Throughout its long history, drama documentary has been one of film and
television's most popular, but also most controversial, forms. Film and
programme makers are attracted to its combination of the languages of drama and
documentary either to dramatise research, thereby stimulating interest in issues
through empathy with characters and narrative, or to apply documentary style to
fictional content, thereby enhancing its immediacy. However, critics and
theorists continue to debate the extent to which these techniques 'blur the
boundaries' of fact and fiction, 'dupe' viewers and sacrifice factual accuracy
to dramatic storytelling.
The British drama documentary has its ancestry in the British documentary
film movement, which often reconstructed previously-witnessed or researched
events. This reconstruction could take the form of illustrative detail, as in
Robert Flaherty's staging of Eskimo life in Nanook of the North (1926) or Basil
Wright and Harry Watt's use of a mocked-up mail train in Night Mail (1936).
However, reconstruction could also involve substantial fictionalisation, as with
the visual style of fiction films or scripted narrative and characterisation
employed by Humphrey Jennings in Fires Were Started (1943). In postwar
television, the drama documentary emerged as a distinct form in the work of
programme-makers like Robert Barr, Caryl Doncaster and Duncan Ross in such BBC
productions as I Want to Be a Doctor (1947), It's Your Money They're After
(1948) and The Course of Justice (1950-51). Despite being billed as
documentaries, these programmes were largely reconstructed, which was justified
in terms similar to those used by the documentary film movement, in particular
technological impediments to observation: for instance, Wright and Watt could
not have filmed their sequences in a moving mail train. In situations like
these, or when sensitive subject matter restricts access to interviewees, there
is often, to quote one historian, 'no other way to tell it' than to reconstruct
events or invent dialogue.
However, the drama documentary remained attractive even when it was no longer
dictated by technology. Since the 1960s, dramatists and journalists alike have
developed variations of drama documentary technique. Granada Television's
dramatised documentary department, led by Leslie Woodhead, dramatised sequences
for such documentary strands as World in Action (ITV, 1963-98) and made
dramatised documentaries which extended the social reach of current affairs
investigations. Granada's distinctive tradition within the form, before and
since Woodhead's involvement, includes Invasion (ITV, tx. 19/8/1980), on
Communist Czechoslovakia; Hillsborough (ITV, tx. 5/12/1996), on the football
stadium disaster; and Who Bombed Birmingham? (ITV, tx. 28/3/1990), on the
Birmingham Six - an example, like the BBC's To Encourage the Others (BBC, tx. 28/3/1972) and
'The Legion Hall Bombing' (Play for Today, BBC, tx. 22/8/1978), of the miscarriage-of-justice piece to which drama documentary is well suited. However, depicting real people can present
legal complications.
Classification, too, can create problems. Julian Glover complained in the
press when Invasion was described as a work of fiction by BAFTA and so
overlooked, as a result of BAFTA's policy towards all drama documentaries at the
time. There are many examples of such contested definitions. The variety of
subjects and stylistic approaches which different programme-makers have explored
has led to numerous descriptive terms - including dramadoc, faction, trauma
drama or reconstruction - with subtle distinctions in meaning. Definitions have
shifted over the years - for example, Coronation Street (ITV, 1960- ) and Z
Cars (BBC, 1962-78) have been described as story documentaries because of their
dramatisation of prior observation. One key distinction is that between the
'documentary drama' and the 'dramatised documentary'. The first category labels
those programmes which are largely dramas, but have documentary value in terms
of research and are shot in a style influenced by documentary. The second
describes those programmes which are largely documentaries, with documented
journalistic research which could include transcripts, but also contain elements
of dramatisation. However, a rigid classification remains elusive.
If the Leslie Woodhead tradition could be categorised as dramatised
documentary, it is the documentary drama category that has sparked the greatest
controversy. For a generation of dramatists within television single drama, the
decision to mix drama and documentary was taken for aesthetic, and often
political, reasons. Peter Watkins evolved a style which brought documentary
conventions to hypothetical content, a style which he called the 'reconstructed
newsreel'. However, whereas Watkins' Culloden (BBC, tx. 15/12/1964) was
acclaimed for bringing alive a historical event, his later The War Game (BBC,
1965; eventually tx. 31/7/1985) was banned and vilified. Like Watkins, Ken Loach
employed documentary conventions in such work as Cathy Come Home (BBC, tx.
16/11/1966) and, although practices change, drama writers and directors continue
to seek levels of immediacy by using the documentary conventions of the day
(see, for example, Gas Attack, Channel 4, tx. 8/10/2001).
In the late 1960s, a Radio Times editorial by a senior BBC figure set out the
Corporation's concern with the drama documentary style, triggered by Loach's
work and by Tony Parker and Roy Battersby's Five Women, which was ultimately broadcast, substantially edited, as Some Women (BBC, tx. 27/8/1969).
Subsequently, politically radical use of drama documentary was criticised or
banned outright. Caryl Churchill and Roland Joffé's 'The Legion Hall Bombing' was just one production to suffer cuts; Roy Minton and Alan Clarke's Scum (BBC, 1977; eventually tx. 27/7/1991) was banned,
while Jim Allen and Ken Loach's Days of Hope (BBC, 1975) was criticised for political bias in the press and had its approach to political naturalism debated
in the film journal Screen. Although these productions provoked long debates on
the nature of drama documentary form in the media, academia and the industry
itself, it has been suggested that such debate may mask anxieties that are more
about political content than form.
One argument in defence of the drama documentary form is that documentary and
drama cannot be viewed as mutually exclusive, since the assumption that
documentary is objective and innately factual is misguided. If factual
programming is itself subject to editorial decision-making and narrative
organisation, then drama cannot 'corrupt' documentary. Indeed, both Ken Loach
and Tony Garnett have argued that appropriating documentary styles in drama is a
politically valid approach, since it is merely presenting facts from a different viewpoint than those offered in factual programmes, which are themselves subjective.
Despite these pressures, drama documentary remains a pervasive part of
British television drama. For instance, there have been many recent variations
on the techniques of The War Game, with depictions of hypothetical terrorist
attack or social breakdown in Smallpox 2002: Silent Weapon (BBC, tx. 5/2/2002),
The Day Britain Stopped (BBC, tx. 13/5/2003), the If... series (BBC, 2004) and
Dirty War (BBC, tx. 26/9/2004). However, it is notable that Dirty War was
followed by a discussion programme in which the filmmaker defended the programme's content, and that the press criticised dramatised scenes in Derailed (BBC, tx. 20/9/2005), which responded to rail safety as an exploration of
institutional culpability akin to Hillsborough. Controversies continue to follow examples of the genre, with no sign of resolution.
Dave Rolinson
Further reading
John Caughie, Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture (Oxford University Press, 2000)
John Corner, The Art of Record (Manchester University Press, 1996)
George McKnight (ed), Agent of Challenge and Defiance: The Films of Ken Loach (Flicks Books, 1997)
Derek Paget, No Other Way to Tell it: Dramadoc/docudrama on television (Manchester University Press, 1998)
Dave Rolinson, Alan Clarke (Manchester University Press, 2005)
Alan Rosenthal and John Corner (eds), New Challenges for Documentary (Manchester University Press, 2005)
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