[Television has embraced] the fashionable “reality bandwagon”: a crude construction that trundles ever forward, crushing anything “real” that pokes out through the scum of docusoaps and trivia…. Observation is largely out, scripting is hugely in…. In these vainglorious worlds of fabricated reality, only the cliché counts and the unsettling facts give way to the LCD [lowest common denominator] needs of entertainment. Grown producers have knowingly taken leave of their sensibilities—indeed, all sense of real life—in order to create a “reality world” that ideally troubles nobody…. Reality, a word I once thought I owned, has been reduced to a game show…. [But] yes, I am accused of being a hypocrite—”You created the stuff, and now you disown it.” No. Just as any artist, I move on. (Watson 22)
Paul Watson produced the twelve-part documentary serial, The Family (BBC1, 1974),1 which is widely regarded as the British counterpart to An American Family (PBS, 1973). Although speaking from his reluctant position as the “godfather of Reality TV” (Hoggart), Watson's comments invoke familiar dismissals of the form. Reality TV, seemingly cultivating an appetite for individualized narratives within self-contained “tele-scapes” of its own devising (Nichols, Blurred 31), is often seen as a regrettable popularization of the factual moving image and a further severing of the relationship between television and the public sphere. Given these negative cultural discourses, it is clear that Watson has a particular investment in distinguishing his work from reality TV. But his comments still raise important questions about how a historical genealogy of the form is being constructed—whether in the popular media or in academic discourse. Television historiography has become a crucial part of television studies, yet when it comes to reality TV, the meeting of these spheres is still an evolving project. (This is doubtless hampered by reality TV's own obsession with “liveness” and “nowness,” and the wider tendency to conceptualize it as an entirely new phenomenon.)
Both academic and popular discussions of reality TV have seized landmarks or flashpoints in mapping the unruly genealogy of the form—from Candid Camera to An American Family and The Family. For example, a recent British documentary on the history of “ordinary” people on television claims that, in The Family, viewers “watched real life as it happened…. The Wilkins family became our first Reality TV stars.”2 But this historical shorthand also emerges as problematic when, as is the case with The Family, the “milestone” itself has never really been analyzed. Although liberally cited, The Family has been referred to rather than examined. On a scholarly level, it has perhaps been overshadowed by interest in the spectacularly controversial An American Family, which featured the breakup of the Loud family (specifically, the divorce of Mr. and Mrs. Loud) as part of the serial itself. But until Jeffrey Ruoff's “An American Family”: A Televised Life in 2002, the American show had also received little sustained attention since its original broadcast in 1973. It seems that, implicitly or otherwise, these programs have not been deemed serious enough for the province of documentary scholarship, yet they have perhaps been considered too serious (and too old?) to capitalize on the current scholarly energy surrounding reality TV (Holmes). In this regard, The Family seems to have slipped through the analytic cracks.
Although some of its innovations are seen to reside in the text itself (its serial form, the unprecedented access to and focus on “ordinary” people), many of the assumed connections between then and now can really be explored only at the level of extratextual discourse—perceptions of genre, privacy, or ordinary people as performers. We always map the past from the vantage point of the present, so the positioning of The Family is no exception here. But in the eagerness to forge a relationship between now and then, what gets lost is the sense of “newness” and the debate that attended The Family's first airing. After all, critics and viewers at the time did not know that The Family would later be positioned in popular memory and cultural history as the gateway to a whole range of popular factual programming. This is vividly encapsulated by a critic's blunt assertions in the Daily Telegraph in 1974: “It is sadly unlikely that The Family will be seminal…. The television audience cannot be expected to bear too much reality.”3
The aim of this essay is not to mount an overriding argument for or against The Family's status as a precursor to reality TV (which would negate the complexities involved in television historiography). But in seeking to come to a more nuanced understanding of this relationship, I explore what might be termed pockets of comparison, drawing on original archival research4 in a bid to reconstruct aspects of The Family's popular circulation.
In deciding to produce The Family, Watson was influenced by the success of An American Family in America the previous year, and he engaged in a dialogue about the production with the BBC's office in New York.5 On April 3, 1974, after Watson had interviewed many potential families, The Family introduced viewers to the Wilkinses. The family comprised Terry Wilkins (thirty-nine), a bus driver, Margaret Wilkins (thirty-nine), a part-time greengrocer, and their children Marion (nineteen), a hairdresser, Gary (eighteen), a bus driver and conductor, Heather (fifteen), and Christopher (nine). Gary's wife, Karen (eighteen), and their baby son, Scott, as well as Marion's boyfriend, Tom, also lived with the family, and they occupied a rented flat above the greengrocer shop where Margaret Wilkins worked.
There is little doubt that The Family was seen at the time as a landmark program—as suggested by press headlines (the surprise expressed at the fact that a “BBC serial stars real people”) and by the manner in which critics reflected on its influence and significance when it came to an end. But in regard to questions of social content and aesthetic form, the emphasis on innovation was also shored up by the producer Paul Watson and the BBC. In this respect, the BBC was apt to foreground aesthetic innovation. Their press release, titled “New Real-Life Documentary Serial for BBC,” drew attention to how The Family exploited “new microphone techniques” as well as the latest lightweight cameras, which allowed “interior filming without artificial lights.”6 In comparison, Watson's discourse about the program took a broadly Marxist stance in the face of questions of class, social access, and representation and emphasized the importance of giving the “ordinary” people a voice. The Family also emerged at the same time that the BBC was exploring “access” programming, which evolved into their series Open Door (1973-1983). Part of the international growth of access TV, the series featured programs made by various marginalized groups, ranging from black teachers to the “transex liberation group.”7 But in terms of making a connection with Watson's program, there is clearly a tension here insofar as the very idea of “the family” (and a white, working-class family at that) suggests a central, rather than marginalized, social concept. (In fact, in the early 1970s at least, nearly 70 percent of the population could still be classified as working class; see Marwick 143). As I discuss below, the program's claim to typicality was hotly contested. But the fact that the discourse surrounding The Family ascribes an inter-textual connection with access programming makes clear how limited the opportunities were for ordinary people to appear on television at this time (and in the British context, the concept of the ordinary is often equated with the working class).
