V.

Controversy

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.