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‘I feel completely beautiful for the first time in my life’

Bodily Re-enactment and Reality Documentary

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Televising History

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with the interface between diet television and historical programming, a new hybrid style demonstrating what Annette Hill terms the continuing ‘cross-pollination of genres’ within documentary/reality practice (2008, p. 223). In particular, I consider the series The Diets That Time Forgot, screened by the BBC on Channel 4 in 2008. By demonstrating and performing historical otherness, and the physical difference between the historical body and the contemporary one, but further, by eroding that difference through clothing and dietary change, the show provokes disquieting questions. Put in the context of various theoretical discussions, the series allows us to meditate upon how historical documentary has evolved over the past decade, and, in particular, how the genre seems to be moving towards an explicit concern with the consequences of bodily affect on ways of defining subjectivity both contemporaneously and historically.

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Authors
  1. Jerome de Groot
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Lincoln, UK

    Erin Bell (Lecturer in History) (Lecturer in History)

  2. Lincoln School of Humanities and Performing Arts, UK

    Ann Gray (Professor of Cultural Studies, Director of the AHRC-funded ‘Televising History 1995–2010’ project) (Professor of Cultural Studies, Director of the AHRC-funded ‘Televising History 1995–2010’ project)

Copyright information

© 2010 Jerome de Groot

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de Groot, J. (2010). ‘I feel completely beautiful for the first time in my life’. In: Bell, E., Gray, A. (eds) Televising History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277205_14

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