The terms direct cinema, cinema verité, and fly-on-the-wall are often used (problematically) in interchangeable ways (see Corner, Art). But despite the claim that The Family was probably more responsible than anything else for the popularization of the concept of fly-on-the-wall programming,8 this term did not have an especially wide currency in 1974. Much of the debate, about direct cinema at least, had been associated with key figures in the United States (Wiseman, Leacock, Pennebaker). This was acknowledged by Sight and Sound when it noted how “very little of this debate has been heard [in the United Kingdom]. And right into the middle of it drops The Family. What were critics going to make of it? What were the viewers supposed to think?” (Young 210). Watson did have Roger Graef's The Space between Words (1972) on which to draw (this was also interested in the inner life of the family, albeit within a “communication experiment” setting) (Corner, “American Family,” 8). But in the BBC's own categorizations of documentary forms, there is no distinct listing for observational or fly-on-the-wall in the mid-1970s; neither appears until the end of the decade.9
There is also the question as to how the program might have related to the documentary culture of the time. Although observational filmmaking, once transferred to television, has been seen as particularly suited to intimate subjects (Kilborn and Izod), it is not the case that the BBC's documentaries had previously dealt only with “public,” metanarrative issues. We know relatively little about routine British documentary production in this period, and celebrated high points—such as Civilisation (BBC, 1969) and The Ascent of Man (BBC, 1974)—tend to be emphasized above all else. The main placing for the genre was in the Tuesday documentary strand (a regular slot for documentary screenings on the BBC), as well as in series such as Omnibus (BBC1) and Horizon (BBC2). In 1973 the Tuesday strand ranged across The Group (alcoholism), The Press We Deserve, The British Empire, and A Place of Your Own (house prices), to titles on sport, the film industry, and film stars. Omnibus featured titles such as “Born Black,” “Born British,” “Artists in Wartime,” and “Marcel Marceau,” and Horizon offered “Sex Can Be a Problem,” “The Making of the Natural History Film,” and “How Much Do You Smell?”10 We can add to this occasional series such as One Pair of Eyes (a collection of “personal films”) and Larger Than Life (a series of half-hour documentaries on unusual people). It is also possible that The Family owed as much, if not more, to current affairs programs such as ITV's This Week (1956-1992) and the BBC's more populist and personal Man Alive (1965-1982). As Anita Biressi and Heather Nunn describe: “Examining ‘problem’ issues around social and sexual life, Man Alive conducted highly personal interviews with ordinary people and provoked tears often enough to attract the label ‘sob-umentary’ “(65).
It is true that The Family provoked debate about questions of privacy and television's role in mediating, and often reshaping, the boundary between public and private (something that has historically been divided by the family). From the initial descriptions of the program as a “much-heralded peepshow,” to the clear distaste expressed for the “doubtful privilege of displaying [one's] sordid life to the public gaze,”11 the very idea of Watson's experiment was seen as offending bourgeois sensibilities. When later comparing The Family with Big Brother, Margaret Wilkins (now Margaret Sainsbury) reminds us how there was “no love-making” and no “filming in the toilet” in 1974.12 But what is perhaps most striking, from today's perspective at least, is the absence of a confessional tone in The Family. For example, Margaret Wilkins's revelation (episode 1) that Christopher was fathered by another man was greeted with outright disgust in the press, with regard both to acceptable sexual morals and to the televisual display of such intimate details. Yet this revelation is imparted as factual information (“now I'll tell you this …”), and rather than emerging from a to-camera confessional, it materializes in the course of a kitchen conversation between Margaret Wilkins and Marion's boyfriend, Tom. It was also actually included in a bid to circumvent a sensationalist exposé, although this was later undermined by the Wilkinses’ prolific extratextual circulation. Margaret Wilkins's ghostwritten book, A Family Affair, was serialized in the tabloid newspaper the Sun, and it filled in (in the manner of a spicy romance novel) the various infidelities on both sides of the marriage during the years before The Family began. But though this may have been a narrative strand woven by the tabloid press, The Family itself did not broach intimate sexual matters in the manner of Man Alive.
Based on the evidence of The Family, this is not, therefore, a culture in which “feeling and emotion have lost much of their private character”—as Frank Furedi describes with respect to the rise of a confessional or therapeutic culture (40). Indeed, the traditional British script of personhood still pivoted on notions of “stoicism, understatement, the stiff upper lip and of fortitude” (Furedi 19). Although there was very little about the Wilkinses that critics and viewers found understated (they often generated hyperbolic reactions), the family still became famous for what was perceived as their ability to deal with the public pressure the serial generated—frequently described as “bearing up.” This emphasis emerged largely through comparisons with the American version. Although British critics and viewers and the Wilkinses had not actually seen An American Family, it played an important role in the discursive circulation of the British program. The fact that the American version was positioned as instigating the breakup of the Loud family was constantly referred to in British press reports, and the Wilkinses mentioned it often onscreen. The invocation of An American Family with such comments as “after television took them apart, the family fell apart”13 seemed to perform certain functions here. For one, and despite the PBS origins of the American show, it initially produced a reassuring contrast between the apparently excessive and intrusive values of American television and culture and the British sense of public service, restraint, and hardiness. The first Radio Times article on The Family ran the headline “The Family That Stars Together Sticks Together,” which was surely a direct reference to the narrative climax of the American show.14 The American press dubbed the Loud family “affluent zombies” (Ruoff 12), but it was also predictable, in the context of British popular culture and identity, that The Family sought to locate the “ordinary” and the “real” in the context of the stoic and no-nonsense working class. In terms of the perpetual emphasis on the Wilkinses’ bearing up in the face of the filming and the fame, we might also note the greater tendency to position television visibility as a trial as much as a privilege. Reflecting on the rise of the self-reflexive individual (Giddens), Furedi argues that therapy culture did not begin to permeate mainstream British culture until the 1980s, and in the 1960s and 1970s “Britain was frequently contrasted with the let-it-all-hang-out ethos of the US” (18). With respect to An American Family, Ruoff indeed outlines how some critics saw the Louds’ willingness to share their private lives “as representative of a therapeutic society thriving on a ‘compulsion to confess,’ an indication of the weakening of America's moral fiber” (106).
