In 1974, a further defining moment in the evolution of TV took place when the BBC made a successful excursion into filming a factual series – regarded at the time as a radical experiment – about the daily life of a British family. In so doing, they discovered not only the power of the hand-held camera and the fly-on-the-wall point of view to convey tension and intimacy, but also the allure of authenticity. Paul Watson’s series ‘The Family’ was greeted by some critics with incredulity and distaste – how could a film about daily domestic routine, with no specific subject or story, possibly hold anyone’s attention? But the public proved the pundits wrong, and tuned in by the million to watch the volatility of a low-income, working family. Thus a template was established – already sketched out by the soft sociology of ‘kitchen-sink’ cinema – that authenticity was synonymous with dysfunctionalism.
The route to authenticity – or, more cynically, the allure of mass-voyeurism – lay in the simple televisual device of apparently removing the fourth wall of a person’s room and thus laying bare his or her privacy. By this means, a compelling sense of risk – absent in scripted soaps – was written into the TV format, answering our need for authenticity and spectacle.
Previously, such subject matter – ordinary British life – had been the highly politicized terrain of ground-breaking documentary directors like Humphrey Jennings, whose films, such as Listen to Britain (1942), would prompt the young left-wing film director Lindsay Anderson to pass an assessment of British cinema in 1957 which predicted the vogue for today’s popular factual television but assumed, wrongly, that social conscience and the rights of the individual would take priority over mere sensationalism and ritual humiliation: ‘I want to make people – ordinary people, not just top people – feel their dignity and their importance. The cinema is an industry, but it is something else as well: it is a means of making connections. Now this makes it peculiarly relevant to the problem of community – the need for a sense of belonging together. I want a Britain in which the cinema can be respected and understood by everybody, as an essential part of the creative life of the community.
What Anderson regarded as the ordinary person’s right to importance and significance as a subject for documentary – ‘the creative treatment of actuality’, as he cited from documentarist John Grierson – has now become what the Sex Pistols once described as ‘a cheap holiday in other people’s misery’. In the Nineties, following on from the success of such docu-soap series as ‘Hotel’, ‘Airport’, ‘Pleasure Beach’ and ‘The Cruise’, TV companies fell over themselves to combine the phenomenal appeal of ‘real’ characters (Jane McDonald from ‘The Cruise’ has now presented ‘The National Lottery Live’, published her autobiography and played at the London Palladium) with the moments of conflict that typify the format of daytime-TV studio debates (or ‘studio rage’ as it has been called). Fact, not only stranger than fiction, was perceived to be stronger, even if one ITC report opined that popular factual programming was pandering to ‘the worst of human behaviour’.
As docu-soap and conflict television both scored impressive ratings, the fusion of the two forms has come to revolutionize the programming schedules: one Friday evening’s viewing on ITV in April 1999 ran as follows: ‘Parking Wars’, ‘Motorway Life’, ‘Family Feud’ and ‘Neighbours from Hell’. Even the BBC’s Business Unit got sexy with a docu-soap drama about company merge, ‘Blood on the Carpet’. On cable, Sky TV has given us the hugely successful ‘Ibiza Uncovered’ and myriad half-hour shows – ‘Tango Tango’, ‘Police, Action, Camera’ and ‘America’s Dumbest Criminals’ – which edits chunks of CCTV and surveillance video into a kind of ‘You’ve been Framed’ (or ‘You’ve been Arrested’) by the emergency services.
As a format, popular factual programming can be seen as a reinvention of social realism, but one that replaces the heightened objectivity of the naturalistic style with a heavily coerced core of subjective values. Other than being cheap, the key to PFP’s success is its manipulation of public curiosity, placing viewers in the centre of a situation which is bound to test their tolerance and arouse their sense of vulnerability. In this way, the reality which such programmes mediate is being massaged by various formal devices to appear more real than real: the surface of the images is lacklustre and flattened, drawing attention to the immediate prompts of the situation – litter, clutter or any evidence of the subject being unprepared for being famous for being ordinary; long, unedited shots (sometimes running for minutes) that create a sense of portentous tension, while the new technology of small, digital cameras can convey a sense of immediacy or claustrophobia.
Thus the medium is so stretched that the slightest word or gesture becomes amplified. The traditional role of voice-over narration – to suggest authority, time line or commentary – has been either removed or replaced by a kind of disembodied Chorus, which hints at off-camera action, the consequences of which we are about to see. On programmes that deal with such volatile areas as, for instance, debt collection, environmental health and the RSPCA, there is the sense of being suddenly dragged back to safety at the ultimate moment of conflict – when someone throws a punch – or allowed to linger for as long as possible – when someone bursts into tears.
In most cases, the ‘authenticity’ of popular factual programming has been used to promote its treatment of the subject matter as being, to some degree, in the public interest. But in many ways such a claim for the genre is nothing more than the old device of positing pornography as sociology – ‘Look at these photographs, aren’t they disgusting?’ This also puts any critique of authenticity into the kind of moral headlock common in debates over contemporary art: to condemn contested material as sensationalist or prurient is construed as merely reactionary or elitist. What remains, beyond an unwinnable contest of value judgements, is the seismic shifts of audience share and ratings that will dictate the direction of the programme-making.
From the point of view of the programme-makers, the genre is an inexhaustible as the collective index of social situations and professions. But such a position is endemic within the genre of social realism. Robert Baldick, describing the cultural circumstances in which J. K. Huysmans came to write against Against Nature (1884) refers to the disillusionment of social realist writers in France in the latter half of the nineteenth century: ‘the novel of adultery had been worked to death by writers great and small; and as for the social documentary, they saw little point in plodding through every trade and profession, one by one, from rat-catcher to stockbroker …’
Television’s answer to such a cyclical problem has been both to up the sensationalism in its wares and spread the techniques of PFP – the span of social realism – into other strands of the medium: celebrities such as Geri Halliwell and Martine McCutcheon are presented in a carefully edited form of stylized ‘docudrama’ – thus satisfying the public’s need to be shown behind the scenes of fame and offered a sniff of intimacy with the stars. Similarly the fact that traditional situation comedies were based on the very professions and areas of human interest that now comprise docu-drama – corner shops, department stores, hospitals, police stations, holiday camps – has prompted, for instance, Carlton to commission a situation comedy – ‘Pay and Display’ – which replicates the look of a docu-soap.
And herein lies the notion that veracity has become synonymous with confusion and dysfunctionalism – through our depictions of ourselves as vulnerable, damaged, volatile, matched by our fetishizing of realism. And this, perhaps, is an accurate reflection of contemporary society, revealing a truth about the way in which we live through our very attempts to come to terms with authenticity.
Or was it just that the networks were looking for ways of keeping vast, profitable ratings by teasing their audience with the suggestion that they might get to see people being beaten up, losing control or fucking? Or maybe it was all just a bit of fun. One argument about Reality TV was that it taught people how to empathize with one another; that as the age was ruled by territorial hostility and depersonalizing information technology systems, watching people interact with one another on TV (‘Look at those dinosaurs ripping one another apart!!!’) could somehow be edifying.
Championed by its creators as either