Arts & Culture
Documentary in crisis
Published 23 October 2000
We watch more factual television than any other nation. Reflecting on recent controversies, Malcolm Clark argues in defence of the genre
The decision to shunt the BBC's flagship current affairs series Panorama into a Sunday graveyard slot has been greeted by some critics as confirmation that British television is now so lowbrow, it could have starred in the monkey series Cousins (August, BBC1).
Shrieks of horror have come from the documentary- making lobby, too. Many producers claim this is just another sign of a shift away from factual programming. They cite Skyscraper and Cafe, two of the most eminent documentary production companies, which have reported financial difficulties in the last month. In an interview with Broadcast magazine, Skyscraper's Karl Sabbagh recently fulminated against shrinking budgets and commissioning editors' obsession with the weird and wonderful, in the pursuit of ratings. The title of one of the key sessions at last week's Sheffield International Documentary Festival said it all: "What's wrong with British documentary?".
Most of this is just vested interests at work, as is the concern of politicians. After all, politicians tend to care about current affairs programmes - and the ten o'clock news - more than anyone else because they dream of appearing on them, the way the rest of us may dream of being invited for dinner by Nigella Lawson.
In fact, the fuss this tiny change in the schedule has sparked, complete with anguished sermons in the broadsheets and semi-regulatory remonstration, testifies to the hallowed status of the documentary in British cultural life. And this reflects the historical pretensions of British television as a whole. Right from the start, television in this country was part of a conscious attempt to educate and inform, reflecting the BBC's charter, and, like public libraries and schools before it, was seen as a way of sharing the fruits of culture between the social classes. A threat to factual programmes appears to the liberal Establishment as nothing less than a form of vandalism.
In Britain, television must never, it seems, be allowed to be mere entertainment. Our enjoyment must be leavened with a sprinkling of programmes which, like Panorama, often offer fare that few people actually want to watch. This, despite the fact that, left to their own devices, the British watch factual programmes in their droves - when they are offered something genuinely interesting. Witness the BBC's success with Simon Schama's History of Britain, Superhuman, Walking With Dinosaurs, Real Lives and Timewatch, or Channel 4's Elizabeth, Body Story, Equinox, Cutting Edge, Secret History, and so on and so on.
Then there are the specific historical pretensions of documentary itself. As television became a mass means of communication in the 1950s and 1960s, it increasingly needed to satisfy the curiosity of the audience, in a way that examined the world with the same sort of detachment the BBC had pioneered in its news broadcasts.
It just so happened there was a form of film-making that believed it had solved this business of transmitting reality neutrally, of using visual images to capture the truth. Documentary had been pioneered by the scientific community - and by anthropologists, in particular - the first recognised example being Nanook of the North, by Robert Flaherty, in 1922.
Forget for a moment that scientific films are not what we would now consider to be actually neutral. There was at least here a methodology, a commitment to empirical examination. It was this anthropological tradition that was embraced by such influential pioneers as John Grierson and, in turn, British television, where it quickly found itself at the heart of the schedule. So when critics lampoon documentary directors for attempting to put characters under the microscope, they are not far wrong; most of them have a closet in which there lurks a white coat.
It is also why Big Brother, with its laboratory layout, was, in its own way, just documentary-making by another route. The audience tuned in to see a type of reality - real human beings behaving in unusual circumstances, just as Flaherty's audience did. Ironically, what constituted the most "real" element of the series was one that has an illustrious pedigree in the specifically British documentary tradition. The most talked-about scene involved a group of people sitting around a table in the kitchen and talking - a scene straight out of Paul Watson's Family in the 1970s and a staple of observational films ever since.
But there is more to the unease about Panorama's demise than just the illustrious pedigree of documentaries in Britain. Panorama represents a type of documentary-making that has held out against what purists deem compromise. Its style is austere. It has deliberately eschewed the innovations and even the professional tricks to which successful documentary has been driven in order to engage an audience that has more choices than ever before.