Although the rise of therapy culture, in which discourses of confession or therapy are no longer confined to religious or institutionally specific contexts, was also still in its early stages in the United States, it is certainly the case that The Family still bears the marks of a more traditional conception of the relationships among society, family structure, and identity. In the individualization thesis, “Stripped of tradition, time/space, class categories and so on, the basic unit of social reproduction is now claimed to be the individual” (Adams 7). But as I will show, The Family is still very much entrenched in markers of an older modernity—particularly the relations among the family, social class, and the State.
Like An American Family, The Family was a “blend of seriousness and sensationalism” (Ruoff 62). That is not to imply that this curious mix differs from the political possibilities of reality TV today (which can and does engender heated debate about questions of identity, power, and the world around us).15 But the difference lies in the extent to which the social and political address of the program is actively encoded in the text itself, as well as in the relationship between the particular (the Wilkinses) and the general (society). What gets flattened out in the positioning of The Family as a precursor to reality TV is the very self-conscious nature of its social intentions—what Nichols may call its recourse to documentary “discourses of sobriety” (Representing 2)—and the context into which these are placed. Watson maintained that he “wanted to try and make a serious film about people contending in an urban society.”16 He hoped that contemporary political and social events, such as mentions of the recent miners’ strike, the three-day week, and a closely fought election, could be examined in the context of the Wilkinses’ family life (Young 208). In fact, what has been lost in the recent invocations of the serial as a precursor to reality TV is how it spoke to the social and political context from which it emerged.
Popular constructions of Britain in the 1970s often paint a particularly bleak picture. As Peter Leese puts it, “The fabric of post-war society, which had often been patched up through the first full decade of the post-war age, began to appear threadbare” (67), and notions of consensual collectivism had truly eroded. As was the case elsewhere in the world, Britain was struggling to come to terms with high rates of inflation, and the mid-1970s brought the most severe economic recession since the war (Moore-Gilbert 2). As unemployment increased and British citizens encountered serious threats to their living standards, industrial conflict emerged on a scale unparalleled since the 1920s (Moore-Gilbert 3). (Most notable were the miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1973-1974, which effectively brought down Edward Heath's Conservative government.) This represented a sharpening of class divisions and attitudes, and fragmentation could also be seen at the level of gender and race, given that emergent forms (feminism and the women's movement, multiculturalism) clashed with traditional discourses and structures (patriarchy and racism) (Whannel 194).
With respect to class, we have already seen how Watson emphasized the importance of giving the working class a television voice. But the BBC production files indicate how he intended to make a more explicit connection with the resurgence of organized trade union action than actually transpired. According to one memo, Watson was looking for a family with a father “working in industry and subject to collective bargaining for his pay … possibly involved in union activities,”17 and the initial Radio Times introduction described how Watson would be using “news and current affairs [programs] to spark off the Wilkinses’ comment[s] about what is going on around them”18 (this never actually happened). Neither Watson nor the Wilkins family professed to specifically left leanings (a Labour government was voted into power in 1974). But it is interesting to speculate about the extent to which Watson's original intentions were shaped, or perhaps circumscribed, by the BBC's long-standing institutional concerns surrounding objectivity and impartiality. After all, the BBC's “Principles and Practice in Documentary Programmes” (1972), which was operative at the time The Family was made, was characteristically contradictory: it acknowledged how directing or producing inevitably involved the construction of a point of view, while it also insisted that for a documentary filmmaker “to express his views would be a total abuse of the power platform he controls” (21). In this regard, The Family, like any BBC documentary, worked within particular institutional constraints.
References to the wider political context were either brief or indirect. In episode 6, for example, Marion's boyfriend, Tom, comes in from the local pub keen to tell Margaret Wilkins a joke he has heard: “Eh Margaret, you should have been in the pub this morning, when they were on about the politics and that—the state of the nation, now that [Harold] Wilson's got in and that. Some matey came out with a great one. He is the only bloke who, when he goes to the toilet, wears his underpants…. That way he doesn't have to look down at the unemployed [they all laugh]” (May 12, 1974). At the same time, given the program's constant emphasis on the housing shortage, questions of welfare provision were implicitly or explicitly present. The Labour government, which was in office from 1974 to 1979, set out to implement its Social Contract agreement. The crux of this was that in recognition of the sacrifice of wage increases, there would be enhanced welfare benefits (Marwick 136). Yet in The Family emphasis was constantly placed on inadequate and bureaucratic structures where housing, or more specifically, council housing, was concerned. The emphasis on overcrowding was also aesthetically and formally present in the serial insofar as the observational filming style, and the close proximity between camera and participants, often accentuated the vision of a cramped domesticity. In An American Family, the camera frequently left the affluent Louds’ “ranch,” so spacious and open, to move into different geographical and physical spaces. Yet trips outside the Wilkinses’ flat were more brief and infrequent—which further contributed to a sense of physical and social claustrophobia.
A key narrative in the first half of the serial focuses on the efforts of young Gary and Karen to secure a council house, which would enable them to move out of the Wilkinses’ cramped flat. Although the officials whom Karen meets at Reading Council are not presented in the same sharply negative light as those in the previous decade's famous documentary-drama, Cathy Come Home (BBC, 1966), she is told that they don't have enough points to qualify. (The only way for her to rise up the scale would be to have another child.) Margaret Wilkins then tells Karen that you have to “worry the living daylights out of [the] … council these days to get anything,” and she goes on to pinpoint further flaws in a system that allows people coming “in from other towns” to usurp homes needed by the residents of Reading.
