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Something of a paradox is at work in the world of British documentary. Long a staple of UK television output, in recent years it has become for the first time a jewel in the prime-time crown. At the same time, though, there has been a running newspaper story since May 1998 about "fakery" in these programmes. The headlines have been screaming for months: "CAN WE BELIEVE ANYTHING WE SEE ON TV?" ; "Channel 4 in new documentary fake row"; "VANESSA SHOW FAKED"; "Will this footage sink Channel 4?"; even, "Fake shots 'routine' in TV wildlife programmes". This press coverage now amounts to a full-scale "media ( or rather "newspaper") panic" about documentary veracity and legitimacy. It is as if real popularity has been purchased at the cost of considerable hysteria about "abuse of public trust". That the leading witch-hunters are the first world's most sensationalist, hypocritical and mendacious press hasn't reduced one jot the panic they have created. The current level of documentary/current affairs popularity is a new phenomenon. Over the past four decades, on a fairly consistent basis, some 20%-25% of both the BBC's and the commercial Channel 4's output as well as 10% of the populist advertising-supported ITV has been occupied by documentary programming of one sort or another -- although little of it has ever figured among the most popular of shows.(1) Documentary's position in the schedules, as Richard Kilborn has argued, has been buttressed more by the concept of public service broadcasting than by its attractiveness to audiences.(2) Just as the Griersonian documentary never acquired wide-spread popularity in the cinemas in the 1930s, so the television documentary never quite made it to the contemporary top TV ten -- until recently. |
(1) Auguston Preta, Mara De Angelis and Marcella Mazzotti, The quest for quality: survey on television scheduling worldwide (Rome: RAI, General Secretariat of Prix Italia, June 1996). (2) Richard Kilborn, "New contexts for documentary production in Britain", Media, culture and society 18, no. 1 (January 1996):143. |
The documentary breakthrough to prime-time success has been a long time coming. Big-ish audiences were attracted to the occasional '70s long-form programmes such as Paul Watson's The family, a twelve-parter watched by an average 5.5 million in 1974, or the military documentary series Sailor in 1976 and the sensationalist Hong Kong beat on the then-colony's police the following season. Roger Graef's 1982 Police, on the UK Thames Valley force, was the first such series to breakthrough into the top ten prime-time. Channel 4, with an edition of its news/documentary series Cutting edge ("Shops and robbers"), did the same thing in February 1984. But these shows were exceptions and, sensationalist as some of them were, all were clearly located in the mainstream documentary tradition; that is to say, they were justifiable as sober (or soberish) examinations of the world around us. They were not expected, much less required, to be big hits. The docusoaps which have benefited from their pioneering popularity are not so blessed. They must deliver audience and they are far from being marked as serious. On the contrary.... As with soaps proper, the docusoap makes full use of the melodramatic moment and the cliff-hanger. Topics tend to the banal -- holiday settings such as a cruise ship or a sea-side town, doctors and vets at work, hotels and health-farms, neighbourhoods with "interesting" denizens, estate agents. The major participants tend to the hyperbolic -- the traffic warden trying to write 100 tickets in a day, the woman trying to pass her driving test for the umpteenth time, the domineering hotel manager, the hooker, the unflappable English airline station manager speaking perfect Russian. Although the shows tend to be expertly structured, the shooting style is extremely uneasy, with these central participants constantly commenting on their own actions to camera, very often literally over their shoulders in a bizarre variant of the old Direct Cinema "follow the subject" shot. Direct Cinema depended on the light-weight 16mm sync. film cameras and battery-driven portable tape-recorders which were being introduced in the late 1950s and early 1960s. These allowed film makers for the first time to shoot documentary footage without elaborate preparations -- today's dominant "fly-on-the-wall" approach. But television bastardised the purities of Direct Cinema by shooting in a style the British industry called verité which involved merely adding long hand-held, available light, natural sound takes to the established repertoire of mainstream documentary techniques. The docusoap camera style represents a bastardisation of this bastardisation. It is easy to see why such a style, such topics and such subjects attract criticism within the business. Here are documentaries, made in exploitative and unethical ways, about nothing in particular, which overtly and obviously encourage the people involved to overact in a largely uncharacteristic and often sensational fashion. Such observers typically contrasted, say, ITV's 1980 Hollywood, a meticulous thirteen-part history