Television and Documentary

Abstract

The emergence of television as a new mass medium that challenged and eventually surpassed the pre-eminence of cinema offered new opportunities and new challenges for documentary. Some documentarists responded enthusiastically to the promise of television. Duncan Ross, for example, who had been Paul Rotha’s assistant producer for Britain Can Make It before joining the BBC in the late 1940s, saw television documentary in the Griersonian tradition of ‘the creative treatment of actuality’. The public service ideology of British broadcasting — as mandated by royal charter for both the licence fee-funded British Broadcasting Corporation and its commercial rival Independent Television — chimed with the educative and socially purposeful ethos of the documentary project.2 And, for the documentarists, television offered a potential audience many times larger than they could hope to reach either in the cinema or through non-theatrical distribution: 90 per cent of British households owned a television set by the 1960s. The audiences for some of the landmark documentary television series such as The World at War dwarfed those for documentary in the cinema. For all these reasons there was much truth in the view that documentary was perfectly at home on television.

In 29 years the word ‘documentary’ has spread all over the world to describe almost all films of social significance … The word has now overflowed its original intention and is often applied to radio programmes, books, articles and paintings. Indeed, it has been so tortured and transformed even within the limits of cinema that, at times, it must be a wise Grierson who knows his own child. It is, however, perfectly at home in television. Indeed, so many opportunities occur in television for ‘the creative interpretation of reality’ [sic] through the visual image that Flaherty himself has said that the eventual future of documentary lies there.

Duncan Ross¹