Perhaps some viewers took heed of Margaret's suggestions. A headline in the Daily Express later reported: “Housing row over TV's Wilkins family. A young couple barricaded themselves into their flat after watching the BBC real life television series.” Their demonstration protested against Reading Council's insistence that they did not qualify for a council house.19 But given that despite the pessimistic outlook cast in the early weeks of the serial, Gary and Karen do get a council house in episode 6, a debate about the influence of the camera on the events portrayed inevitably ensued. (Did they get the house only because they were on TV?)
But when compared to Cathy Come Home, which engendered a national debate on the subject of housing, which in turn led to social reform (see Corner, Art), The Family did not generate this kind of overtly politicized discourse, which was not central to its circulation and reception. As one critic summed up, the show was often seen as simply being “burdened with the trivial chit-chat of domestic routine,” which had “no interest at all to any outsider.”20 I will return to this judgment shortly, but this description now seems particularly striking, given that (compared to popular factual programming today), its discursive relationship with social observation and comment is narratively explicit.
The Family articulated the Wilkinses as subjects who represented social as well as individual identities. This was most apparent in the use of voiceover to frame the background and social position of the family members, especially in the first two episodes. While referred to as observational, Watson's work mixes styles or, rather, demonstrates how television has rarely used observational filmmaking in its “pure” form.21 In episode 2 we are given more information about Gary's wife, Karen, when Watson explains, “There are many like Karen—ensnared within the trap of low wages, inadequate education, and early marriage” (April 12, 1974). Such moves from the particular to the general were often accompanied by a still shot of the family member. Though perhaps intended to reinforce the sense that the audience is being offered a snapshot of the life of one social subject, the aesthetic impression, when the person is caught in the frame, reinforces a kind of ideological containment—especially when compared to the boisterous and vocal identities displayed by the family in the observational sequences. Watson often positioned himself as the omniscient voice of God, the origin of meaning, and the possessor of superior social knowledge. Witness, for example, the events in episode 3, when Heather bluntly rejects the advice of her school careers officer by stating how “half the girls in my class … get fed up” (April 19, 1974). (This episode prompted debates in the press about the education system and the age at which youths could leave school.) After we fade to a still of Heather, Watson narrates: “Heather … must take her chance in the growing ranks of unemployed youth, for without the certificate she will be prey to every cheap-labour employer. It could be a bleak future.” Not only does Watson appear to occupy a superior temporal position (he knows Heather's past, her present, and apparently her future), but he also knows best.
The description of the serial as being “burdened with the trivial chitchat of domestic routine” privileged the observational sequences—which did represent the program's dominant aesthetic and narrative mode—whereas other critics thought it displayed a clash of styles. Watson's expository contextualization (“There are many like Karen”) could abruptly shift to a sequence displaying a domestic squabble, Margaret doing the housework, or young Christopher watching TV. But the judgments cast on the apparent triviality of the domestic routine, as well as the wider perception that Watson's serial was not a serious documentary (which failed to live up to its original aims), are also inflected by a gendered public-private dichotomy. This takes on a particular resonance in relation to contemporary television when we consider how this dichotomy has shaped the perceived relationship between reality TV and the documentary. The terms of discussion—hard/soft, public/private, social/personal, objective/subjective—have often been gendered, and the positioning of the documentary as a “masculine” genre, especially in terms of its relation with the public sphere, is often implicit. In fact, Liesbet van Zoonen has argued that reality TV has been both derided and controversial in part because of its flagrant disregard for the historical, gendered division of private-public realms. We might also speculate whether the focus on the domestic has shaped the lack of real scholarly engagement with The Family. (And documentary criticism in Britain has in many respects been primarily a male preserve.)
Indeed, this was precisely the time when second-wave feminism was proclaiming that the personal was political, and in watching the serial today, it is difficult not to note the power struggles surrounding the gender roles in The Family. As the most dominant member of the family, Margaret Wilkins tended to be framed as a timeless working-class matriarch, one that might be found in a British soap opera. But the younger relationships (Marion and Tom, Karen and Gary) offer fascinating insights into changing gender expectations, as well as the continued constraints placed on gender roles.22 In comparison, feminism and the women's movement represented a more explicit discourse in An American Family—as can be seen in the narrative impetus of the Louds’ divorce. As Ruoff describes it, Pat Loud emerged “as a foil to discuss general issues related to the women's movement,” and the release of her autobiography capitalized on this connection, exploring issues of divorce, single motherhood, and sexual liberation (123).
The emphasis on family cohesion in the British program did not lend itself to discussion of gender issues. In fact, when the Scottish Women's Liberation Group proclaimed that, as a strong matriarchal figure, “Mrs. Wilkins has done more for the movement than Germaine Greer or anyone else,” she promptly replied, “Look, I don't want to be a celebrity and I'm certainly not one of these women's libbers.”23 This may reflect the extent to which radical feminism in particular was often perceived as an attack on the very concept of the family (which obviously sat uneasily with the focus of Watson's serial). But it may also offer insight into the relationship between feminism and class here. In her weekly column in the Evening News, Margaret Wilkins spoke about issues raised by the program, such as sex before marriage (Marion and Tom), the “colour problem” (Heather's boyfriend Melvyn was of mixed race), and the role of the mother-housewife. As she muses in one column:
Now, I genuinely believe that a housewife can be a great job. It can be much more rewarding for you and your family than if you have to go out to work each day. So many things affect our everyday lives at home—like rising prices, rising rates, house shortages. Just because we are housewives, we don't have to sit at home and let politicians and councillors make decisions to alter our lives without us having any say in them. Look at the great job those housewives in Cowley [Oxford] did in stopping the strike and getting their husbands back to work. I really admire them.24
It is tempting to simply read this in hegemonic terms; we don't even know if she wrote the column, and the emphasis on wanting to be an ordinary housewife also seems at odds with her class status and the family's economic position. Nevertheless, her direct reference to the political and economic contexts of the time speaks to how feminism was cut across, and shaped by, discourses of class. The popular image of the bourgeois feminist emphasized the pursuit of individualism, but working-class women (and women in the unions) recognized the importance of solidarity with male class allies, so that their relationship with these discourses was uneasy (Bolt).
