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Docudrama on European Television pp 199–227Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

British Docudrama: New Directions in Reflexivity

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Part of the book series: Palgrave European Film and Media Studies ((PEFMS))

Abstract

This chapter explores developments in British docudrama in the twenty-first century, in particular the strategies of reflexivity and hybridization which have engaged instructively with the nature of the genre and extended its reach and grasp. A brief survey of the industrial practices and cultural values of British television reveals their long-term impact on the characteristics of British docudrama. Public service broadcasting played a formative role in the world’s first regular high-definition television service, launched by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in 1936. Its first Director-General, John Reith, instilled classic public service values such as a drive to ‘inform, educate and entertain’, still invoked in British television policy today. BBC Television, the only channel until 1955, originated ‘dramatised story documentaries’ post-war which dramatized field research in studio re-enactments. This practice resulted from television’s initial limitations in recording on location, but was seen by programme makers as a strength, generating a ‘distinctive aesthetic’ and ‘particular dynamics of narrative’ (Corner 1996, p. 31), and enabling ‘audience identification’ – these would become familiar parts of the ongoing ‘defence for mixing documentary and drama’ (Paget 2011, p. 186). This period tallies with Derek Paget’s description of docudrama’s ‘first phase’ from 1940 to 1960, in which documentary – whose ‘probity and sobriety’ was believed in by audiences – was uppermost (2011, p. 181).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For an account of the development of social realist drama in the context of the development of television policy, see Rolinson (2011). For a primer on British television drama, see Cooke (2015).

  2. 2.

    See Cooke (2012) for a history of regional television drama, including a detailed case study of Granada.

  3. 3.

    For an account of these debates in the context of docudramas, see Rolinson (2011) and Caughie (2000a).

  4. 4.

    For an account of banned and delayed docudramas in this period, see Rolinson (2005) and Hill (2011, 2013).

  5. 5.

    The British ‘borstal’ was a kind of youth detention centre, abolished in 1982.

  6. 6.

    For a case study of docudrama debates in relation to Scum, see Rolinson (2005, pp. 74–93).

  7. 7.

    The ‘Birmingham Six’ were six men wrongly accused of terrorist bombings in Birmingham in 1975. Their life sentences were quashed in 1991 after a long campaign.

  8. 8.

    Accounts of Kosminsky’s contribution to political docudrama in light of debates covered in this chapter can be found in Rolinson (2010) and Paget (2013b). The Government Inspector explored the events leading to the death of a weapons inspector caught up in disagreements between the government and the BBC over the latter’s reporting of the intelligence justification for the war in Iraq.

  9. 9.

    Pieces like this mark a wider cultural shift: if the 1913 Paris premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring is worthy of re-enactment in Riot at the Rite (BBC2, 2006), so are popular forms like video game franchise Grand Theft Auto (1997–) in The Gamechangers (BBC2, 2015), the start of BBC Television in The Fools on the Hill (BBC1, 1986) and the development of comedy double act Morecambe and Wise in Eric & Ernie (BBC2, 2011) and situation comedy Dad’s Army (BBC1, 1968–77) in We’re Doomed! (BBC2, 2015).

  10. 10.

    This account underplays the intertextual undercurrents. Phoenix/Tanner is played by Jessie Wallace, best known as the not dissimilar Kat Moon in the BBC1 soap EastEnders (1985–), often written by Daran Little, this drama’s writer and Coronation Street’s archivist.

  11. 11.

    In the new deregulated media ecology, Granada made The Road to Coronation Street not for ITV but for BBC4.

  12. 12.

    Consistent with industry and academic discourses on television authorship, The Road to Coronation Street focuses on the writer, with the director serving his ideas. An Adventure in Space and Time does not show the first story’s writer. Mark Gatiss, writer of the docudrama but also writer and fan of Doctor Who, stressed his personal discomfort at omissions necessitated by compression: ‘it’s not that I don’t understand or appreciate the scale of Donald Wilson as Head of Serials – or of David Whitaker as script editor’ but ‘I had to just pack away my inner anorak and think: “This is a drama.”’ He instead nodded to fans with Lambert’s diegetic statement that she couldn’t list everyone involved because ‘we’d be here all day’ (Gillatt 2013, p. 33).

  13. 13.

    See Ireland (2012) for details of the use of 1960s production spaces to interpret a 2006 Doctor Who episode.

  14. 14.

    Similarly, when Newman allows Hussein and Lambert to re-record the flawed pilot, they visit the Totter’s Lane gates that are entered at the start of that episode as if their adventure is also beginning.

  15. 15.