series (made by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, narrated by James Mason with music by Carl Davis) with Helen Fitzwilliam's and Paul Buller's 1996 seven-parter, Hollywood pets (about pets in Hollywood!) and concluded that, as far as vast areas of British television was concerned, popularity notwithstanding, documentary was over, having become instead "docuglitz", a way station on the road to docusoap. Moreover, the clear manipulation and dubious quality of "docuglitz" and docusoap not only cast a shadow across the surviving "serious", especially investigative, documentary, forcing it into an evermore sensationalist mould. It did more. Docusoaps were seen as displacing traditional documentaries of social concern in general, removing them from the schedules altogether. Within the "dumbing down" debate about TV, docusoaps tend to figure heavily as an exhibit in the prosecution's case. Paradoxically, the first documentaries really appreciated by the masses seem to be killing off the Griersonian tradition. Against this, though, it must be said that the docusoap's escape from documentary's traditional marginalisation is no mean feat. Making documentaries which do not treat ordinary people as social victims or problems is also to be celebrated. Expanding the tradition's po-faced sobriety to embrace humour is a considerable achievement. It is possible to mount a perfectly reasonable defence of the docusoap along these lines. But a problem remains. Without question the UK broadcasting system more or less demands sensational footage from all documentarists and, increasingly, refuses to fund research and preparation at appropriate levels. It encourages the unthinking manipulation of many central docusoap personalities and this has indeed spilled over into the remaining areas of more traditional documentary work. These in turn have been forced to become more slap-dash, more sensational and more journalistic, indeed more tabloid-journalistic, than they ever were in the past. Most British TV documentaries are made by small independent production companies which are really nothing more than a disguise for a casualised, insecure workforce. To get a commission from a broadcaster often entails promising more than can be delivered. Failing to deliver is widely seen as a one-way ticket out of the industry. With these pressures it becomes easy to see why programme makers are, firstly, prepared to promise what they cannot be sure of filming and, secondly, to fake it when they fail. And this is what has been happening. |
(3) Andrew Bethell, "A job, some stars and a big row", Media watch '99 (London: Sight and Sound, 1999). British TV rating information is published weekly by Broadcast magazine. |
It follows from this that all documentaries are to eschew reconstruction of any kind, although what constitutes a "reconstruction", or even an improper intervention in the filming, remains ill-defined not only in the public debate but also in the British broadcasting codes. The bottom line is that fly-on-the-wall rubrics are now so widely accepted that older documentaries, including all the Griersonian classics, are routinely dismissed as not being documentaries at all. Their reconstructions rule them out of court and they constantly (and in my view, improperly) attract a new classification as docudramas. By implication the Direct Cinema style, even when bastardised and re-bastardised by TV, is now perceived as the only way a film-maker can lay claim to a documentary truth. A hard-pressed industry and a public convinced (by Direct Cinema documentarists themselves, it must be said) of the potential "truth" of the fly-on-the-wall image have proved to be a most volatile combination. Since such public expectations cannot be met, from the start of docusoaps' popularity in 1996 a "scandal" about documentary "fakery" has been waiting to happen. It came with the Guardian newspaper's exposé in May 1998, following a six month investigation, of The connection, a Carlton Television documentary about a Colombian drug smuggler which was widely screened around the world and garnered much recognition. There is a suggestion, which has never been confirmed, that the story the Guardian revealed of extensive reconstruction, if not downright fabrication, during the shooting of this film was leaked to the paper by a disaffected free-lance member of the production team. The film was originally screened in October 1996 to an audience of some four million on UK Channel 4. |
(4) Carl Plantinga, "Mockumentary, docucomedy, documentary, or 'sick humour': Roger and me meets the media", unpublished paper, 12th Ohio University Film Conference, 1990. See also: John Corner, The art of record: a critical introduction to documentary (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). |
