Burns’s War – although resulting from a similar four-year trawl for original material and interviews – is very different from the magisterial even-handedness of the previous landmark series on the Second World War, Jeremy Isaac’s The World at War (1973), a 26-part epic that has stood the test of time as one of the greatest history series ever made.57In 2007, the same year that the Burns series was broadcast, the eminent British historian Richard Holmes saw fit to publish a compilation of the unused interviews recorded for the previous series nearly 40 years before.58With nearly all those witnesses to war now dead, this archive was re-evaluated as even more valuable than the original extracts in the edited series. Most film-makers regret the priceless material they discard in editing, often better but less easily extractable and neatly containable within the narrative arc and the tyranny of running time.
Few imagine that those offcuts may prove valuable and so few are retained, but the potential offered by the internet may prompt reconsideration.
The equally meticulously researched and comprehensive oral history projects undertaken by Brian Lapping Associates have been wisely cognisant of their collateral archive value.
The Second Russian Revolution (1991) profited the British Library of Political and Economic Science, proud possessors of 22 boxes of production files, including all interviews – audio
and video – with other papers residing in the archives of the London School of Economics library; and The Fifty Years War: Israel and the Arabs (1998) programme and interview transcripts are archived in the Middle East Centre at St Anthony’s College, Oxford. It is not just the extensive interviews with all the key players that distinguish these Lapping documentaries, but extraordinary found footage unearthed by the finest film researchers in the business. The result gives as clear a window on recent history as it is possible to achieve in this linear medium, earning plaudits from players from the world stage, such as former US Defense Secretary Robert J. McNamara:
The Fifty Years War is often a tale of mistrust and betrayal, but this production strives to present a balanced view of history, and is not only impressive for its command of the facts but for its skillful and often dramatic presentation of history.59
The Lapping series Death of Apartheid (1995)60and Death of Yugoslavia (1995)61also are original works of historical documentary importance that outlive the ephemeral demands of the television schedule.
Standing diametrically opposed to this late flowering of the inclusive, balanced documentary form, is the latter-day Marcuse62that is Adam Curtis. A former Oxford politics teacher, he did not come into television as a ‘telly-don’, but as a researcher on the consumer show That’s Life, more remembered for its obscenely shaped vegetables and gags than its big ideas. But Curtis credits this baptism as initiating the comic lift he brings to his docu-mentaries, among the few left on television that unashamedly deal with the field of ideas.
Each of his series starts with a short lecture enshrining the thesis of the show, often lasting over two minutes, apparently defying the executive anxiety that demands the biggest bangs in a programme’s first minute and nothing too difficult to frighten the audience off. But these narrations are accompanied by Curtis’s trademark barrage of edited archive, irreverently inter-cutting political figures and speech with popular culture icons and sounds. The conflation of images and ideas is very much the Curtis USP, instantly in tune with the MTV and YouTube generation, and is matched by the unorthodox arguments that Curtis presents.
In The Century of the Self (2002), Curtis announces that ‘This is a series about how those in power have used [Sigmund] Freud’s theories to control the dangerous crowd in an age of democracy’.63He charts how the development of public relations and advertising designed the model of self-centred consumerism that sponsored neo-conservatism and the breakdown of society. In The Power of Nightmares (2004), he claims that radical Islamists and American neo-conservatives have effectively conspired to seize power by fuelling popular fears:
Together they created today’s nightmare vision, of a secret organised evil that threatened the world, a fantasy that politicians found restored their authority in a disillusioned age.
And those with the darkest fears became the most powerful.64
In The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom (2007), Curtis further extends the argument that the proclaimed worldwide battle for democracy has had the opposite effect, of promoting terrorism and leading to the loss of age-old liberties. He explores what he terms
‘a dark and distrustful vision’ of human nature that has led to ‘a new and revolutionary system of social control. It would use the language of freedom, but in reality it would come to entrap us and our leaders in a narrow and empty world’.65Quoted out of context like this, this sounds
like the ‘miserabilist’ worldview that many television executives had vowed to eradicate from the airwaves, but that does not do justice to the endlessly innovative choice of image and juxtaposition of thought that makes Curtis’s films such a joy to watch. In Britain, their iconoclastic and sceptical take on the motives and methods of the powerful are part of an honoured tradition that goes back to the eighteenth-century satire of Swift and Hogarth. In America, they are deemed so far beyond the acceptable pale that none of them have ever been shown on any television channel.
If that fact reflects badly on the self-styled ‘land of the free’, Curtis reflects sharply on the television landscape in which he works:
The media class grew up during a period of certainty which was the Cold War. All those famous reporters bestrode the world and told us what was what because everything was simple. We knew who was wrong and who was right.
