Class-based documentary: from campaigning voice to the withholding of judgement
Since the 1960s variations of the drama/documentary form have continued to find a place on television. The docudrama’s influence extends to contemporary forms of reality TV as well as contributing to the ‘standard rhetoric’ of factual television more generally (Kilborn & Izod 1997: 87). Its new emphasis on the voices and experiences of ordinary people, in particular, was to be powerfully revivified in the observational documentaries that followed in its wake, but arguably without the overt campaigning voice or political critique. Following
Cathy Come Home, the docudrama and related forms went from strength to strength during the ‘golden age’ of television drama; sometimes maintaining a campaigning edge and at other times remaining broadly politicised simply though its commitment to the representation of the lives of ordinary people. Irene Shubik, a drama producer for both the BBC and ITV, has observed that much writing for television is ‘dramatised journalism’ (2000: 72) and
Cathy Come Home, in fact, fits this description well, for all its filmic attitude. Television has demonstrated a continuing ability to adapt and to take on board documentary and journalistic polemic; and many of the plays that followed on from
Cathy Come Home merge journalistic characteristics with their fictional form. They depict ordinary lives, often through composite representative characters, not simply to afford them recognition but also to make a point. The 1969 drama
Mrs Lawrence Will Look After It, written by Tony Parker and commissioned by Shubnik to launch a new series of the
Wednesday Play, is a good example. Parker’s earlier journalism was distinctive in that it arose from detailed taped interviews with criminals which led to riveting books such as
The Unknown Citizen (1963), which revealed the life of a recidivist criminal and
Five Women (1965), which was a portrait of women law-breakers. Shubnik describes Parker’s perspective as one of ‘pure external observation’. He even lived in a prison for three months with the permission of the Home Office to research a book on the penal system.
Mrs Lawrence Will Look After It was intended to highlight the precarious existence of illegal childminders and to reveal the inadequate provision of childcare for lone mothers. Based on interviews, the drama was shot on film rather than in the studio by director John MacKenzie, who had training in documentary production and had worked with Ken Loach. Although the drama was stylistically different from
Cathy Come Home it attracted a number of favourable comparisons and, in Shubnik’s view, pointed to a continuing audience demand for ‘realistic and identifiable subjects, treated in realistic terms’ and which was to become an established characteristic of British television fiction (2000: 81, 86).
Issue-based docudrama, still seen intermittently on television, remains an important form which is frequently controversial and can attract national attention through extensive media coverage. This programming continues to exhibit a commitment to the representation of ordinary people in the face of unnecessary bureaucracy, negligence or corruption. Dramas such as Hillsborough (1996), which re-traced the events that led to the stadium disaster in 1989 and Fighting for Gemma (1993), which investigated the long-term effects of the nuclear fuel industry on the health of its workers and their families, sought to convey private grief and trauma within a campaigning framework that voiced national concerns and challenged the authorities. Unlike Cathy Come Home or Mrs Lawrence Will Look After It these do not fictionalise characters to explore, in a representative manner, social issues but choose instead to dramatise the lives of real individuals. Hillsborough, written by the outstanding television dramatist Jimmy McGovern, was a classic of its type. The two-hour documentary deployed detailed research to present its case and combined this with a close focus on the dreadful experiences of just a few of the families affected by a disaster that led to the deaths of 95 football fans. McGovern himself stated that the intention was to tell the truth of the situation and to reveal ‘the things that were done, before and after the tragedy, by our public services in our name’ (in Scraton 1999: 158). Like Cathy Come Home, it contributed substantially towards the formation of public opinion, and in this instance, specifically to the demand for the government of the day to investigate claims of police negligence and cover-up. Tabloids referred to it as the ‘most shocking TV drama ever’ (Scraton 1999: 160). Such was the impact of the drama, that although the story was nearly eight years old, it helped re-ignite media coverage, making the issues newsworthy once again and placing those particular families in the media spotlight (see Paget 1998: 207–8; Scraton 1999: 158–63).