    ‘The Offer’ was a one-off for Comedy Playhouse but was subsequently repeated as the first episode of Steptoe and Son following commissioning.

  16. 16.

    This Is Your Life (BBC 1955–64; ITV/BBC 1969–2003; ITV 2007) was a programme that originated in America on NBC radio in 1948. It attempted to catch celebrities (and occasionally non-celebrities) by surprise, then taking them into a studio to tell their life stories with help from guests.

  17. 17.

    Again, this trope runs more widely: at the start of The Deal, reflections in glass show several Gordon Browns (David Morrissey), a moment of abstraction and of multiple possibilities accompanied by the writing credit ‘by Peter Morgan’, which creates another sense of different Browns: the documented, the impersonated, the private, the authored.

  18. 18.

    For an account of the television debate in the context of changing attitudes to the Python film, see Burridge (2015).

  19. 19.

    Similarly, Smallpox 2002 introduces victim Mark Smits through his surviving partner Rachel (Nadia Cameron-Blakey), integrating home footage (wedding ‘film’ plus photographs shot with rostrum camera or tracking shots) with hotel video, time-lapse footage of London and a voice-over (Brian Cox) whose constructed markers of verisimilitude – ‘At 10.30 a.m. on April the eighth, Mark Smits checked into this hotel in Central London’ – are accompanied by tracking shots of empty spaces (the hotel corridor and bedroom) haunted by their (imaginary) past while tonally signposting the programme’s presently unfolding and future (imaginary) events.

  20. 20.

    This analysis follows Michael Stewart’s lead in applying indexical iconicity to Death of a President (2011, p. 256).

  21. 21.

    These docudramas often use real-life news and current affairs formats and newsreaders as if invoking the discourse of sobriety as textual verification of the journalistic base. Dirty War is credited as ‘A BBC Films Production with BBC Current Affairs in association with HBO Films’, an unusual combination of the BBC’s Film (not television drama) arm and its in-house Current Affairs unit (reminiscent of The War Game’s status as ‘a documentary film’ made by the documentary department).

  22. 22.

    For example, television drama Doctor Who (1963–) has used, amongst others, real-life newsreaders Kenneth Kendall (‘The War Machines’, 1966) and Huw Edwards (‘Fear Her’, 2006) in constructions of science-fiction crises hitting London.

  23. 23.

    However, the invocation of the referential code can itself support the programme’s evidential base: presenting a 2003 Newsnight feature about The Day Britain Stopped, Jeremy Paxman asked about its plausibility and whether it could happen ‘for real’, but noted that ‘every traveller’ regularly faces disruption. This supports Ward’s observation that audiences may refer to their own experience as evidence that ‘such events are not only possible, but probable’ (2006, p. 274).

  24. 24.

    He questions genuine ASLEF union General Secretary Mick Rix. Earlier, two Sky News presenters reflect on the quietness of the roads at 1.30 p.m.: ‘nowhere near the level of chaos we’ve predicted today. We’re all doom-mongers, aren’t we?’ This fictional exchange between two real-life Sky News presenters critiques the media’s bleak prophecies – in a bleakly prophetic media text – and its tenses are unstable, the present tense of rolling news edging to past-tense reflection, all within a docudrama that has already signposted things to come.

  25. 25.

    Channel 4 surprisingly trailed UKIP: The First 100 Days as ‘ground-breaking’ despite the number of antecedents in this form. It hypothesized UKIP’s responses to (imagined, future) problems in footage taken from their (actual) responses to (past) problems. Archive footage of election coverage and politicians’ interviews is repurposed to create a UKIP 2015 General Election victory. This follows The Day Britain Stopped, in which footage of then-Prime Minister Tony Blair commenting on a tragedy in the House of Commons was deployed as if he is/was commenting on the future tragedy depicted in the programme, though this has the politically loaded inference of circularity.

  26. 26.

    The latter relationship is interrogated in more conventional docudrama – BBC1’s Faith (2005), depicting the personal lives of fictional characters during the 1984–85 miners’ strike, includes a sequence in which actual BBC News coverage is analysed by those who were there to reveal that coverage was transposed so that a police charge was misleadingly depicted as a reaction to action by the miners.

Chapter 8: British Docudrama

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Stirling, Stirling, UK

    David Rolinson

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  1. David Rolinson
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Hebrew University of Jerusalem , Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

    Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann

  2. University of Reading , Reading, Berkshire, United Kingdom

    Derek Paget

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Rolinson, D. (2016). British Docudrama: New Directions in Reflexivity. In: Ebbrecht-Hartmann, T., Paget, D. (eds) Docudrama on European Television. Palgrave European Film and Media Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49979-0_8

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