But now they don’t know anything. They know nothing! . . . But above all they know that they don’t really know. And what that leads to is a terrible sense of insecurity . . . But these people are paid a large amount of money, actually, to be clever and to tell us about the world – and they’re failing. It’s not their fault, but they are failing at it.66 Clearly not a view supported by many still working in television, but one that might be addressed by examining the level of expertise documentary series now offer in presenting the world. Although the historians have managed to survive the loss of intellectual confidence Curtis refers to, there is also a growing reliance on celebrity presenters, who bring to a subject not expertise, but an audience. It was the chance involvement in 1980 of a world-famous comedian in a series otherwise presented by conventional television presenters and historians that really set this ball rolling. Michael Palin, famous as one of the Pythons,67was an ardent train fan who was asked to front one of the films in the first series of Great Railway Journeys of the World.68The series ran for several years, employing more comedians and personalities, from Alexei Sayle and Victoria Wood to Ian Hislop and Danny Glover. Palin went on to become the Phileas Fogg of the BBC, fronting a modern Round the World in Eighty Days (1989)69and several other very popular landmark globetrotting series, confirming the man’s charm as the ultimate travelling companion, the archetypal innocent abroad, up to every challenge – not one of those clever clogs who presume to know everything. Funnily enough, Palin’s fellow Python Terry Jones has also become a documentary presenter, with series ranging from The Crusades (1985) to Terry Jones’ Barbarians (2006), but he bucks the trend by actually being a medieval historian.
The ascendancy of celebrity over knowledge has become the norm and it is likely that the choice of star often precedes the choice of subject. Having landed the big name, one can imagine the grateful commissioner asking: ‘Where would you like to go?’ Comedian Billy Connolly took a documentary crew with him on his World Tour of Scotland (1994), combining idiosyncratic travelogue with performance extracts, a trick repeated in Billy Connolly’s World Tour of Australia (1996), . . . of England, Ireland and Wales (2002) and . . . of New Zealand (2004). Connolly’s latest venture, Journey to the Edge of the World (2009), documents a 10-week trip returning to the Arctic, to which his previous visit was chiefly memorable for his naked dance in the snow. Comedian Paul Merton brings a different, more diffident approach to his travels for Channel 5, most notable for keeping his hat on in China and India.70The polymath Stephen Fry joined the celebrity charabanc with
his London taxi drive across all 50 states of the USA in Stephen Fry in America (2008),71 following a widely praised two-part documentary on his bipolarity in The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive (2006) and the following HIV and Me (2007). The BBC’s Richard Klein sees this as a logical development of documentary:
Now documentary embraces using character, more ‘immersive’, which gives it an authored feel. Stephen Fry decides to go out and find out about manic depression and it becomes a film about manic depression. We see Stephen Fry as a character in it while he explores the world around him.72
Connolly, Fry and Merton are among many whose celebrity give them free passage to travel on behalf of an apparently grateful audience. However, there are times when there is an uneasy relationship between the comedy and character of the star and the needs of the subject. Caroline Aherne and Craig Cash are largely known for the characters they write and play so well in the sitcom The Royle Family, but their trip to India to visit a remote children’s eye hospital made for uncomfortable viewing. In Back Passage to India (2000) – a title that indicates the problem – they seem ill at ease and the audience is left unsure whether they are performing or genuinely unhappy to be there. It was unfortunately repeated in a BBC season of programmes celebrating the 60th anniversary of Indian independence in August 2007, which had no Indian presenters other than the English comedian Sanjeev Baskhar and no programmes commissioned from Indian producers. The ‘immersive’ has supplanted the authentic. The other series that has revealed the potency of the star persona is in the personal histories of Who Do You Think You Are? mentioned earlier. Justified as good business, this is the triumph of the personal over the political.
Conclusion
Ideas are naturally subversive and their proponents always problematic to those who are ruled by the bottom line. Commissioners sitting in their glass and ivory towers, contemplating the coffee-table book sales of another series on art, do not anticipate libel actions from insulted painters, nor escalating costs caused by academic epiphanies on location. The primary job of these series is to give intellectual credibility to the channel’s schedules and disprove allegations of dumbing down. The more that the lecturer is a genuine expert sharing their original research and enthusiasm, the more that brief is fulfilled, but the harder they are to control. Similarly, rising celebrity and its increasingly astronomic evaluation also empower the presenter in their tantrums and demands. The producer can be caught between the siren voices of the superdon, assured by his ‘golden handcuffs’ deal to have divine right, and the channel executives, with one eye on the programme budget and the other on the
‘overnights’ (the overnight ratings published by BARB, the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board).73
Adam Curtis keeps working because his ideas are challenging and timely, and he has found a filmic form that attracts the audience. Indeed, he contradicts assumptions by delivering the younger demographic that the executives are so desperate to retain. It is possible that this attracts the same sensibility that Gavin MacFadyen speaks of rediscovering investigative journalism in Chapter 2. Thirty years ago, philosophers on a sofa could intrigue an audience, most of whom would not have been to university. Today, there seems to be a growing demand
for coherent analysis from a generation that has been to university, but discovers economic and political verities collapsing before their eyes. As Curtis says, those that are supposed to know, know they know nothing, so those with a compelling thesis are shooting at an open goal, if given the chance. It is instructive that the BBC continues to support this maverick filmmaker, whereas not even public service television dare show his work in the USA. As we discover in Chapter 17, this vacuum has been responded to by the revival of cinema documentary; and, on both sides of the Atlantic, the growth of secondary distribution via DVD and the internet favours documentaries of substance. While the coffee table books turn up the following year in the remainder stacks, the web is awash with clips from meaty series like The Power of Nightmares. The simple, if inconvenient, truth is: it is preferable that those addressing the camera have something to say.