While the campaigning voice of films such as these is crucial to their construction it bears repeating that their distinctiveness also lies in the privileging of ordinary people, their voices and perspectives and their prominent insertion into events of national importance is paramount. McGovern himself said in interview that he did not think that the film would effect change in itself but rather reveal the ‘truth’ of the situation. The ‘truth’ in this context, although later publicly substantiated, is one rooted in a partisan commitment to its subjects’ perspective (such as the fans and their families) over and above the views of other protagonists (such as the police or football club). This commitment is especially apparent in the example of
The Stephen Lawrence Story (1997). This dramatised documentary traced the events and aftermath of the death of Stephen Lawrence, who was killed in South London as the result of a racist attack. Focusing heavily on the experience of Lawrence’s parents it did not bring new evidence to light but explored multicultural relations through the lens of the incident. In doing so it presented a dramatic and highly effecting portrait of an ordinary couple trying to grieve while fighting for justice; all the time besieged by news hounds, lobbyists and police investigators. For some, its presence proved that there is still a place for passionate political documentary amid the crowded market of the docusoap and its like (Owen 1999: 203).
The lens through which the Hillsborough and Lawrence cases were focused was of the family as a social unit and the dynamics of these relations in times of intolerable stress. As Diana Gittens points out, ‘What actually goes on in families is conveniently dismissed as “private” until it becomes “public” by creating a nuisance or a financial responsibility to the state’ (1993: 153). The narratives invited viewers to identify, in both cases, with parents in mourning, but also with parents who are forced to become ‘public’ in order to challenge authority and orthodoxy. Here the families are ordinary people, who through no choice of their own, are forced to breach the threshold of media visibility. As an idealised social grouping the family also becomes the touchstone or marker of authentic feeling and righteous conviction in the face of institutionalised intransigence and political obfuscation. This opposition between family (posited as natural and given) and bureaucracy (posited as faceless, cumbersome, overwhelming and unnatural) is also evident more broadly in media culture, as in television drama such as Edge of Darkness (1985), ‘real life’ movie stories such as Lorenzo’s Oil (1993) and Ladybird, Ladybird (1994), dramatised documentary such as Cathy Come Home and Fighting for Gemma and popular journalism such as the features in Reader’s Digest.
As already noted, not all forms that conflate drama with documentary realism sit within the campaigning tradition; some make a less overtly ‘political’ intervention simply by choosing to depict extensively and sympathetically the lives of ordinary people. The films of Penny Woolcock (documentarist and later feature-filmmaker) deal with the economically deprived neighbourhoods that were decimated by the closure of heavy manufacturing industry. These are communities fractured by the unemployment and alienation that hit the estates which had grown up around the steel works and mines of Britain’s industrial north. In mainstream press and television reportage, such communities were made visible in the early 1990s by a series of riots, which spread across the municipal suburbs of Cardiff, Oxford and Tyneside. In some cases the riots involved racial attacks as young white youths laid waste to community buildings and targeted Asian shops. In other cases, the target was the police or the other inhabitants of the estate or the scrubland and streets which became a stage for ritualistic burnings, joyriding and violent behaviour.
These forms of public protest were the excessive and violent expression of defeat and exile. The protesters were ‘neither legitimate citizens nor consumers’, adrift from all the recognised forms of authority (Campbell 1993: 97). In dominant representations, the otherness of these estates was underlined; these were ‘demonised domains’, places where undesirables had been transported, places where people did not pay their rates, who were often excluded from the electoral register, did not have their vote and whose status often slipped from symbolic victim to symbolic culprit: the unemployed male, the single mother, the ‘problem family’ (Campbell 1993: 172). These people were often crudely united and caricatured by the theorists of the ‘underclass’. Woolcock’s films, made in collaboration with Channel 4, entered these ‘no-go zones’ and revealed a world of hardship made tolerable by humour and an extensive involvement in the black economy. There were three innovative documentary films scripted and directed by Woolcock which addressed white working-class estate life in the post-Thatcher era. The films are all the result of independent production work and examples of innovative new-realist representations of class:
When the Dog Bites (1988) deals with the dynamics of space and power, community and individual adaptation to the broader de-industrialised landscape. The focus is the town of Consett, in County Durham, and the film offers a series of accounts of how the inhabitants of the town have survived after the closure of the main industry, the steelworks, in the early 1980s;
Tina Goes Shopping (1999) and
Tina Takes a Break (2001) focus on the residents of a Leeds housing estate. In the
Tina films the dramatic reconstruction of estate life involves the improvised acting of real-life estate inhabitants themselves who take on and perform the everyday dramas of estate survival.
