a filmmaker I’d employ her just so her name would appear in the credits. Anyway Juliana turned out to be a very normal, sensible young woman so I put away my preconceptions of our steaming up the windows of her Bentley Continental in a lay-by overlooking Monte Carlo and rabbited on about the toy industry for two hours. After wishing her a safe trip home to Ipswich, Ipswich for God sake! I watched the student protest on wall-to-wall TV. It’s so easy to see a crowd as just ‘a crowd’ rather than a few thousand individuals each with their own life story, hopes, understandings and motivations; so easy to dismiss them on mass. Strangely, after talking at length about the toy industry, it reminded me of any product you buy. You may see it as an electric kettle that’s just failed, but involved in that product was a small crowd of people from designers to engineers to managers, assembly and packaging. That fault, assuming you haven’t just thrown it across the room at a marauding befuddled buffalo, is probably down to one of that crowd making a small misjudgement. It just helped remind me we’re all in the midst of crowds, of so many different oral histories. So let me tell you about the toy industry.