In this regard, the extent to which The Family engaged with its political context, and what this might mean, could clearly benefit from more debate. This is especially so in light of its perceived relationship with reality TV, and the similarities and differences this comparison might reveal. This seems to be particularly important given that the dominant themes in the critical reception of the program in 1974 were more myopic—focused on the contested “typicality” of the Wilkinses and questions of mediation and performance.
With regard to An American Family, Ruoff comments how “critics failed to recognize the mediation involved … and talked about the Louds as if they were next-door neighbors” (xxiv). When issues of mediation were recognized, there was generally more emphasis on the significance of mediation at the shooting stage (the effect of the filming on the family's performance) than there was on the postproduction construction of meaning through editing. Although questions of mediation were hardly a marginal concern in the reception of the British serial, it was nevertheless also the case that emphasis was placed primarily on questions of performance rather than postproduction. As the Times critic Christopher Dunkley observed, if the “intention is to deliver a certain ‘truth’ … it is succeeding. It is telling the truth about the way an overcrowded family behaves when it has a BBC television crew living in the house for 18 hours a day.”25 Though it might be easy to assume that viewers in this period were less critical and savvy when navigating their way through the complexities of the real, 52 percent of the BBC's viewers apparently rejected the very idea of observational television, agreeing with the statement that “this sort of programme will never work because no matter how often they say they forget the cameras [are there] it just isn't true.”26
When compared to access programming, The Family was evidently not authored by the Wilkins family—something that was occasionally debated by certain critics in the press. But the fact that this strand of debate was subordinate to the emphasis on the family as dramatic agents and performers reflects the extent to which the media debate militated against their association with the role of victim. (This is despite the fact that, as I mentioned earlier, Watson's voiceover often gave this impression). Existing work on The Family has noted the often vitriolic reception of the Wilkinses (Corner, “American Family”). A filmmaker and supporter of The Family, Roger Graef, attributed the reception of the Wilkinses to the fact that to “present British families other British families … is to confront them most uncomfortably. And they panic, lest the box turn into a mirror” (773). But as Corner observes, the emphasis on The Family as an uncomfortable mirror underrates the extent to which class difference (and distance) pervaded the responses it received (“American Family,” 9). The language of the reviews bespeaks a tapestry of class prejudice, and critics discussed sequences in ways that conflated an aesthetic and class distaste. For example, in episode 3, “the camera sniffed around the Wilkinses’ establishment, Heather's boyfriend helped her wash her hair (close-up of him ogling her well-developed bosom) while Tom … swayed in from the local clutching his pint”).27 It would be something of an understatement to suggest that the Wilkinses became one of the first and most visible constructions of what Corner has since called “the bad ordinary” on television, “one part of the assumed badness of which is the belief that the depiction will encourage a further slide in standards of behaviour and values of living” (Foreword xvii).
Although middle-class critics clearly did not see the serial as a mirror, part of the controversy that surrounded The Family did revolve around what was perceived to be its apparent claim to typicality where family life was concerned. Christopher had been fathered by another man, Marion was cohabiting with Tom, Gary had entered into a shotgun wedding with Karen, and Heather had a boyfriend of African and Caribbean descent. Letters and columns debating the typicality of the Wilkinses were plentiful; still more objected to the “real” language used. One viewer, for example, wrote to the BBC to insist that “the average working-class family does not regard illegitimate children as something to be found in every … home…. Most of all, the women folk in the average working-class family do not intersperse most of their conversation with expressions such as ‘piss off’ and ‘arseholes.’”28 Despite (or perhaps because of) Britain's declining empire status, there were still more anxieties about the image the program would project of Britain overseas.
Watson perpetually maintained that he had never laid claim to a representation of typicality, although it is not difficult to see that this concept was crucial to his project in at least two ways. It established the social (“public”) basis for the serial, and it directed attention away from the possibility that the Wilkinses had been selected with their dramatic, or rather sensational, potential in mind. As Margaret Wilkins notes nearly ten years later in the follow-up, The Family: The After Years (1983) (screened the same year that the American version was also revisited): “I know why you picked us—because you were bloody lucky. You had everything in one family, didn't you? A girl living with a boyfriend. A couple who were pregnant when they got married. Heather, a teenage young woman … going with a coloured fella, and then there was Christopher. So what else did you want?” (December 17, 1983). But times had changed, and what Margaret paints as scandalous was no longer perceived as such. First, when the serial was rescreened in 1983, some critics felt that the boundaries of privacy had been pushed back to such a degree (renegotiated, of course, by television itself) that The Family could no longer be of any real interest to the TV audience.29 Second, although The Family: The After Years presented a far less cohesive picture of the family than the 1974 serial, critics hardly batted an eyelid when it came to its ideological implications. All three of the marriages featured in The Family had broken down, Heather was a single mother of two, and young Christopher was a jobless teenager in Thatcher's Britain.
