From the herring fishermen of the 1920s to today’s exploitation of South-East Asian tuna workers by the fast food industry: similar subjects, but worlds apart in presentation, viewpoint and audience. Modern documentary forms are frequently castigated for tabloidisation, dumbing down, and celebrity-led narratives. Carly Sandy analyses some recent examples to explore how ‘the creative treatment of actuality’ has adapted to the changing media landscape and to audiences often believed to be switched off from current affairs.
The documentary form has come a long way since the pioneering films of John Grierson in the 1930s. Grierson’s film-making evidenced a strong public service ethos, and had an emphasis on education and raising awareness, rather than entertainment values. It was Grierson who originally coined the term documentary describing it as ‘the creative treatment of actuality’. Early Grierson documentaries such as Drifters (1929), an account of a North Sea fishing fleet trawling for herrings, and Night Mail (1936) charting the Royal Mail’s delivery service from London to Glasgow seem a world away from Danny Dyer’s Deadliest Men, Ross Kemp on Pirates and Blood Sweat and Takeaways, but what similarities do they share? How have the core principles of documentary making evolved in an age of rating wars, channel proliferation and audience fragmentation? What issues do documentaries raise about the institutions that produce them and the audiences who consume them?
Critics often point to the dreaded ‘dumbing down’ debate when discussing recent documentaries, suggesting the documentary form has been tabloidised with a stronger emphasis on sensationalism and voyeurism in order to make them more palatable to mass audiences. This article aims to draw together an analysis of the modern documentary form whilst also looking at issues of audience and institution, in particular the rise of narrowcasting, as opposed to more traditional forms of broadcasting.
The rise of narrowcasting
Narrowcasting refers to broadcasting that targets smaller, more tightly defined audiences such as 16-34-year-old men (Dave) or 8-12-year-old children (Nickelodeon). The ratings for some of these channels may be small in comparison to more traditional broadcasters such as ITV1 or BBC1 (QI on Dave attracting 0.61million viewers compared with ITV1’s Coronation Street audience of 8.65 million). But ratings aside, what these channels offer advertisers (the lifeblood of commercial television) is their desired demographic on a plate. For example satellite channel Bravo targets the 16-34-year-old C2/D and E male demographic – a perfect arena for advertising razors, beer, mobile phones, sportswear, lads’ mags...
In terms of narrowcasting and audiences, the ‘youth’ market, generously referred to as the 16-34 demographic, is seen by broadcasters as both the most desirable – and most elusive. Commercially the youth market is seen as the most desirable to advertisers because they have a high disposable income and are the earliest adopters of new technology (you are far more likely to have an iPhone than your parents). In terms of PSB (Public Service Broadcasting)channels such as BBC3, they are not trying to sell products but rather their whole brand to an audience who will one day be licence fee payers. In an effort to connect with this audience BBC3 has developed a very distinctive documentary style which they have designed with their young (16-34) demographic in mind.
The BBC3 approach
Blood Sweat and Takeaways is the follow-up to the highly successful Blood Sweat and T Shirts series which attracted both popular and critical acclaim, securing a BAFTA nomination in 2008; sending a group of six young people to investigate the true cost of cheap clothing and the impact of globalisation on the developing world. Similarly, Takeaways follows six young Brits to South East Asia to live and work amongst families who work in the food industry. Again the emphasis is on issues of globalisation, exploitation and the human cost of mass food production.
Borrowing from the hybrid documentary form of reality TV, the participants are clearly selected with contrasting backgrounds and attitudes because, like scripted drama, documentary needs opposing characters, tension and a strong sense of narrative. Manos, a 20-year-old ‘fast food junkie’, establishes his credentials at the outset of the programme by declaring:
I don’t know how they produce it, where they produce it, I don’t care.
Stacey is introduced as a ‘concerned consumer’ and Jess will ‘only eat meat in the form of a sausage or a burger’. Olu, Josh and Lauren complete the line up.
The young Brits are soon stripped of their highly polished nails and sent to work in one of the leading tuna-producing factories for around 40p an hour. But the pressure of working in the factory soon proves too much and after just 10 minutes Lauren collapses, and Olu pushes Manos through a glass window pane. The dramatic exchanges between them owes as much to Big Brother as it does to traditional documentary modes of representation.
The voiceover is a key documentary device used to direct audiences towards a preferred reading. In this case the informal, female voice provides statistics about the hourly wages of the tuna workers and their exploitation (factory workers process 600 tins of tuna per day, the factory sells them for £300 and pays the employee £3).
Throughout the episode, parallels are drawn between the comfortable, affluent lives of the Brits and the lives of the tuna workers. For example, the voiceover explains that Josh, ‘although just 20’, already owns his own house. Jess later admits ‘all my family describe me as Paris Hilton’, and this is reinforced through scenes of Jess applying make-up in her bedroom. The mise-en-scène reveals a pair of red sparkly high heels and a bottle of Moet and Chandon champagne both shot in close-up, to signify her wealth and lifestyle. Predictably the trip and the conditions that they live and work in, forces the young Brits to re-think their attitudes to globalisation and cheap food. It’s a change epitomised by Manos’ piece to camera:
I said some very silly things at the start when I said that economic exploitation was good for me ... but now I really wanna take that back after seeing all the effort and how hard they work ... it makes me look like an idiot.