The Commission was already flexing its muscles at this time, investigating other such supposed infringements of its code especially by Channel 4. Thus in February 1998, a documentary about rogue builders was being examined as having a number of faked scenes, including one where two men were supposedly filmed stealing building supplies. Moreover, the smash-hit light-weight BBC docusoap series of 1997 about people fouling up their driving tests, Driving school, was admitted to contain "invented" scenes. Apparently the much-failed Maureen, the show's most popular central "character", was not filmed at 4 a.m. practising for her test but at some later hour. The alarm clock was made to lie; the sequence was therefore "faked". In the flood of this newspaper panic, the moral ambiguities of such everyday documentary filming practice were swept away. No distinctions were being drawn between reconstructing scenes that actually happened, and that could have happened, or that could never have happened and were entirely fictional. The draconian prohibition against reconstruction was rendering many standard practices deviant. Using them was seen as "an abuse of public trust". Grierson's definition of documentary as "the creative treatment of actuality" was in effect being tossed aside, forgotten. In August, in the sort of incident that would have caused an ethical Griersonian (should such a creature ever have existed) pause, a film crew was accused of making children in the care of a local council beg on the street and, in the case of one 15 year-old girl, solicit as a prostitute. The council threatened Channel 4 with an injunction. The film-maker's perfectly reasonable defence (at one level at least) - that the children had been observed in these activities - was dismissed. I should make it clear that I want to highlight how reconstructions of this sort have always been part and parcel of documentary technique - take Fires were started (UK 1943), for example. I am not condoning asking children in such circumstances to repeat their actions, which does seem to me to be of extremely dubious morality. To castigate the film makers on such grounds is entirely appropriate - but to accuse them of "fakery" in such a simple-minded way is not. In September, Daddy's girl, a programme about fathers and daughters, was pulled at the last moment when it was revealed that one of the "fathers" was actually the young woman's boyfriend. The couple had been found by the researcher placing an advertisement in the papers. Although budgets now allow little if any time for proper preparation, I think advertising as a research practice is lazy and indefensible and that the broadcasters deserved what they got. By the turn of 1999 the British papers were no longer interested in only documentaries. A popular BBC daytime confessional talk programme, The Vanessa show, was revealed to have used "faked guests" hired through an agency. The programme has now been cancelled. In February 1999, men in a scene from Much too young: chickens, a documentary transmitted in 1997, who were shown picking-up rent-boys in Glasgow, were revealed by another disgruntled researcher to have been members of the production team. The Commission fined Channel 4 £150,000 for this unlabelled "reconstruction" and the Channel told Marie Devine, the producer, that she would never work for them again. Next, two programmes were in trouble for employing criminals on production teams. In one, Undercover Britain: stolen goods, transmitted in 1996, a freelance reporter accused an antique dealer of selling stolen goods; but the dealer was working undercover for the police who were actually investigating the reporter, a man with a criminal record for theft. The second "scandal" involved a researcher on another programme in this series, Undercover Britain: guns in the street. He, too, was revealed as having a criminal record and many scenes in the film were shown to have been set up. In June, the BBC was caught out by a tabloid reporter pretending to be a nymphomaniac who had responded to an advertisement seeking contributors for a programme called Addicted to love. The programme was pulled and the BBC threatened to sue the Sun newspaper because the reporter has signed "an honesty clause" in her release form. This clause had been introduced after the Vanessa show fiasco. It is hard to know where to begin discussing the ethics of this one. Why is the BBC making documentaries about fucking? How does the Sun justify entrapment? But one thing is pretty clear -- any research process which fails to ask questions as to why an East-end barmaid, which is what Sun-girl Andrea Busfield pretended to be, was responding positively to an ad in the left-wing, middle-class broadsheet Guardian, ought to be left in decent obscurity, especially since the intrepid journalist also refused to reveal her supposed place of work. As these continuing 1999 incidents reveal there is now a "documentary fakery" journalistic frame in place in Britain. The story will run and run. The conclusion of The connection episode, which occurred in December 1998 when Carlton, after a lengthy quasi-judicial inquiry, were eventually fined £2 million by the ITC regulator has not affected its "legs". The problem with the Carlton case is not that the authority was wrong to pillory the mendacity of the film-makers. Confusions about acceptable reconstructions are one thing but fabrications are clearly another and much of The connection was fabricated, for which there can be no excuse. But in a supposedly free society it is hard to accept the idea that such