In early 1998, Eugene, whilst busy scaring people at the University of Sussex's radio station University Radio Falmer, revealed that him and "some mates" from Crawley had thrown a video recorder off of a cliff and recorded the sound.
In an effort to prove a point, Eugene then demonstrated this by throwing a VCR out of the top floor of a student flat at Lewes Court on the Sussex campus.
At URF, we decided that this was not really good enough, so, late one evening, we set out to some cliffs at a secret location, with a Bush 21" TV set... we shall refer to first names only. Eugene and I were joined by Simon, Kathrin, Francesca, Ali, Fouad, Vicky and maybe a couple of others, I can't remember exactly who was there.
Being scientific in our approach, we made sure that we set up the recording equipment properly, and made sure that we used special professional equipment (borrowed from the radio station). Don't underestimate our efforts.. We had to spend a lot of time in the planning stage, we used radios for communication and every system had to be double checked and checked again.. You only get one chance.
The experiment was a success and the sound effect was pretty spectacular.
We discovered that there are a lot of surplus TV sets just "lying around" and Eugene became what can only be described as "slightly obsessed" by the whole thing. Then along came a competition...
The competition was to win £1000 for your student society by doing the most "outrageous" stunt possible. We made a professionally(!) edited video of how we took a whole minibus full of people to the cliffs. It was a student union minibus, but we covered up the sign writing with our own "<<Dropzone>>" banner, although this gave the impression that "<<Dropzone>>" was proudly supported by Barclays!!
We destroyed several TV's and a washing machine that evening. Somehow the video didn't win. I have spent the last few days searching high and low for that video, but I haven't been able to find it. We also had a website, which has sadly gone now (parts of it are at The Wayback Machine )
I would like to point out that we ALWAYS swept up the mess and took it away. Barry the Porter of Norwich House, where the radio station was based, was not impressed by the broken glass that we left in the office with a sign saying "We broke the TV!"
Please click below to hear some sounds from <<Dropzone>>
