Nothing on TV ... BBC3 ran full coverage of Spencer Tunick's Newcastle artwork. Photograph: Matthew Fearn/PA
It was all over today's papers. Amidst the inevitably painful puns (so many "Nudecastles", so little time), the Sun even got a free page three out of it. I'm talking, of course, about the event at which 1,700 people last night bid farewell to their clothes - at least temporarily - in order to stand on the Tyne Bridge as part of an artwork by American artist Spencer Tunick. (Thank God this event was scheduled for a heatwave in July rather than a cooler, crueller month.)
One of our very own journalists, Michelle Pauli, has already revealed for this blog what it felt like to strip off for Spencer ("reassuring, comforting and, yes, ultimately liberating", apparently). Having yet to gather the courage to experience it myself, the closest I could get was the coverage on BBC3. I hadn't meant to, but stumbled across it. And, er, stayed watching. For purely professional reasons, you understand.
Despite not being particularly prudish (so I tell myself), I admit to being briefly shocked by what was unfolding on screen. Flesh wobbling, buttocks jiggling, and all the while Tunick bawling through a microphone at his naked subjects. One of the presenters had even donned his birthday suit to broadcast from the bridge, and, denied the comforts of pixellation, was forced to duck behind a parapet in order to preserve his modesty. You wouldn't get that on Blue Peter.
But after a while the whole thing proved compelling viewing. Not for the nudity, which quickly became refreshingly irrelevant, but for the insights it offered into something we don't always see enough of: artistic process. Watching a man attempting to make a large and sometimes awkward group of people create a vision none of them could really see was rather fun. Art as crowd control, and not always entirely successful crowd control at that.
Tunick rejected someone with blue hair. Why couldn't that man put his legs down quickly enough? And who was that woman refusing to wave her hands in the same way as everyone else? Put your back into it! Never have images of such startling and haunting simplicity seemed so tricky to get right.
The final "work", which will apparently be made up of photos and video, will appear at the Baltic in September. But for my money the live TV coverage – with all its shouting, running and air of bewildered confusion – was the right kind of way to remember this spectacular event. Here's to nude TV.
