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The simplest way to do this is to commission formatted docu- mentary, make sure there’s a good exec to enforce compli- ance with the commissioning brief and order in slabs.
They’re not necessarily bad telly. The formats are designed to include conflict, emotion, narra- tive – if you’ve got all three of these in ‘doco’ then you’re usual- ly on fertile ground.
They provide stability for the production companies and a training ground for new talent within a protected framework where they’ve got a template for what they have to deliver.
Sure, they’re being overdone, like docusoaps before them, but we can hardly blame the pro- ducers for that.
But I can’t help feeling we’ve lost something along the way. I don’t want to see a return of wholesale miserabilism but it is pos- sible to make documentary that is illuminating, enlightening, startling and provocative without sending the audience into therapy.
Where’s the difference with the formatted stuff? What’s sepa- rate and distinctive, odd or strange? What is there that plays in that interesting area where you don’t know what to make of a scene, whether to laugh or cry?
What room is there for a pro- ducer/director to convey a view, to say something? When does something completely unexpect- ed happen?
The slots that used to provide a home for this sort of filmmaking – Inside Story, Modern Times, Cutting Edge, True Stories – have dwindled.
I made my own bleak and dis- turbing efforts for slots like these but I also remember films that were funny, startling, alarming, different. Now, you might have the most distinctive and arresting idea and contributors for a one- off documentary and you might have a track record to match but where are you going to send it?
The production companies aren’t going to be interested in investing time and effort in a low return one-off and the broad- casters no longer have the strands to house one-offs.
Well, brave documentary maker, there is light on the hori- zon. Telly trends don’t tend to last more than four years before the broadcasters start re-inventing the wheel.
Later this year, BBC1 begins a strand showcasing single docu- mentary films with the emphasis on narrative, authored, individ- ual films. That’s new and it’s welcome. It won’t be called Inside Story but the brief – to provide space for individual documentaries focusing on human experience – is similar and the strand editor, Todd Austin, says it’s a priority for him to avoid sending the audience off to slash their wrists.
Second glimmer of light: if you’re prepared to view docu- mentary making in a more European way – where your sub- ject will have to appeal to sever- al different markets and you’ll have to raise finance yourself from several different sources – then there’s Storyville on BBC4.
Storyville used to be a rather recherché and elusive slot on BBC2: you knew you’d arrived when you got to make one. I never did. Now it’s running forty or so films a year mid evening on the Beeb’s egghead channel.
The other market for distinc- tive, single ‘docos’ is the most sur- prising – because it’s smack in the middle of mass market program- ming on ITV1. Here, I’ve got some direct experience because, last year, we made six films for ITV. They were surprising for a mass audience channel because they included some pretty unsettling and revealing scenes.
Of course, there were com- promises. The films were transmit- ted under tabloidy titles designed
to pull in a large audience – The Angriest Men in Britain, The Unluckiest Faces in Britain... They were packaged and marketed for a red top audience. The opening ten minutes were cut racily and pacily.
But they all kept their audi- ences and led them into unusual, puzzling, moving scenes of the sort that would have been viewed as distinctive and memo- rable even within a Modern Times or Cutting Edge.
Execs from the BBC, Channel 4 and Channel 5 all commented they couldn’t believe that we’d “got away with putting that sort of stuff on ITV.” Well, the truth was there wasn’t any getting away with anything: ITV commissioning editor Dianne Nelmes only ever encouraged and enabled what- ever distinctiveness the pro- grammes achieved.
So here’s my advice to those sad, bedraggled ‘doco’ makers hanging round the Channel 4 lobby. Lighten up, human drama doesn’t have to be miserable.
And think outside the strands and channels you watched as an angsty adolescent... you might find your slot at the egg head margin of BBC4 or in the mass audience mainstream of ITV1.
Nick O’Dwyer is executive producer at Oxford-based Landmark Films. He has made documentaries for Cutting Edge, Inside Story, Secret History, Modern Times and Real Life and is currently completing a new run of ITV’s ...In Britain series.
Photos opposite page: Nick O’Dwyer above: stills from ...In Britain series
“I made films about people shooting each other, about crackheads murdering smackheads in various horrible ways,
about people betrayed in love and life, about merciless criminals tormenting hapless pensioners, about electric chair deaths.”
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