Like any documentary, Blood Sweat and Takeaways contains a point of view and a preferred reading; clearly this series is aiming to raise awareness of economic exploitation amongst an audience not readily drawn to more ‘traditional’ forms of documentary. Instead Takeaways adopts a more informal approach, for example using a non-diegetic soundtrack featuring artists such as Lady Ga Ga and Elbow and featuring participants who are all under 25 and from a variety of ethnic and economic backgrounds.
Takeaways, like the majority of BBC3’s factual programming, adopts an informal, upbeat mode of address, despite the fact that it deals with serious and sensitive issues. Similarly in Jess: My New Face, 17-year-old Jess Lees set out to investigate Western perceptions of beauty whilst also coping with her own facial disfigurement as a result of Apert Syndrome. Across the schedule, Jack: A Soldier’s Story approached the war in Afghanistan from the perspective of 23-year-old Lance Corporal Jack Mizon whose bravery on the frontline of a war zone was contrasted with his involvement in a pub brawl in the UK which almost earned him a custodial prison sentence. Note from the titles of these programmes the way in which they attempt to interweave personal narratives with wider, more political issues and in doing so offer a fresh approach to documentary-making for a generation of viewers often considered switched off by current affairs.
The commercial approach: celebrity
While BBC3 has opted for an informal mode of address and young people to front its factual programmes, Bravo and Sky One have enlisted the help of celebrities to promote their most successful documentary strands. The Ross Kemp on… series for Sky One has been a banker programme for the channel since its launch in 2006. Ross Kemp on Gangs sees the former EastEnders’ ‘hardman’ head to areas affected by gang/gun crime and interview everybody from gang members to the (then) Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith. Like many contemporary documentaries, the series draws upon the ‘moral panic’ surrounding gun/knife crime which gives it a modern and relevant edge. Kemp’s voiceover frequently uses real-life cases to frame the narrative of each episode; in Liverpool, for example, he highlights the murder of 11-year-old Rhys Jones, a tragic casualty of a turf war between two neighbouring gangs. A montage of newspaper headlines, radio excerpts and tense non-diegetic music accompanies Kemp’s recounting of the poignant events leading up to the murder, which provides a platform for his investigation and subsequent interviews.
Following the success of Gangs (which won a BAFTA for Best Factual series in 2007), Ross Kemp in Afghanistan saw Kemp joining front line troops on their mission against the Taliban, and in 2009 Ross Kemp on Pirates investigated the problem of piracy in South East Asia and Africa. Kemp claims that:
the BBC don’t commission me. But I’m lucky I do have somebody who listens [Sky]. And I hope it’s a populist take
Popular is the key word here; in the fiercely contested world of multichannel ratings Kemp scores highly with Pirates attracting a 0.7 million audience in its well-established 9pm slot. These programmes also seem to hold considerable appeal to a young male demographic, (53% of this audience was male and 30% aged 16-34).
Like the Ross Kemp on… series, Danny Dyer’s Deadliest Men is another attempt to draw on the star persona of an actor, also known for playing ‘hard men’. The appeal of Dyer to young working-class males is considerable. His ‘wide boy’ image and use of cockney rhyming slang are used as a unique selling point; his film career (The Football Factory, The Business, Adulthood) reinforces this secondary persona and as a result has made Dyer a lucrative brand. Dyer’s first programme The Real Football Factories was described by Bravo’s controller, Dave Clarke, as ‘a photofit ideal’ for the channel. More recently in the Deadliest Men series, Dyer lives with ‘dangerous’ men learning about their life and criminal pasts. Now in series two, the programme continues to be a ratings winner for Bravo with a strong emphasis on entertainment values and the fulfilling of the personal relationships and diversion aspects of Blumler and Katz’s Uses and Gratifications theory (1974).
Some key questions
Clearly documentaries, like every other genre, have developed to keep pace with changing audience trends and this has involved ‘borrowing’ from fiction, particularly narrative techniques, structures and characterisation, leading many to question whether entertainment values are being pursued over content. This is certainly one way of looking at contemporary documentaries; but you may also want to consider the following:
• Does a factual programme have to be formal and authoritarian in order to be informative?
• Does it have to be presented by a middle-aged professor or ‘expert’ in order to have credibility?
• Can any documentary ever really provide us with an unbiased ‘truth’?
I would argue no to all of the above. Furthermore, I would suggest the subject matter explored in the documentaries I have discussed is both contemporary and relevant to its audience. At their core they share a commitment to raise awareness of socially challenging issues (poverty, gang crime, globalisation) and openly seek to challenge opinions. Yes, there is ‘the creative treatment of actuality’ with a sharper edge than perhaps Grierson had envisaged, but he was not a broadcaster struggling to compete for an audience amongst hundreds of channels. And let’s face it, who really wants to watch a documentary about a Royal Mail overnight delivery service? ... I’d settle for Ross Kemp every time.
Carly Sandy teaches Media Studies at Palmers College, Essex.
References
Broadcast magazine – 19/6/2009, source of all ratings and statistics cited in the article.
Broadcast magazine – 30/11/2007 ‘Fighting for young male viewers’, discussion of Bravo.
The Observer – 24/05/2009 ‘The Other Side of Ross Kemp’, interview http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/news/multi-platform/news/channel-report-has-nickelodeon-met-its-match/1139193.article – discussion of Nickelodeon audience.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7005061.stm – news item discussing the rebranding of UK G2 to ‘Dave’.
This article first appeared in MediaMagazine 30, December 2009.
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