Profile/Bus Uncle: Forget X-Men - two men arguing on a bus form the new blockbuster of the summer. Along with many other DIY videos, it's showing for free on YouTube, writes Brian Boyd
At the end of a long, hard day comes a long, hard commute. A young man in Hong Kong is travelling home on a bus. It is late and he is tired. An older man sitting in front of him is talking very loudly into his mobile phone. The younger man taps him on the shoulder and asks him if he can lower his voice. The older man reacts furiously and swears at the young man. Another passenger on the bus, thinking a fight is going to break out, takes out his mobile phone and videotapes the heated conversation between the pair.
Things calm down eventually and the older man apologises to the younger man for his outburst. Both get off the bus at their respective stops and go on their way, oblivious to the fact that their encounter is about to become one of the most watched internet video clips ever.
The person who took the video uploads the footage onto a popular and free website that allows people to watch and share videos. Within days, hundreds of thousands of people have downloaded the clip; within weeks millions have watched it. They have all viewed the video, now known as Bus Uncle, on www.youtube.com.
And, partly because late one night last April a tired young man tapped an older man on the shoulder, six million people now watch 40 million videos a day on YouTube. And the numbers are rising steeply. These figures are all the more impressive when you consider that YouTube does not allow nudity or pornographic images.
There is nothing particularly remarkable in the five-minute, 58-second clip that is Bus Uncle. There is, though, something remarkable in how it has drawn attention to a new wave of internet interaction. We no longer merely consume internet information, we now produce it. And direct it and star in it.
Bus Uncle is beautiful in its banality. When tapped on the shoulder, the older man first responds by shouting, "Get off the bus now!" to the younger man. He then says, "I don't know you. You don't know me. Why did you do this?"
The young man apologises and voices the hope that the situation is now "settled". In what has become (inexplicably) the latest global internet catchphrase, the older man replies, "Not settled yet. Not settled yet," before adding, "I've got stress, you've got stress. Why do you aggravate me?"
There have been various readings of this "text". Does the Bus Uncle dialogue tell us something about shifts in social etiquette? Is it all to do with long commute time alienation? What does it tell us about anger management?
Bus Uncle has nothing to do with the above. It's simply a six-minute video clip of an older man shouting at another passenger on a bus ride. The story got a fresh pair of legs when Bus Uncle himself was eventually tracked down. This happened after the younger man, Elvis Ho, called a Hong Kong radio talk show and identified himself. He explained that he always has a long commute home and frequently asks people to lower their voices when speaking on their mobiles so that he can have a nap during the journey. The person who took the video clip on his phone then identified himself and told the media that he had a second video from the bus journey - one where Ho rings a friend and laughingly recounts what had just happened to him.
This second Bus Uncle video will not go up on the free site, YouTube; it has now been sold privately and will probably be only made available on a pay-per-view site.
BUS UNCLE TURNED out to be a 51-year-old named Roger Chan who told the media that he had just had a massive row with his girlfriend and was so upset that he was on the line to the Samaritans when Elvis Ho tapped him on the shoulder. When Chan's girlfriend was tracked down, she was shocked to find out that her on/off boyfriend was the famous Bus Uncle and the two had another massive row.
Chan is currently unemployed - he says this is because he once served an eight-year prison sentence for drug smuggling in Belgium. He has made three unsuccessful attempts to run for the office of Hong Kong chief executive.
He is frequently described as "eccentric".
Aware of his new internet fame, he was allegedly paid a large fee by a Hong Kong newspaper to go to where Elvis Ho works (accompanied by a camera crew) to apologise for his behaviour. He also wanted to discuss a business proposal with Ho - the launching of a "Bus Uncle Rave Party". Ho declined to meet with Chan, saying he was put off by the small army of media present.
Meanwhile, Bus Uncle's catchphrases have now being sampled by rap musicians and mixed to music; a special English language version of the video has been created with other people playing the parts of Chan and Ho, and the main Hong Kong TV advertisement for the World Cup is a parody of the Bus Uncle video. Bus Uncle has even impacted on the Hong Kong educational system. Teachers are using the video in their civics classes to illustrate how one should react to stressful situations.
Most media commentators have been struck dumb by the phenomenon. It's the ineffable nature of these video clips that have befuddled and bemused. The massive popularity of video-sharing sites such as YouTube defy orthodox media analysis.
What is it about these Candid Camera-style short films that appeals so much? They represent the "raw" as opposed to the "cooked" of commercial film production. Their sheer artlessness, randomness and triviality are a welcome relief from the stylised outpourings of a shareholder-pleasing entertainment industry.
The Bus Uncle video is now being rivalled in popularity by the Jaffa Cake Eater video. This was posted on YouTube by a 17-year-old English girl. It features the girl, who uses the name "Slayerette", showing Americans how to eat a Jaffa Cake in a certain way so that only the orange bit of the biscuit is left at the end. Jaffa Cake Eater is now the most parodied video on YouTube.
"Very, very late at night I decided that it was a good idea to make it," says Slayerette. "It really is quite a strange video and I think that's why lots of people started watching me."
YOUTUBE WAS founded by two American ex-computer science students last year. They had noticed how difficult it was for friends to share videos on each other's cameras, so they created a site where anyone with a home video can post it online free of charge and watch millions of other videos free of charge. The only rule the site has is that it doesn't accept nudity, obscenity, profanity or violence and it can't broadcast copyrighted material (TV shows etc) for legal reasons.
Whereas before it was blogs and podcasts that were changing people's relationship to the media, faster internet connections and digital video cameras are pushing video-sharing sites to the top of the internet pile.
Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft's MSN have all now launched their own video sites but YouTube is by far the dominant player.With social networking sites such as MySpace and Bebo still being predominantly print-based, YouTube is like the television to their radio.
Crucially, YouTube has retained something of its cult appeal, and its sheer quirkiness makes it unlikely to be co-opted into the mainstream (for the moment anyway). Even if you're not particularly interested in two people having an argument on a Hong Kong bus or a young woman showing you how to eat a Jaffa Cake, there is still probably something weird and wonderful somewhere on YouTube for you.
While the technology behind these sites is new, the theory behind them dates back to the early 1960s when the critic and theorist Marshall McLuhan wrote that a medium affects society not by the content delivered over the medium but by the characteristics of the medium itself. This is usually reduced to "the medium is the message". And Bus Uncle has just delivered it to millions around the world.
The Bus Uncle File:
Who is he? Bus Uncle is all of us: a stressed-out commuter who is mad as hell and not going to take it any more.
Why does that make him famous? It doesn't. This has nothing to do with Bus Uncle and everything to do with how the internet video clip of his rant got higher viewing figures than the average Hollywood blockbuster.
What next? Try to get a bootleg copy of Bus Uncle 2 - the sequel. Also prepare yourself for Train Uncle and Plane Uncle. They're happening as we speak. This is not settled yet. Not settled yet.