Intransit festival _ Zero hour bus tour

The marketing for Zero Hour promised "a series of postapocalyptic audiojourneys on night buses across London" in the early hours of the morning on Night Bus route N11. The first difficulty (for both organisers and myself) was caused by the timing, with the date associated with the 12.30am start slot causing all sort of confusion. Secondly, the promised download link never arrived (and the use of mp3 format seemed to be designed to make it deliberately difficult for Ipod/Iphone users). However despite this and the booked (free) ticket being moved back and forth, I made it to Liverpool Street for the Thursday night (or Friday morning?) for Greg McLaren's 'End of the World Show'.

The appeal of this type of audio show is two-fold; it allows us to project the story onto the often post-apocalytic scenes of everyday life that you come across at night in the city (both in and out of the bus), but on another level it the audio lets the audience into the fictional world, permitting us the audience to behave transgressively (we were asked to wear face-masks) and accept the transgressive behaviour of the actors, thus confusing and entertaining the non-participants.

The plot, set in a future scenario of a energy melt-down, involved snippets of a radio broadcast implicating listeners in a late-night escape, which was spliced up along with 'sci-fi' adverts and recordings of everyday memories of the city. Though I found this pseudo-futuristic format I found a little grating, there were several moments when the effect of the audio, the passing scenes outside and the drunken character(?) scrawling messages on the bus windows (ITS NOT REAL!). The final piece of music, listened to now off the bus at eerie public space at the 'End of the World' in Chelsea, worked genuinely well.

Unfortunately by the end of the night I was too exhausted to fully appreciate the return leg, and the lack of coordination by the organisers made the event feel like a missed opportunity.