cowfish

I like flashmobs. Be it the good old days of people turning up in a bed shop to bounce on mattresses, very organised low-rent ninjas turning up to look confused at a bunch of high-effort fancy dress pirates, or standing still in the middle of a station, the concept appeals to my sense of the absurd and love of being in on something that others aren’t. You’ve got to be worried about someone (me in this case. Many people worry about me, I have been told, but that phrase can mean so many things) when the highlight of their helping at the Great British Beer Festival was riding up and down in the truck sized goods lifts, because not many people get to do it. They were really cool though.

Anyways, in recent times the flashmob has condensed into two camps: ones involving people dancing and ones that don’t involve people dancing, with the former often happening at Liverpool Street for some reason or another. Maybe it’s the fact that the station has not one, or even two but three(!) pasty shops. Maybe it’s the convenient transport links to both the east west via mainline trains to Essex and East Anglia as well as London Underground links to the West and a range of useful buses. Maybe it’s just because it’s got a nice big concourse with an overhanging balcony all around that makes it easy for spectators to watch. Whatever it is, it’s convenient for me due to my working mere minutes down the road, and I’ve managed to pop by and see a couple of mobs as they ran their course. However, most annoyingly, the most recent one happened while I was seated conscientiously at my desk making sure that the financial world continued its government assisted way around the sun for yet another day. Yes, I am a hero.

I heard rumblings on the flashmob grapevine. Well, there was some twittering about it from the significantly more connected than I members of the London ‘random stuff’ community, whose coat-tails I often run at and occasionally manage to grab a risky handful of. Suffice to say I missed it and heard tales of it being very well organised and a really impressive sight. Then, all of a sudden, twitter became alive again with tales of dancing in Liverpool Street station – it seems there were cameras on hand to film it and it’s on the telly as an advert for T-Mobile.

This type of thing often gets people’s backs up, with accusations of ideas being cheapened by being used for advertising, or stolen from the public. However, I think the above advert is great in content, breaking an interesting idea further into the mainstream. The building numbers of people dancing, both plants in the crowd pretending to be surprised until their part begins and innocent punters joining in, is fantastic and reminds me of the less organised flashmobs where people slowly gave up their inhibitions and joined in the fun.

Unfortunately, depending on the level of distribution of the ad, this could be the end to the dance flashmob as something to surprise the public, which is the thing here that I lament most. Already in Liverpool Street the seasoned commuters have become used to the occasional event, normally tipped off by a heightened police presence and my camera wielding brethren and I standing around the balcony, acting in the pseduo-nonchalent manner that can only be feigned by those who have never trod the boards. Let’s just hope that the other side of the flash mob spectrum can continue its random trail through the minds of the public, moving on from pillow fights and dance mobs to greater flights of insane fancy.

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