‘I am not convinced he has ever taken that tram in his life.’ Liam Gallagher in Cardiff, Wales, September 2022.‘I am not convinced he has ever taken that tram in his life.’ Liam Gallagher in Cardiff, Wales, September 2022.We are bombarded with public messages that are bland and boring.
Public transport announcements are part of the aural wallpaper of daily life: bland, ever-present, boring. Explorations of such things can appeal to those of a certain, nerdy mindset if only through their very ubiquity: a few months ago,listing every one of ScotRail’s automated station announcements, with its warnings of boats colliding with bridges and cattle on the line, became an unlikely viral hit.
Part of the appeal of such a marketing strategy must be the way it forces itself into your consciousness, making you listen by turning background noise into something more attention-grabbing . But part of it is also the fact that, as any social media manager who has ever desperately tried to make their boring tweets go viral will know, there’s just something delightful in a corporation eschewing the usual banalities and speaking in the voice of a human.
An announcer who livens up a boring journey with vignettes about each station will have more impact on passengers than the one who simply lists the next stop in a depressed exhale. This can go either way: searching the web for examples, I found a Thameslink driver who made a special announcement to a school party ending, “Olivia, daddy’s driving this train”, which is cute; and an LNER one who warned passengers, “The mother-in-law lives in Doncaster, a good reason not to get off”, which is not.
Speaking of exes, a guard once made up for the crime of evicting mine from the front seat of a DLR train in London – the one from which you can “drive” this automated transport – by allowing her to make the announcement that we were arriving into Bank. Considering this was, at least partly, a way of him not doing all his job, he made us both very happy. Whether the rest of the passengers felt the same, history does not record.
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