But although Margaret Wilkins (now Sainsbury) later described how “being on a documentary like this brings you fame—but of the worst kind. You don't get all the trappings—like money and status,” she also insisted that they didn't “regret doing it.”30 Furthermore, as was not the case in the debate surrounding An American Family, television itself was not viewed as contributing to the breakdown of the family unit. In fact, the Wilkinses have been far more compliant documentary subjects in this regard, rarely complaining about their representation or television experience. As I noted earlier, certain members of the family (Margaret, Marion, and Heather) have since achieved renewed recognition by appearing in television documentaries or press articles about reality TV. Although this has sometimes contributed to Watson's bid to differentiate the program from recent popular factual programming (“It really was ‘reality TV’ in those days, but what you see now is not what I call ‘reality TV’ “),31 the family's conception of the show is still framed in terms of social access and representation—as set up by Watson and the program itself in the mid-1970s. As Marion comments in a 2005 documentary about ordinary people on television: “We have been part of history, and that's something we never would have been—and we're proud of it.”32
If the Wilkinses were seen as slightly more typical in 1983 than they were in 1974, this perception engages a debate about documentary epistemology (rather than simply ideological constructions of family life). Given that documentaries claim to offer access not to “a world, but to the world” (Kilborn and Izod 211; emphasis in original), debates about typicality go to the heart of the genre's attempt to produce meaningful accounts of its social environment (Kilborn and Izod 211). In this regard, the initial response to The Family would appear to reflect Nichols's conception of a documentary mode of engagement. In Representing Reality Nichols famously argues that the distinction between documentary and fiction resides less in markers of textual difference than in the frameworks of viewing brought to the text (24). The viewer of fiction employs “procedures of fictive engagement,” whereas the documentary viewer employs “procedures of rhetorical engagement,” becoming involved in constant conjecture about the denotative authenticity of the indexical bond between image and reality (28). This represents a practical testing of “subjective responses” (“Life is like this, isn't it?” “This is so, isn't it?”) (114), which is precisely what The Family dramatized.
But the advent of popular factual programming has compelled scholars to revisit the question of the aesthetic and cultural distinction between the documentary and fiction. The apparent increase in the fictionalization of factual programming, in which the primacy of “narrative design virtually assumes a life of its own” (Kilborn and Izod 9), is not only seen as a consequence of importing the techniques of fictional drama into factual output; it is also seen as reflecting the shift away from exterior referents in favor of those that are “snugly relocated within the realm of television itself” (Corner, “A Fiction” 92). But this argument cannot easily be separated from the more general sense that television's influence on documentary production has represented a fatal downward spiral in itself. Furthermore, to posit this as a recent shift downplays the long-standing difficulty of defining the documentary as a coherent genre (Kilborn and Izod), while it also ignores the extent to which television genres have always been negotiated on an intertextual level, in relation to surrounding program culture.
Well before there was a need to explore the possibility of a “post-documentary” culture (Corner, “Documentary”), critics in the mid-1970s were discussing the documentary as a somewhat elastic category. As the newspaper critic Christopher Dunkley outlined when The Family was released: “The word ‘documentary’ has become so overworked since television took to the air that it has become almost useless…. Even if we limit our pool to what is proclaimed as a documentary, one finds, during the last month, works differing wildly.”33 The BBC Documentary Department also recorded in one meeting in 1973 (commenting on the BBC's own document “Principles and Practice in Documentary Programmes”) that documentary producers “work … in a changing world. To many, ‘Drifters’ … now appeared to be fiction rather than documentary. If the BBC were to try and formalise a distinction between a documentary programme and a fiction programme, it would have to take account not only of this sliding scale of audience expectations but also of social, cultural and aesthetic considerations on which such a distinction would have to be based.”34 In going on to address the importance of labeling (how programs are promoted, for example, in the Radio Times), the discussion at the BBC acknowledges how genres are discursive categories that are not simply the product of inherent textual elements.
Indeed, I began this essay with a quote in which Watson, fighting against popular constructions of reality TV history, seeks to distinguish his work from this devalued generic label. This reflects the extent to which, as recent work on television genres has made clear, generic categories are political: bound up with relations of power. Jason Mittell's Television and Genre: From Cop Shows to Cartoons was not the first intervention to argue for a discursive approach to genre (see Neale), but he drew attention to the political significance of generic categories. Far from arriving at a “proper” definition, the goal of genre analysis should be to “focus on the breadth of discursive enunciations around any given instance, mapping out as many articulations of genre as possible and situating them within larger cultural contexts and relations of power” (Mittell 174; emphasis added). This reveals how generic discourses are also practices of evaluation (and such judgments are themselves often related to wider discourses, such as gender and class).
The Family was a highly visible cultural site for such a discursive struggle, and it was through this framework that myriad issues, ranging from the social function of the program to the authenticity of its performances, were further negotiated. The BBC's preferred term, used in the Radio Times, was “documentary serial,” and this label was always applied when the corporation was seeking to shore up its status. For example, the BBC Handbook of 1974 (an annual publication) emphasized how despite the controversy the show had caused, “many viewers took the programme seriously—seeing it as an important social documentary” (7). At the same time, the situation is more generically complex than this at the level of discourse. As Ruoff elaborates, An American Family was rarely perceived in relation to the heritage of nonfiction film, and it was only those writing for specialized film magazines who “cited non-fiction precedents with greater frequency” (109). This was also true in the United Kingdom, where publications such as Sight and Sound constituted one of few spaces where The Family's relationship with, and significance for, the documentary form was interrogated and explored. Otherwise, The Family was compared to and discussed through other generic frames, principally those of soap opera and sitcom.
One of reasons that The Family has been positioned as a precursor to the explosion of popular factual programming lies in its serial narrative design, and it is clear that for critics in 1974, serial narrative meant soap. Although British television also screened Emmerdale Farm (ITV, 1972-) and Crossroads (ITV, 1964-1988), the principal reference point for the British soap was undoubtedly Coronation Street (ITV, 1960-), which similarly promised access to the domesticity of working-class life. In explaining how Watson “wanted to do more than real-life soap opera,” or how “the Wilkinses got sud-all from their real life soap,”35 the generic category of soap is used to dismiss the form, to pass judgment on its domestic triviality, or to imagine its addicted and emotionally invested viewers. Cementing the generic association with low cultural value, BBC audience research also revealed that, like soap operas, The Family was more popular with female viewers than male.36
When it came to the reception of An American Family, Ruoff observes that, for many critics, the perception of tightly organized stories and narrative drive “grated against the realism of handheld camera and direct sound” (110). The nature of narrative construction in The Family was similarly a topic of debate, and the penultimate episode, featuring the wedding of Marion and Tom, undoubtedly focused these discussions: Watson overlaid Tom's last bachelor hours with the song (and the theme) “High Noon,” and a deadline—”get him to the church by 3:30.” The camera cuts between the separate activities of Marion and Tom, marked by the ticking of a clock. (Watson later described this as a mistake and likened it to a music video).37 Although the ending of the serial was seen as being unwritten (unlike the American version, the U.K. version continued to be filmed while the first episodes were being broadcast), Marion and Tom's wedding is set up as a key narrative and temporal arc from the start. In episode 2, Marion is pushing Tom to confirm a date for their wedding, which she insists must be “within the next seven weeks.” When Tom keeps resisting, she admits, “Apart from [wanting to do it soon] I want it on television. That would mean more to me than anything else” (April 12, 1974). Thus, the serial's narrative climax was all but written.