As the schedules have become ever more competitive, producers and directors have been forced to respond by making their programmes, in short, more interesting than Panorama ever was. MacIntyre Undercover, for example, was willing to find a way to deal with current affairs issues by using new technology and a ballsy, contemporary style.
Other factual producers and directors have learnt from drama. They exploit every tool they can to grip their audience, whether it be in the choice of music, special effects or visual style. Above all, they have recognised that they are telling stories. Stories, whether factual or fictional, have to be paced and have a structure imposed on them that evokes an emotional response in the audience, as well as an intellectual one.
At Horizon, where I worked until recently, the editors combine an obsessional desire to get to the truth, and to ensure accuracy, with a creative attitude to narrative structure that owes everything to drama. Proposals are routinely rejected if "the third act isn't strong enough", or "the protagonist is strong but there's no antagonist". It is no accident that in March Horizon won the 1999 Royal Television Society Award for Best Documentary Strand, and routinely gets two million viewers to watch 50-minute films about particle physics. The recent Panorama on the fuel crisis was not just newsy: it had a sense of drama, which suggests that if Panorama producers followed their first instincts, they would be fine. It topped four million viewers.
For some people, the suggestion that documentaries must appeal to the senses and to the human love of a well-told story is anathema. For them, the desire to interpret and shape a story in order to present it as powerfully as possible is doomed to end in exaggeration and lies. They hold up the salutary example of the fake drugs couriers in Carlton TV's award-winning fraud, The Connection. But there is a big difference between telling a lie and telling the truth with maximum impact.
The implication is that in Panorama's dry, spare style, there is a kind of veracity that the more exciting and dynamic documentaries have given up. This is nonsense. On occasion, even Panorama, the dullest, most serious programme, does not transmit the truth untouched. Every documentary is edited, shaped, material excluded and structure imposed. It would be unwatchable otherwise.
What is unhealthy is when a film exploits, if you like, that whiff of the fairground while coming on entirely po-faced. Take the last Panorama shown before its move, whose subject was the Omagh bombing. There is no denying the bravery of John Ware in tackling the alleged Real IRA in Dundalk, but this was like Roger Cook on a bad day. One man closed his van door and drove away muttering, another stayed put on his farm and refused to answer the phone. To prevent a sense of impending farce, the script took us back to the crime, again and again, and to the victims. Their testimony, in a sense, helped cover up the programme's failure. The bare black backgrounds, the decision to take Ware to the locations and the hand-held camera were all conscious decisions made by programme-makers to underline the programme's claims to authenticity. Although I believe these claims, the audience was given little or no evidence to judge them for itself. Neither method is more true than the other.
As documentary evolves, the sense of unease has inspired a wave of nostalgia as critics and producers alike look back achingly to a golden age when Jacob Bronowski's Ascent of Man and Kenneth Clark's Civilisation ran in prime time. But between those memorable creative highs, there was also plenty of dross. The dross was watched because there was nothing else on. When you had only two or three channels that ran the test card for most of the day, a long documentary about a Bulgarian dance troupe suddenly seemed positively fascinating.
Recently, I had to watch hours and hours of factual archive from the 1960s and 1970s, looking for material to illuminate a history series I have just finished. Much of this stuff was ground-breaking and award-winning in its time. But it comes from a different world with a different aesthetic, when an audience was still grateful for the technological miracle of being transported into someone else's life.
One of the films I watched was an hour-long Horizon from the early 1980s which followed the course of an ordinary small river from its source to the sea. Nothing happened. Nothing. No flood. No underwater filming. No conflict. There was a character, a farmer who came and went, and some cows. There was a town in the distance, an abandoned mill, some shakily shot plants and a voice which felt as if it was carrying sediment. Now turn to the programme that kicked off the new series of Horizon a fortnight ago. Called Mega-Tsunami, it explored the possible effects of giant landslides, including a tidal wave that could destroy the entire eastern seaboard of the United States. Pumping music, stunning graphics and dramatic storytelling. Phew. So much for the golden age.
Malcolm Clark has just finished a history series for ITV, called Time of Our Lives
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