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Losing Grip on Reality: A Reflection on British Factual Television

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Realism and the Audiovisual Media

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Abstract

Television has never been so real … and so unreal. The rise of reality is relentless. The boundaries between game show and documentary, reality and artifice, are becoming increasingly blurred. Now no factual programme is safe from the formatting process. Yet the recent debate about breach of public trust in British broadcasting may have shown that this process is ending. The uncovering of unpalatable television untruths has ripped a tear in the fabric of television reality, allowing the public to probe more deeply into the making of factual programmes and ask pertinent questions about the methods used. The current situation might be likened in fictional terms to the part in The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998) when Truman finds the scenery at the end of thestorm: suddenly reality has lost its familiar way; no one is likely to believe that anything on television anymore is real.

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Authors
  1. Diane Myers
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Leeds, UK

    Lúcia Nagib (Centenary Professor of World Cinemas and Director of the Centre for World Cinemas) (Centenary Professor of World Cinemas and Director of the Centre for World Cinemas)

  2. University of São Paulo, Canada

    Cecília Mello (FAPESP Postdoctoral Fellow in the Film Department) (FAPESP Postdoctoral Fellow in the Film Department)

Copyright information

© 2009 Diane Myers

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Cite this chapter

Myers, D. (2009). Losing Grip on Reality: A Reflection on British Factual Television. In: Nagib, L., Mello, C. (eds) Realism and the Audiovisual Media. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230246973_17

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