Critics certainly expressed an antipathy for the serial by invoking its bid to exploit narrative enigmas, whether with regard to an ongoing narrative strand (“Can Marion land superbachelor [Tom]? … Why does … 15-year-old Heather, so animated outside the home, stand self isolated in a corner whenever the family gathers?”),38 or its use of cliff-hanger endings. Episode 2, for example, which had tracked the so-far-futile efforts of young Gary and Karen to secure a council house, ends with a letter falling through the mail slot and Watson's voiceover: “A week later, Karen's faith is rewarded. The council reply … [credits roll].” But the emphasis on a narrative affinity with soap should be qualified. From today's point of view, and especially when the show is compared to the tightly edited docusoap, it is worth recognizing what Corner describes as The Family‘s “expanded durations of domestic time,” which offer a “relaxed, spacious approach and an engagement with the inconsequential” (“American Family” 9). With fades marking out the beginning and end of sequences, it is not always easy to predict its forms of “over-looking and overhearing” (“American Family” 9), and there is a greater use of the observational documentary's investment in what elsewhere would be seen as dead time. In light of this, it does not seem that surprising that a good number of critics and viewers were simply bored.39 But though they reflect a lack of cultural familiarity with texts that depart from the expository style of the documentary, these responses also foreground how fictional expectations were also in operation.
Just as some American critics found that the much-heralded separation of the Louds at the end of An American Family fell short of expectations as the narrative climax of the serial, principally because it lacked the “sharp emotional clarity of fiction” (Ruoff 114), so there were complaints that any “interesting narratives” in The Family were too quick to “sag into a structureless amble.”40 These judgments also shaped interpretations of The Family‘s aesthetics. Despite the long heritage of realist television drama in Britain (and Coronation Street also provides a reference point here), The Family was just as likely to be criticized for lacking the dramatic certainties and aesthetic polish of fiction. It was, for example, apparently “badly lit and poorly photographed” (Young 207).
But fiction entered the interpretative framework here in multiple ways—including assessments of character. Though Watson had aimed to deactivate the referent of fiction by claiming that the program was intended as more than a “real-life soap opera,”41 he also encouraged it at the level of character construction. The first reviews often quoted Watson's suggestion that he was launching “real-life rivals for the fictional families who inhabit Coronation Street and On the Buses” (the latter was a popular sitcom of the early 1970s).42 This invocation of “high” and “low” generic referents may further speak to the serial's aim to expand its potential audience. The opening sequence of The Family, which uses snapshots of the participants, may claim to capture the “reality of the time” (Biressi and Nunn 65). But for a good number of critics, it immediately conjured up a fictional referent: it seemed to deliberately ape the opening titles of Coronation Street. In both shows the camera moves in, swooping over rows of rooftops before focusing on the domestic existence of particular characters inside.
Comedy was also a highly visible genre by which The Family was framed. In comparison with other generic referents, however, this was a framework that was often used to praise, rather than to dismiss, the program. As a critic in the Guardian noted early on: “An unexpected thing about the BBC's fly-on-the-wall series is that it is extremely funny…. The Wilkinses are in a pure and lineal line of descent from The Glums through the Garnets [featured in the sitcom ‘Til Death Do Us Part]. They are an incorrigible, resilient, irresistible lot clouted and comforted by their mother, Margaret Wilkins.”43 The Daily Mirror article “Fun in the Family Way” agreed, suggesting that “one of the things that has made the family consistently watchable has been that … they have been comic. Not dreary … but bouncy, combative, cheeky and funny.”44 In terms of the use of comedy as an interpretative as well as evaluative frame, critics frequently recalled and quoted comic scenes, including dialogue excerpts, punch lines, and self-directed “audience” reaction. This is certainly not separate from the class prejudice that structured the critical reception of the program, as such comments pivot on the tradition of treating “the working classes [on television] as though they are inherently amusing” (Root 96). But though the difference between laughing at and laughing with is inevitably blurred here, it would be rash to dismiss these generic discourses as simply further evidence of the class prejudice directed at the family.