The documentaries provoke political as well as aesthetic responses to their form and content. Woolcock employs ordinary people instead of professional actors whom she selects from local inhabitants.
1 But she also inserts fictional characters which has attracted criticism from the ‘real’ people who were members of the cast. Her research for the films involves embedding herself within the community and slowly uncovering the alternative networks of black economy, crime, fleeting consumerism, personal relationships and gendered patterns of responsibility. But the films are very far from the working-class realism that this preparation might suggest.
When the Dog Bites, begins, for example, with a homage to Orson Welles’ film
Touch of Evil which signals the experimental ‘dreamy’ effect that Woolcock sought to incorporate into the narrative (Corner 1996b: 151). In contrast to depictions of estate life as drab, mundane and disempowered, Woolcock’s films construct a layered depiction of the local unofficial structures of power and exchange and their production of winners and losers. Her filmic technique mixes a range of documentary and fictional discourses, together with a postmodern attitude embodied by what John Corner calls ‘hallucinatory realism’ (1996b: 123). In
When the Dog Bites, she mixes a sequence of interviews with unconventional
mise-en-scène: one interview takes place in the local swimming pool with the interviewee providing commentary whilst appearing to be chest-deep in water. There are also various sequences of observational footage which combine to produce a symbolic as well as naturalistic tone: for example, the recurring imagery of a local escapologist attempting to release himself from a strait jacket or a padlocked bag.
In all these films, the estates are represented as grimly realistic, the raw underside of an iniquitous class system, but they are also the sites of complex celebratory cameos of almost exotic menace and the risk of everyday existence. In
Tina Takes a Break Tina, the unemployed mother of two children with an alcoholic partner, takes a break from the family to recover from her heroin addiction. The resulting chaos of the family home as it descends into dirt, disorder and almost carnivalesque inversions of power as her two young children survive with their drunken father, combines naturalism and almost hallucinatory realism. This is a world where only women’s networks or powerful male criminals can survive; the unemployed white male is absent from the frame, only fleetingly caught in the image of the ineffectual drunken father. The film achieves a tenuous poise between comedy and tragedy; the humorous or even exhilarating moment is carved out of a lifetime of despair or banality and, at any moment, the ordinary threatens to turn into the exotic.
Tina Takes a Break ends with a powerfully tragi-comic scene in which, quite surreally, a local ice-cream vendor hands out ice-creams to the children and drugs to the local women – and a good time is had by all.
These films stretch the boundaries of both fact and fiction and through experimentation further explore the ‘complex politics of the everyday’ (Corner 1996b: 122–3). Unlike the work of the early ‘social explorers’ who condemned their subjects, Woolcock’s films refrain from making judgements. She refuses to condemn the class-based decisions of parents that keep their son at home when he could leave and take up a scholarship or the canny reluctance of neighbours to call an ambulance for a badly beaten adolescent on the estate. Woolcock reveals and valorises the alternative systems of care and different codes of behaviour which structure these communities during hard times. And unlike the work of Ken Loach, Tony Garnett or Jimmy McGovern, for example, her films make no explicit political comment and do not adopt a campaigning agenda. What they do achieve is a re-invigoration of factual/fictional forms through a mixed marriage of journalistic investigative research, dramatised narrative and filmic experimentation. The films may offer a strange and engaging hybrid of the everyday and the outlandish but at the same time they place the marginalised ‘underclass’ centrally and afford its constituents a real psychological complexity. The complexity of Woolcock’s work reveals the unrealised potential of many of the reality TV docusoaps that were produced in the same period to provide a voice for ordinary people in an entertaining fashion.
