TELEVISION For all that the internet draws more and more of us into its web for more and more of the time, we still watch (on average) nearly four hours of television a day. It’s the most popular way to consume fiction – and to consume fact. Bar brief breaks, they pass into our minds in a single, finely crafted stream. And distinguishing between the two is not always easy.
This is because TV now blurs and even erases the division between the real and the fictional. Fictions have been brought closer to “real life”; the news and documentaries have been made more dramatic, with techniques borrowed from fiction.
This is not just the case with political and other satire/drama based on real politicians. It is also so with the just-ended Waking the Dead (BBC1 Mondays) and the about-to-return Spooks (BBC1, later this month). In both cases, their action is highly wrought, powerfully acted, clearly fictional – but draws on real-life characters, events and trends. To watch Spooks is to wonder: which of these threats with which these men and women deal, are real? Could happen? Are brewing now?
Watching documentaries now, one can no longer be under any illusion that this is “the way it is” – as the late Walter Cronkite would sign off his CBS bulletin – but the way the programme makers frame it. Wednesday’s Panorama Special (BBC1) was an uncomfortable object lesson, because the programme’s standards were at war with its desire for an outcome of outrage. At its core were the deaths of patients who had been transferred to privately run clinics from the National Health Service for relatively routine operations; its question was whether or not this reflected pressure from politicians and managers to shovel people through the system to reduce waiting lists.
Emotionally (there were tearful interviews) the answer was “yes”; statistically, it was “yes and no”; journalistically, in spite of reminding the audience of overwhelming success rates, there were unanswered questions – about how the figures compared with operations in NHS hospitals, about mortality rates for those on formerly long waiting lists, about the specific culpability of a surgeon who has now been suspended.
Or take an even more strongly framed programme with lower standards – Unreported World (Channel 4 Fridays), which began its new series last week (September 25) with a cheap and cheerless half-hour on the descent of the Russian region of Ingushetia, next door to Chechnya, into a guerrilla/terrorist war. The director-presenter Clancy Chassey took the evidence of the Ingush who had lost sons and husbands to a campaign of terror by the Russian army largely at face value. He reported that the Russian authorities, whom he interviewed off-camera, said they were fighting Islamic fundamentalists, but he dwelt on the brutality visited on what seemed to be harmless young men.
There is no shortage of evidence that the Russian army can be brutal; I would believe much of what Chassey showed. But the Russians do now confront a rebellion fuelled by Islamist fundamentalism; they do now face, as they did in Chechnya, men as brutal as they are; they do seek to control territory, a majority of whose inhabitants oppose the insurrectionists. That Russian hard power largely created this state of affairs is, I think, true – but we cannot properly know a situation only through its victims.
In both fiction and in documentary, a contemporary audience will and should increasingly ask of the programme-makers – what are you telling me? How do you know? How real is the fiction, how manipulated the real?
Such questions are as old as fiction itself . But we have better technology now – and in pursuit of the transparency that we all prize, it would be a tremendous initiative for programme-makers to make available the material that supports – or does not support – the fictions and the documentaries we see. An essay – perhaps in the form of study notes – accessible on the channel’s website, with links to other, explanatory sites and a reading list, would be a great innovation. It would enrich the experience of viewing, and make this, our most common cultural activity, a little less potato-like.
Two programmes this past week did not require such an innovation. Two Feet in the Grave (BBC1 Tuesday) had Richard Wilson conduct a gentle examination of dying: how to do it with dignity, the mechanics of it, what the dying think. It was resolutely – and mistakenly – secular, about an event that throughout history has been the preserve of religion. But the jaunty celebration of a West Indian funeral, and the determinedly upbeat approach of makers of coffins, crematorium managers and pathologists was an inspiration, as was the apparent cheerful insouciance with which a musician with throat cancer prepared for the end – in his case, choosing to ride to the cemetery in a coffin in a motorbike’s sidecar, driven by a vicar known as the Faster Pastor.
And the first episode of Flash Forward (Five Monday), whose production values are almost those of a compressed blockbuster, seems to promise enjoyably alarming pure fiction. But we’ll see: it could turn into a covert essay on the ills of our world. More on that later.
john.lloyd@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/lloyd