lying "abused public trust" and warranted the creation of what is, to all intents and purposes, a virtual new quasi-legal tort - Abuse of Public Trust - punishable by a quasi-legal fine. It is hard to see how such an offence meshes with the liberal ideal of freedom of expression. It is not illegal under British law to tell lies; you can't sue politicians, for example, on that basis. If damage results from telling lies, then that is a different matter. What is chilling about the documentary witch-hunt is that the ITC, a government regulatory agency, can find you guilty of "abuse of public trust", and levy substantial penalties, without proving damage, actual or potential, to any party. Damage is the crucial factor here: it, for instance, justifies the control of mendacious advertisements where the public might well suffer. But in The connection's case how was the audience actually or potentially damaged? That they acted to their disadvantage in seeking to buy the heroin which the film mendaciously alleged was now being passed into Britain by a new route? That the balance of their mind had been disturbed because two air journeys taken several months apart had been represented as one? Technically, of course, the ITC would deny a new (quasi) offence here. It would claim to be acting on its contracts (licences) merely to enforce its Programme Code, specifically Section 3.71 which says dramatised reconstructions in factual programmes must be identified as such for the viewers. Compliance with this Code is part of the contractual obligations incurred by broadcast licence-holders like Carlton. But, in effect, the ITC's action is caused not by any breach of contract but by fakery (which would be OK if there were no fines) and reconstruction (which should not be dealt with in the same way at all). In objecting to this fine and the idea of an abuse of public trust as a victimless offence, let me repeat that, in my view, documentarists should be held to account if they lie and cheat. They should most certainly be exposed and they should suffer the consequences of that exposure - the public destruction of their credibility. But that is not the same as fining people whose actions have not actually harmed the audience. The ITC requirement that "reconstructions" be labelled for the audience is completely ill-defined and apparently based on some quite primitive vision of how films get made. It offers no distinctions and plainly confuses fabrication with reconstruction. It utterly avoids addressing the every-day interventions necessary to (and traditional in) cost-effective documentary filming. The ITC vision is clearly grounded in the rhetoric of Direct Cinema with the implication that the "fly-on-the-wall" film maker captures reality as it happens and that anything other cannot be documentary and constitutes an abuse of public trust. But that is, as we know (well, most of us except Noel Carroll know), tendentious nonsense. It ignores how the vast majority of documentaries, even those most obedient to Direct Cinema's rules and strictures, are made. It is a requirement which is grounded in the prior, slippery, notion of a public right to know. This is, in terms of legally enforceable rights, of far less value and antiquity than the parallel but actually far more powerful public right to speak -- the right of free expression. Of course, in terms of the citizen and the state a public right to know is important but, even today, it is limited in important ways. The right in this area is actually a right to speak and it includes a right to lie or to express horrid opinions as long as no damage is possible or can be proved. |
(5) Michael Sean Gillard & Laurie Flynn, "Carlton fined £2m over documentary", Guardian, 19 December 1998. |
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(6) Roger James, Personal communication. |
So fining The connection in effect suggests that, by implication, there can be no subterfuge or misrepresentation in the vast majority of the programmes on commercial television -- why else are they not investigated and punished? Thus, when Riddle of the skies tells me there could be alien space ships about, I ought to believe them. After all, those programme makers haven't been fined £2 million. I have to say that this is an outcome which perpetrates a fraud on the public every bit as damaging as the putative fraud perpetrated by the "faked" shows. Noel Carroll once wrote: "Direct Cinema opened a can of worms and then got eaten by them." (7) The worms are still feeding -- and this perhaps is the most important aspect of the "documentary fakery" scandal. It is not just that some filmmakers are liars (which is really pretty boring and quite simply dealt with); rather, it is that the triumph of Direct Cinema's claim on the real in the public mind is so simple-minded and unsophisticated as to now be causing film-makers real problems. Paradoxically, by reducing film-makers to flies, it is emasculating much of the documentary's ability to say anything significant about anything. |
(7) Noel Carroll, "From real to reel: entangled in nonfiction film", Philosophical exchange 14 (Winter, 1983).
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