Docusoap and the drama of the domestic
The home as theatre is an idea that survives on and through television, but it is a family theatre, in which families participate both as audiences and as players. (Silverstone 1994: 41)
There are clear differences in the forms employed and the spectator positions offered by drama-documentary, the more traditional expository documentary and observational documentary. At its best, observational documentary liberates factual filmmaking by adopting a more casual, non-interventionist style and by focusing on the topical and the everyday in ways which not only refresh the genre but may also make important social statements (see Bruzzi 2000: 68). But as such, they arguably leave behind any pretensions to
political intervention in the lives of those they portray. Where they do undertake a kind of implicit social commentary it is through a commitment to revealing
social structures and challenging the preconceptions of viewers through the revelation of the patent ‘humanity’ of its film subjects. Whereas some dramadocs and most expository documentary may be regarded as constructing a ‘spectator’ who adopts a critical distance on the documentary subject, observational forms construct a viewer/voyeur who gains a sense of looking in on other people’s lives. Stella Bruzzi suggests that the successful advent of the docusoap or ‘new British observational documentary’ signalled a growing discontent with the authorial absenteeism of the more conventional fly-on-the-wall programmes. It answered the ‘pervasive modern concern with the notion that documentary’s most significant “truth” is that which emerges through interaction between filmmaker and subject in front of the camera’ (2000: 76).
The best docusoaps, which may be regarded as a sub-genre of observational documentary, with their detailed attention to family and personal life, are especially adept at exposing the fractures in the social structures that maintain social cohesion. Attracting high ratings, these shows came to dominate the early-evening schedules from 1996 to 2000 with some of them regularly attracting audiences of between 8–12 million viewers. Broadly speaking, docusoaps are multi-part series, each episode featuring strong recurrent ‘characters’ engaged in everyday activities, whose stories are interleaved in soap opera style. In the late 1990s the format became a resounding popular success and was familiar enough to have its characteristics open to parody. Rich with melodramatic moments, cliff hangers, hyperbole and personality clashes, the series focused predominantly on the service industries, entertainment and white-collar workers – estate agents, nurses, shop workers, traffic wardens, families, holiday reps. A mixture of commentary, edited narrativisation, observational filming and direct address to camera structured what were often fairly banal happenings (see Winston 2000: 55). In some, focusing on hospitals and vet practices such as Pet Rescue (1998) and Animal Hospital (1995), the drama of the illnesses of children or animals was rooted in an unashamed sentimentality that could not help but invite the charge of dumbing down, tabloid voyeurism and an uncritical complicity between host institution and programme makers (see Kilborn, Hibberd & Boyle 2001).
Paul Watson’s series The Family (1974) is often referred to as a landmark in the new observational documentary and as the precursor of the docusoap. Directed by Watson and Franc Roddam and produced for the BBC, the series took viewers into an ordinary working-class family home in Reading, England. During twelve 30-minute episodes it tracked the relationships between matriarch Margaret Wilkins, her husband Terry, daughters Heather and Marion and Marion’s rather reluctant fiancé Tom. It contained many of the elements that would become trademark features of Watson’s filmmaking, albeit differently weighted in later productions: a strong central female character, a focus on the institution of marriage, and more subtly, an interest in Englishness, domesticity and social class. It also attracted a substantial audience of an average of 5.5 million viewers per episode (Winston 1999: 2).
Documentary maker Bernard Clark foregrounds the radicalism of Watson’s venture by contrasting it with Richard Cawston’s 1969 BBC documentary The Royal Family:
No one pretended this would reveal a natural real-life portrait of the Queen, just that we would glimpse a few more informal ‘set-ups’ than previously … even the royal corgis appeared to be playing to camera …Three decades ago this was typical documentary – class-conscious, polite, unobtrusive and modest – an art-form that knew its place. (2002: 2)
In contrast, The Family demanded to be taken at face value as a genuine filmic intrusion into the day-to-day interactions of the Wilkins’s. As such it probably owed more to the change in approach of current affairs programmes of the 1960s and 1970s such as This Week and Man Alive than to the more ‘official’ documentaries characterised by The Royal Family. 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 labels ‘sob-umentary’ (Root 1986: 99). They were certainly compulsive viewing and when accused of voyeurism their defenders argued that if audiences were shocked it was not because the topics were shocking in themselves but mainly because representation of real life on television was so very limited (Root 1986: 100).
