Finns ring the changes
SUCCESS is not all it’s cracked up to be. That’s not my verdict but more a sort of theme you find in all kinds of stories, from King Midas to Facebook. THE RISE AND FALL OF NOKIA (BBC4) with its tale of a Finnish wellie factory suddenly hitting boom-time with its electronics range reminded me of some hippies who renovated a derelict loo in the park near my house.
They started serving vegetarian food in there and it was good, so good that people came from all over... breakfast, lunch and dinner, and then they had to start taking bookings.
The last time I saw Lozza, the young Australian who’d set it all up, he had a suit on and a pressured, frantic look in his eyes. It wasn’t quite that simple with Nokia but not far off and as well as telling a predictable story, large tracts of last night’s documentary were like the Arctic forests, dense and hard to navigate.
A parade of businesspeople discussing things like market strategy and management structure in Finnish does not make for great film-making, neither for the audience’s eyes nor its ears. Along the way, though, some interesting tributaries caught the attention for a moment or two. Nokia’s success with telephones was intimately bound up with being a Nordic country with a small population and lots of open spaces.
It’s not just the wealthy who have boltholes in the woods or boats in a remote harbour, it’s more of a way of life and that of course, means a demand for ways to stay in touch.
Geography also played a role in the way Nokia moved into neighbouring Sweden. They blanket-booked advertising space across the country in a way that could only be possible in a country with a handful of urban centres, establishing a vital first toehold on the global market.
It’s possible that distinctively Finnish things such as the rooftop sauna and the cooperative way small communities work together to solve problems played a role in the story. Yet nothing, it seems, is ever so strong that it can’t be ruined by big profits.
THE VOICES IN MY HEAD (BBC1) was a bold attempt to show us how lives are ruined and limited by mental illness.
The producers had worked closely with actors, sound engineers and people who heard voices to give us an experience of what this terrifying phenomenon sounds and feels like.
Originally broadcast to the younger audiences on BBC3, the youthfulness of the contributors added an extra sadness to the stories. Emmalina said she’d been hearing voices since she was in primary school. She had a sort of fraught family triangle going on in her head, an understanding mum-like voice alongside “Katy” who was more like a demanding, critical sister and she seemed trapped between the two.
Yet she’d had a job once, as a nursery assistant, and enjoyed it. Like everyone else who bravely tried to explain their experience of voices, she was too young to be living this kind of half-life.
Perhaps because the voices were brought to life so vividly last night, it seemed clearer than ever as well that the problem was only partly down to the chemistry of the brain.
Why were the voices so critical and persecutory? Why were the ones described as “friends” so demanding and harrying? I wasn’t surprised to learn medication often only turned the volume down.