The most boring day in history
Bad Ideas from the Big Wide #003
Welcome back to Bad Ideas from the Big Wide, where we have terrible ideas so you can have better ones (hopefully). Below that, we’ve been sniffing around for interesting stories this week.
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A BAD IDEA: THE DAY THAT CHANGED NOTHING
We’ve had The Years That Changed History, The Last Great Decade and The Year That Changed America. How about The Day That Changed…Nothing?
In 2010 an English engineer named William proclaimed that April 11th, 1954 was the most boring day in history.
He’d made the discovery whilst building his simple yet powerful search engine True Knowledge, which combed the internet for facts. It was so intelligent that it went on to become the foundations of the Amazon Alexa AI brain. Whilst working on it, he had a thought:
It occurred to us that with over 300 million facts, a big percentage of which tie events, people and places to points in time, we could uniquely calculate an objective answer to the question “What was the most boring day in history?” For fun, we wrote a script to scan all days (from the beginning of the 20th century) and set it going.
But when it looked at 11 April 1954, there wasn’t much to find - it was duly crowned the most boring day in history.
But it’s now 2024 - just because nothing happened that day won’t stop us making a film about it.
In The Day That Changed…Nothing an array of expert historians dive deep into the nitty gritty of the events of that day to prove True Knowledge wrong. The film takes us from the death of Oldham Athletic footballer Jack Shufflebotham, through the Belgian General Election and many other very interesting events until, finally, the finale. It’s the opening of the 1954 All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship, and we’re in Tullamore’s O'Connor Park as Offaly take on Westmeath.
💶💶💶 Amazon Prime feature doc, millions spent on high-end interview setups, multiple conspiracy theories from ‘experts’ created as to what actually happened on that fateful day that continue on for decades. Spinoff ten part drama series on April 11, 1954 commissioned three months later.
💶💶 24 part YouTube series that relives each hour of that day in real time, packed with generic archive footage and an AI VoiceOver. Gets millions of views, no one knows who created it…
💶 Fascinating Radio 4 documentary on the exact underpinnings of the science that allowed True Knowledge to calculate the most boring….oh, it’s already been made.
SNIFFING AROUND 🐷
NHNZ has some ‘exciting’ factual projects on the brew in Saudi Arabia and the UAE…
…as does branded documentary producer Econ Films, who are starting a series on the making of a “top-end resort in Saudi Arabia in 2024 and 2025”. Maybe it’s this, the world’s most dystopian Center Parcs?
Pinterest have gone into factual TV, launching their first cooking show on Tastemade with “an actionable and shoppable experience on Pinterest” 🤷. Tastemade is a ‘Free Ad Supported Streaming Service’ - which is essentially just old fashioned TV…
Whisper are crewing up on a football obs doc. Whisper also produced the FIFA+ (Fifa’s free streaming service) series, All Roads Lead Down Under ahead of the 2023 Women’s World Cup.
Interesting article on how Indian YouTubers are a worldwide educational powerhouse, helping thousands of Nigerians alone get through their exams.
Electrify, who buy up some of the biggest YouTube channels with $85m behind them, is looking for a channel controller for it’s science channels like Veritasium (nearly 15 million subscribers and 2,450,939,883 total views).
And an interesting (and nicely shot) interview with the CEO of YouTube:
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