The opening sequence of each episode signals and anticipates, quite explicitly, the viewing pleasures to be had from an observational form that seeks out the private and the domestic. After a brief voiceover or discussion between two Wilkins family members the sequence begins. A camera pans across the roofs of rows of small houses, enters through the window into the living room of the Wilkins’ home before focusing on the mantelpiece. Here, in a framed family photograph flanked by domestic knickknacks, still images of the various members of the Wilkins family appear. The camera then pulls back to show the real family standing in front of the fireplace. This opening gestures towards an iconography of the realist cinema established by the British New Wave discussed in the last chapter and popularised in the long-running television series Coronation Street. Andrew Higson talks about a similar sequence, too, in the ‘Sunday morning’ section of the film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning when the camera moves from the general to the particular, from the townscape across terrace houses to an interior shot. He notes: ‘The movement from one image to the next rapidly impregnates the space, after each transition, with increasing narrative significance and dramatic purpose, until finally the individual is placed in his environment, the figure in the landscape’ (1996: 139).
The photos on the mantelpiece are rich in connotation. Ideologically they invoke the idealised cohesion of the family unit, each in his or her place, centre stage in the communal heart of the home. Formally placed, they make a public statement about the Wilkins’s as a social group. As documents they also seize a moment, their verisimilitude seeming to capture the reality of that time. Finally, they suggest a sentimental attachment to the family which is of personal importance and underscores the emphasis on the private, personal and domestic in Watson’s film. As Patricia Holland has noted in her historical overview of personal photographs, ‘the fact that private photography has become
family photography is itself an indication of the domestication of everyday life and the expansion of “the family” as the pivot of a century-long shift to a consumer-led, home-based economy’ (1997: 106). Historically, ‘social explorers’ of working-class life focused precisely on the questions of how the poor conducted their domestic lives. The expansion of middle-class domestic values and behaviour was to be adopted by the respectable poor and the family realm became the main forum for the expression of emotion and the conduct of close relationships (Holland 1997: 106). In this context, both the behaviour of the family and the appearance of the domestic realm (in terms of taste, consumer goods, maintenance and the pursuit of leisure) became the object of fascinated speculation in photography and later in documentary film.
Home as dramatic centre
In The Family the privatised setting of the domestic sphere becomes the dramatic stage for family interaction. Just as television has become centre stage in the home, so too the home takes centre stage on television. And unsurprisingly, perhaps, in this series the mother Mrs Wilkins seems to be most in control of her setting and most confident about the place of television in their lives. Speaking to the camera about their decision to be filmed, she said, ‘It gives us a chance to portray ordinary people. Our opinions are probably what 60 per cent of people in this country think but can’t put over – they’ve got no media to put it through’ (Collins 2000). In this context The Family seems to offer opportunities to be represented, to see oneself on the small screen, to enable the gratification that comes with public recognition.
It also offered riveting viewing; revealing domestic strife, prolonged arguments about money, relationships, emotional commitment and the viability of marriage as an enduring institution during a period of ‘permissive populism’ when older forms of respect, family values and sexual propriety were dissolving (Hunt 1998). If voyeurism was an engaging element of audience involvement in the programme, then it lay in watching the Wilkins family’s apparent ‘indisciplinarity’, in viewing their incontinence with money, language and emotions.
2 The family’s behaviour is excessive from the perspective of the bourgeois ideal; pub sessions, the hen night and even small domestic disputes seem to connote a hyperbolic emotional setting. At the same time, Mrs Wilkins’ attachment, in particular, to family life and to the already crumbling institution of marriage, resurrected earlier images of the white working-class family and especially the matriarch maintaining old-fashioned family values. This early series itself became a media phenomenon which focused especially on the on-off wedding of Marion and Tom. Mrs Wilkins seems to have handled the media attention with grim pragmatism. In one episode prior to her daughter Heather’s marriage she doggedly turns away a persistent local reporter while telling him in no uncertain terms that she is unhappy with press treatment of her family.
Watson himself has argued vehemently against the attribution of
The Family as a proto-docusoap. He would contend that his series inhabits a more respectable realm than the more entertainment-led work that followed in its wake. Following the production of his documentary
A Wedding in the Family in 2000, Watson stated of docusoaps, ‘They sneered and didn’t enrich our lives or understanding, even when dealing with serious hurt in
Neighbours From Hell. Most of the time it was middle-class media people taking the piss out of people performing for the 15 minutes of fame’ (in Collins 2000).
3 The Family was strongly resonant in its depiction of the limited aspirations and proscribed lives of its subjects. It exposed the limitations of a range of gendered, ethnic and class differences and, in this sense, it made a statement about contemporary social life.