Expert briefing – the scripted documentary
Documentary commissioners not only seek assurance that they are buying ‘a good story’, but also stipulate elements that are required by a particular strand. Thus Channel 4’s Cutting Edge wants ‘important films that, increasingly, are enjoyable and funny in tone’, while Discovery Europe wants factual formats that appeal to ‘Phil’, an emblematic 30-something family man ‘interested in motors’.74Other Channel 4 documentary demands are for ‘highly provocative polemical films’, ‘emotionally charged first person narratives’,
‘surprising and popular films about family life’, ‘docu-soaps and presenter-led
programmes’.75BBC2 is looking for ‘intelligent blending of constructed formats with top documentary filmmaking that deliver high-impact series’, 76while BBC4 is ‘eager to increase the number of landmark specialist factual series’. None of these objectives encourage free-form ‘following and shooting’ observational documentaries, just to see what you turn up.
They all require designing and focusing, casting and planning, creative collaboration – and scripting in some form. So here are some guidelines for the scripted documentary:
1 What is the story?: Hollywood established the tradition of the ‘log-line’, literally one sentence that encapsulates the storyline and the style in which it will be told.
The discipline ensures the filmmaker has a clear handle on what they are about. The assumption is that a concept too muddy to be reducible to one clear line is unready for production. The clearer the concept, the shorter the line can be. My favourite was Nick Park’s apocryphal pitch for his first feature, Chicken Run: ‘The Great Escape – but with chickens’. The documentary line needs to be just as revelatory, whether it is Life Story’s ‘Watson and Crick’s race to find the structure of DNA’ or Air Force Afghanistan
‘chronicling life for British servicemen stationed at Kandahar air base’.
2 Titles: Good titles help clarify the complex and define the promise, from The Shock of the New to The Power of Nightmares. These are ‘hard-bite’ phrases that attract attention and promise strong sensations. Long-running series titles quickly achieve iconic status, with their literal meaning subsumed in the programme brief, whether it is Panorama or Big Brother. The choice of words in titles conveys not just meaning, whether literal or literary, but the show’s aspirational level. You do not approach a programme called Cops or Extreme Bodies in search of subtlety, nor The Daily Politics for a laugh. Landmark series have to speak to many nations, so must rise above culture specifics to talk to the universal: Life on Earth and The War. As they said in the days of film, ‘it must do what it says on the can’.
3 Narrative arc: Whether it is a history of a war or a country, the genesis of an idea or an invention, a metaphorical journey through time or an actual railway journey, the narrative paradigm will normally apply, because film – at least in the way that most people consume it in the cinema or on television – is a linear medium. French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard observed that all film stories should have a beginning, middle and end, ‘but not necessarily in that order’. The narrative arc is the line that connects those three, alternatively defined as ‘proposition, conflict and resolution’.
So dramatic storytelling requires a (preferably sympathetic) protagonist setting out on a journey; events, if not antagonists, that jeopardise the course of travel; and some sort of resolution. Screenwriting schools call this ‘The Three-Act Structure’.
Even an eminent historian’s personal odyssey through his or her special subject can be organised in this way, with the exposition simplified for the audience and the revelations staged in satisfying, edifying sequence, arriving at the anticipated conclusion.
4 Voice: Most landmark series are built around a given presenter, who will normally be responsible for the original script. It then falls to the producer and/or director to establish how that will be visualised, how much will be voiced in vision, how much in commentary, whether this will call for a secondary commentary voice and/or readers for written extracts, and how many complementary speakers will be called on in the course of the programme. Too many can make the pace frenetic and programme superficial; too few may make it slow and monotonous. How strong is your presenter’s voice, especially in voiceover? Can they manage long pieces to camera, enabling developing shots, or will their takes have to be cut around, line for line? Can they write conversationally, or must the script be completely re-imagined for the untutored viewer?
5 Resources: Even the most lavish productions will be constrained by budget, not least in how many locations can be afforded. This is not the academic’s area of speciality, so you have to advise roughly how much travelling is feasible before their first draft, then plan a schedule of how much on the page can be achieved. With music, art and archive, there are also major copyright considerations, which will restrict how much secondarily sourced screen time can be afforded. Location and picture research will help flesh out the script and reveal more accurate figures on costs, but the level of ambition of the series will have been set by the commissioner and the budget given.
What they will require is more bangs for their bucks; leisurely strolls through castles or galleries are rarely acceptable, unless that is the point. But they will want pictures of those castles, and getting to each costs money, as do the aerials or crane shots that achieve the stunning panoramas. There may also be the requirement for dramatised reconstruction, which I cover in more detail in Chapter 15.
6 Pictures: Scripts need to be realistically prescriptive in shot needs. With a visual demand that has doubled cut rates in recent years – few shots lasting more than three
6 Pictures: Scripts need to be realistically prescriptive in shot needs. With a visual demand that has doubled cut rates in recent years – few shots lasting more than three