According to BBC audience research, and in stark contrast to those who were simply bored, some claimed to watch “merely to see what hilarious situations this maniacal family will get into this week.”45 Given the centrality of fiction here, we might have expected the emphasis on comedy to increase the concern about authenticity and performance in The Family. But this was not the case. Recurrent critical comments such as “we have to pinch ourselves to remember that this is not the figment of some scriptwriter's imagination”46 demonstrate how the interpretative frame of comedy was used to bolster the emphasis on an authentic spontaneity, at the same time expressing an appreciation of its entertainment possibilities. Watching The Family is like watching comedy, but it is better— funnier—because the material is seen to emerge from “real life.” Despite the sitcom's often low cultural status as a genre, comedy was specifically invoked to express an approval for the authenticity of the program; its relation to the documentary was cited to suggest just the opposite. After all, “documentary truth” in The Family was described as “the way an overcrowded family behaves when it has a BBC television crew living in the house for 18 hours a day.”47
In his piece “Finding Data, Reading Patterns, Telling Stories: Issues in the Historiography of Television,” Corner describes the “double dangers” of television historiography—the pitfalls of an “over-distanced approach” (in which the past is “another country”), and the problem of an “undue proximity” (the past as “today with oddities”) (277). In terms of popular constructions of reality TV's genealogy, it was the potential for an “undue proximity” that provided the impetus for this archival excavation of The Family. Of course, in approaching the serial with this discursive weight in mind, we are predisposed to ask certain questions of The Family (questions of the “real,” of ordinary people and agency, of generic hybridity). This is thus very far from what Jason Jacobs, in his discussion in “The Television Archive: Past, Present and Future,” describes as the importance of “blind searching, rogue searching, or ‘chancing it’ in the hope that something relevant will turn up” (18). Indeed, in terms of understanding what is new about reality TV (and perhaps what is not), an alternative approach might involve scouring TV schedules and newspaper reviews for the unexpected and the forgotten. But it is precisely in such sites of reception that we can see and feel changing attitudes to the television themes mentioned above, which are rarely available in the text itself.
This essay has also used The Family‘s extratextual framework to think about the historical specificity of generic discourses and their functions. When Ruoff observes that An American Family was infrequently discussed in relation to nonfiction film, a situation paralleled by the reception of The Family, the implication is that this demonstrated a lack of critical recognition (109). This is certainly a possible interpretation, but especially when examined in relation to debates surrounding reality TV, it also reifies a generic hierarchy that relies on an idealized conception of the documentary form (and sees apparently fictionalizing attributes as a regrettable slide toward trivialization). If The Family is indeed to be seen as a precursor to contemporary popular factual programming, then there may be much to learn from the deft interpretative maneuvers it solicited between fact and fiction, as well as its rejuggling of the traditional generic hierarchies that circulate in and around reality TV.
Readers may well have made up their own minds about The Family‘s historical positioning, and about Watson's reluctant status as “the godfather of Reality TV.” But at the level of historiography and reality TV scholarship, I hope that few would argue with the premise that an “enriched sense of ‘then’ produces, in its differences and commonalities combined, a stronger and more imaginative sense of ‘now’ “(Corner, “Finding Data” 275).
1. The first episode of the serial can be viewed at www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/444743/index.xhtml.
2. “I'd Do Anything to Get on TV,” Channel 4, broadcast April 20, 2005.
3. Daily Telegraph, July 1, 1974.
4. This was undertaken at the BBC Written Archive Centre, Caversham, Reading, U.K. The research involved consulting internal BBC documents, such as production memos and audience research reports, as well as an extensive collection of press reviews and articles.
5. Paul Watson to David Wheeler in BBC's New York Office, October 18, 1973, TV Central: Documentaries: The Family: General, BBC Written Archive Centre (WAC).
6. “New Real-Life Documentary Serial for BBC,” BBC press release, March 11, 1974, WAC, T66/55.
7. “Public Access Television,” Australian Financial Review, June 29, 1973.
8. See “Joe Sieder, ‘Fly on the Wall’ TV,” www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/698785/index.xhtml.
9. BBC Handbook, 1979, 3.
10. Ibid.
11. Richard Afton, “The Family,” Evening News, July 4, 1974.
12. “I'd Do Anything to Get on TV.”
13. “Family of Six to Star in New TV Series,” Times, March 12, 1974, 16.
14. “The Family That Stars Together Sticks Together,” Radio Times, March 28, 1974, 9.
15. In January 2007 the British version of Celebrity Big Brother prompted a near-global debate about racism (in the wake of the apparent racist bullying of the Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty), and Hell's Kitchen provoked a furor over homophobia (and the apparent bullying of the reality star Brian Dowling).
16. Transcript of Speakeasy radio show, July 6, 1974.
17. BBC Families Project, undated note, TV Central: Documentaries: The Family: General, WAC.
18. “The Family That Stars Together.”
19. Daily Express, June 16, 1974.
20. Peter Knight, “The Family,” Daily Telegraph, June 14, 1974.
21. This was also following the pattern of An American Family; see Ruoff 45.
22. Karen's domestic and familial isolation emerges as a constant narrative undercurrent in the serial.
23. “The Woman Who Became the Best Known Mother in Britain Overnight,” Daily Mail, April 5, 1974.
24. Margaret Wilkins, “If Only I Could Be an Ordinary Housewife,” Evening News, May 10, 1974.
25. Christopher Dunkley, “What Is Truth?” Times, May 1, 1974.
26. “The Family: How Viewers Reacted and What Functions the Viewing of It Performed for Them,” survey conducted by BBC, WAC, 6.
27. William Marshall, “Nice One Heather … and Mum,” Daily Mail, April 18, 1974.
28. Radio Times, July 13-19, 1974, letter held in WAC, T66/155/1.
29. Daily Mail, September 17, 1983.
30. “Where Did the Family Go?” Sunday Mirror, February 2, 1986, 9.
31. “I'd Do Anything to Get on TV.”
32. Ibid.
33. Dunkley, “What Is Truth?”
34. Colin Young, extract from minutes of meeting, July18, 1973, “Principles and Practice in Documentary Programmes,” BBC file R78/2,623/1.
35. Ben Thompson, New Musical Express, July 30, 1988, 23 (emphasis added).
36. “The Family: How Viewers Reacted,” 22.
37. “I'd Do Anything to Get on TV.”
38. Daily Mail, April 4, 1974.
39. “The Family: How Viewers Reacted,” 24.
40. “The Family,” Daily Mirror, May 29, 1974.
41. Thompson, New Musical Express.
42. “Stars of New TV Family Series—A Family,” Guardian, March, 12, 1974.
43. “The Family,” Guardian, April 4, 1974.
44. “Fun in the Family Way,” Daily Mirror, June 27, 1974.
45. Audience research report on The Family, June 17, 1974, WAC.
46. Daily Telegraph, June 5, 1974.
47. Dunkley, “What Is Truth?”
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