That the family-based observational documentary could attract large audiences with characteristics such as multiple story lines, domestic drama and strong central characters invokes a comparison with British soap opera. The popular success and critical notoriety of Desmond Wilcox’s BBC 1986 series
The Marriage, which he contended at the time, showed that ‘real life
is soap opera’ provides a good example. Wilcox compared the series to the US prime-time series
Dallas but it was more akin to the modest scenarios of British soap opera. The series, which traced a young Welsh couple called Marc and Karen Jones through their first year of marriage together recorded petty squabbles and prosaic chat, sounds unpromising. In fact, as Jane Root recounts, their lives were tabloid topics and if they could be regarded as at all ordinary, it could only be as ‘extra special’ ordinary people – ordinary people as media celebrities. Moreover, the pleasures of viewing their unfolding relationship were structured through soap-opera motifs of emotion, small-scale drama and a realism that invites recognition and identification.
Paul Watson’s later series
Sylvania Waters (1993) more obviously invited comparisons with the affluent prime-time dramas of American soap opera. Watson produced the twelve-part series, which premiered on Australian television in 1992 and attracted a great amount of media attention – it was also the first programme to inspire the press description ‘docusoap’. Taking its name from the wealthy harbour-side suburb in Southern Sydney, it observed the lives of couple Noeline Baker and Laurie Donaher and their largely adult children. It filmed them for ninety hours over six months. This ‘new money’ family, while superficially easy-going, had all their interpersonal conflicts and individual values exposed: the family’s investment in material goods, Baker’s alcohol consumption and Donaher’s white Australian racism seemed to be writ large across the screen. The series is narrated by Baker’s 16-year-old son, which fosters a closer, less objective engagement with the characters than is usual in documentary and introduces a more reflexive and performative element to the observational documentary form.
4Baker’s growing notoriety as a ‘larger than life character’ (the press simply referred to her as ‘Noeline’) became the subject of much media criticism and was also criticised by the family themselves. Her media presence as a celebrity after the series was broadcast in Britain and presaged later ‘entertainment and character-led’ docusoaps. More broadly, there was a perception from Australian audiences and critics, at least, that their national image had been deliberately stereotyped. The Sydney Morning Herald critic Richard Glover wrote scathingly, ‘Meet Australia’s new ambassadors: a family whose members are variously materialistic, argumentative, uncultured, heavy drinking and acquisitive’ (in Lumby 2001). There was a sense here, as with much earlier documentary criticism, that documentary makes not only particular observations but generic ones; that the truth about one family might be read as the truth about an entire nation’s identity. As Jon Stratton and Ien Ang have noted in relation to the series: ‘The intimate connection between television and family suggests how the two institutions interact – are mutually complicit – in contributing to a unified national culture in the modern world’ (1994: 1). As the private sphere merges with the public sphere and the symbolic load on the family becomes more onerous and more untenable it was perhaps inevitable that the family itself would come under intolerable pressure. Despite Watson’s refusal to acknowledge the connection between his work and the soap aesthetic found in television drama serials, Sylvania Waters was marketed with reference to soaps and bears a number of soap opera conventions (see Stratton & Ang 1994).
Stratton and Ang point out that it is not only the marketing circuit that linked the documentary programme to soap opera (through promotional leaflets, press and television coverage) but the ‘collusion’ between the two genres in that the family is rarely seen interacting with the external world. Whereas
Cathy Come Home graphically illustrates the links between official culture, bureaucracy, politics and the private realm, series such as
Sylvania Waters seem to evacuate socio-political context. There is little sense of how the family’s social attitudes to money, to ethnicity or to social status can be more broadly understood except as the idiosyncrasies of one family grouping. This presented little difficulty for British audiences, unfamiliar with Australian culture and over-familiar with Australian suburban soaps such as
Neighbours, who could regard the series as real-life soap opera. But for Australian audiences the decontextualisation of the Baker/Donaher family produced serious ideological problems and rendered it difficult to digest. As Stratton and Ang suggest, ‘in the Australian context the distinction between self and other, subject and object, could not so easily be maintained’ (1994: 9) and consensus about what constitutes the ideal Australian family came under scrutiny.
