Documentaries

Precisely because of their claim to represent reality, documentaries have often created controversy. For example, documentaries agitate authority when they shock or challenge orthodoxy. In Britain, the Conservative government fiercely condemned Thames Television in 1988 for Death on the Rock, about the killing of three Northern Irish terrorists in Gibraltar by British security agents. Television companies have themselves stopped programmes: a television documentary called Hang Up Your Brightest Colours (1973), about the Irish republican leader Michael Collins, made by the Welsh actor-producer Kenneth Griffith for the British station ATV (Associated Television), was not shown for more than 20 years. The subject was held to be too sensitive because terrorist violence arising from the same issues was then killing and injuring hundreds of people in Northern Ireland. A BBC documentary about nuclear war, The War Game (1965), was similarly withheld for years during the international Cold War tensions between the communist countries and the Western democracies from the 1950s to the 1980s as the programme was judged to be too disturbing.

Dramatized documentaries, or docudramas, have also ignited controversy. Such programmes mix real-life recordings with re-enactments. When crucial evidence is missing, the programme-makers use actors to reproduce what they believe happened. When this contradicts official versions, it has been denounced as “faction”, that is, fiction pretending to be fact. Critics said it was a regrettable new development. It was in fact a revival of methods used years earlier and made more effective by generations of experience. In one telling example, Granada Television mixed traditional documentary, investigative journalism, and drama in Who Bombed Birmingham? The programme, shown in 1990, questioned the criminal convictions of six people (the “Birmingham Six”), named others as the culprits, and helped secure the release of individuals wrongfully jailed.

The perceived blurring of generic boundaries in the docudrama—the fictional and the factual—has often provoked controversy leading to heated debate, more so since the 1990s. The increasingly competitive, multi-channel television environment has significantly altered the commissioning and transmission of factual programming. Critics argue that this has placed a premium on material being entertaining and accessible, often leading to debates about “dumbing down”. For example, the journalist Adam Sweeting has noted that the word “documentary” “used to carry connotations of authority, gravity, and probity…Today, the word has shed its original meaning.” The documentary theorist John Corner, in his paper “Documentary in a Post-Documentary Culture?” (2001), has described an increasing use of the documentary as “diversion”—where the intention is to entertain, rather than to educate or inform.

In the late 1990s, the “docusoap” form, in programmes such as Airport (1996), The Cruise (1998), Vets in Practice (1996), and Airline (1999), achieved great popularity in Britain. As the title of the form suggests, the docusoap combines techniques from documentary (the claim to investigate “real” life, the use of a voice-over) with techniques from soap opera (intersecting narratives, ongoing storylines, characterization, drama/melodrama). While popular with audiences, many cultural commentators saw the docusoap as a trivialization of the documentary form, and the popularity of the docusoap was seen as limiting opportunities for other documentaries to be commissioned and scheduled.

“Reality TV” has equally emerged as a hybridized form of popular factual programming. Although often hard to define, the term was initially associated with emergency services or “real” crime TV in the early 1990s, before it later became linked to a “gamedoc” phase, in which popular formats incorporated elements of the game show (Big Brother, Survivor, both 2000), or the talent contest (Pop Idol, 2001). These later formats, which constructed their own arenas solely for television, have moved further away from any clear documentary base. It has been claimed by critic Bill Nichols that documentaries traditionally aimed to make an “argument” about the social world, and it would certainly be difficult (or inappropriate) to apply this to much of Reality TV. At the same time, it seems important to note that something like Big Brother, which combines generic references to the documentary, talk show, and game show, is not intended as a documentary. In this respect, academic theorists have increasingly explored how popular factual programming needs to be approached on its own terms, rather than simply dismissed as a trivialization of documentary. (This argument also idealizes the history of documentary.) Scholars have analyzed, for example, Reality TV’s cultural construction of celebrity, its playful manipulation of the “real”, and the extent to which such formats address audience participation in new ways.