In A Wedding in the Family, Watson stated that he wanted a wedding involving a nurse so that he could touch on ‘the core establishment of middle England. Those that keep the fundamentals going – teachers and nurses’ (in Collins 2000). He wanted, in contrast to Sylvania Waters it seems, to forge links between the individual and the social, the private and public spheres. Nurse Anna Hutton, who featured in the documentary with her future husband, recruitment consultant Stuart Hutton, saw Watson’s advert in Harefield Hospital. Although the couple was happy to trust Watson, Anna Hutton felt that his focus altered during the programme:
Paul’s original agenda was to document a family at the turn of the millennium. He wanted to present social issues so he wanted to attract someone who was involved with the NHS … I think the agenda changed. It seems to me now that it’s all about the marriage. (In Lacey 2000)
The wedding, together with an interrogation of the concept of marriage as a life contract, is indeed central to the film and arguably, Watson fails to make a larger statement about social structures. The wedding ceremony itself is central; the event and its emotional and ideological load deferred throughout the programme by being inter-cut with family interviews and other footage of Anna and her father (who is a doctor) at work. As such the drama is inevitably a family one. It is also difficult as a viewer not to focus overly on the accoutrements of family life and their signification of middle-class aspiration and ideals. Weddings are about display and consumption as well as a declaration of feeling and commitment and by directing the viewer towards this event it is difficult to come away with any larger nuanced understanding of the institutional context in which Anna Hutton and her father are employed.
Watson is not exceptional in trying to distance himself from the docusoap label. There is certainly a stigma attached to the label for those working within the industry and generally speaking producers are apologetic about the term.
The Secret Life of the Family (2000), for example, tracks a ‘typical’ Saturday for Paul and Janine Bentall and their four children; counterpointed with a commentary from behavioural researchers, nutritionists and doctors. The show, in by now typical hybrid fashion, linked social experiment to family observation. Producer Jeremy Turner commented:
I didn’t set out to make a docusoap here – that came about as part of its evolution … the original premise was to look at a 24-hour period and dissect every event from a scientific point of view as we go through it. (In Higgins 2000)
The couple are professional actors, so there was, argues Turner, a greater degree of control and mutual understanding and co-operation. The show even includes interviews of them talking about being documentary subjects. Turner is one of many who seek to distance their work from the docusoap label. Joe Houlihan, a television producer for London Weekend Television, described his dismay when the documentary series School Days broadcast in February 2000 was referred to by many critics using the ‘dreaded D Word’ docusoap. His concerns were two-fold. Firstly, that despite the earlier critical successes of docusoap series the term was now being used in a derogatory fashion. And secondly, that was a somewhat lazy and confusing catch-all term for a diverse range of work and that it was being used retrospectively and wrongly to describe the earlier work of documentarists such as Paul Watson and Roger Graef. Houlihan called for tighter definitions and argued that viewers themselves differentiate quite clearly between fly-on-the-wall and docusoap formats. His own attempt at differentiating between the two is, however, less than convincing and only highlights the subjective nature of categorisation; he argues that fly-on-the-wall is recognisable because of its greater emphasis on ‘the darker, grittier side of life and had subjects more directly connected with public and social policy’. He notes that School Days producer and director Rukhsana Mosam regards a series based in a school and addressing issues such as sex, exclusions, bullying and admissions policy as being in a ‘different category from life on a cruise liner’ (Houlihan 2000). There is an imputation here of a lack of seriousness in the agenda of docusoaps. This is complex territory. For to distance Paul Watson’s work from docusoap, using Houlihan’s criteria, we would have to argue, for example, that much of his work overtly, or even implicitly, addresses public sphere issues of public or social policy – which is not the case. Yet who could deny that many of Watson’s programmes invite serious questions about social relations and the place of the family and the domestic within it? Equally, many other docusoaps could be defended on similar grounds. John Willis, for example, who commissions factual programming has noted:
Just look at the BBC series on the opera house which laid that institution completely bare. Even Neighbours from Hell contained a more powerful portrait of brutal racial harassment than any number of editions of Panorama or Dispatches. (2000: 101)5
So, perhaps the most voyeuristic docusoap may also lay claim to exposing issues of social and political import and to affirming the central importance of ordinary voices and the conduct and structures of everyday life. Indeed
chapter 4 aims to show how even the most personalised of documentary forms such as the video diary and the subjective auteur-driven documentary can engage in challenging ways with controversial social and political issues.