TV matters: Why facts are Exiled in tv drama
Shows such as Exile demonstrate how factual accuracy is sacrificed for dramatic intensity
Much of the discussion of tv comes down to a single question: how real is this? Arguments over manipulated news or documentaries, rigged talent and game shows, or misleading adverts all assume that the medium – unlike theater or cinema – has an obligation to be truthful.
This expectation of factual accuracy extends even to fiction. This is most obvious in rows over racial representation – BBC drama boss John Yorke has just acknowledged that EastEnders is whiter than the real East End – but nearly any TV drama involves compromises between realism and interest.
Reviewers, for example, have commented on a scene in the excellent Exile on BBC1 in which John Simm’s lad-mag journo types a scandal-breaking piece on his laptop, but then prints it out and puts it an envelope for his sister to deliver to the local paper. In reality, clearly, this transaction would have taken place by email. But how dramatic is a shot of someone pressing the “send” button? The scene as written neatly concluded the storyline between the journo and his sister, while allowing a poignant flashback to a significant location: the paper where their father worked.
So the scene is an example of how factual accuracy and dramatic satisfaction may be contradictory. Similarly, it can be objected, of some scenes in BBC2′s The Shadow Line, that police officers simply would not select to work in such dark and shadowy conditions. But this is another example of the distinction between life truth and dramatic truth: the basic human instinct to turn on a light or carry a torch is opposed to the rules of a genre that is not accidentally called noir.
There are limits. Apart from its recently-remarked apartheid policies, Midsomer Murders consistently shows long-dead corpses being removed from crime scenes in emergency ambulances, which is simply wrong, even though the producers would presumably argue that it might not be obvious to viewers what a private ambulance or unmarked morgue van was. Fiction means not necessarily having to state you are sorry to pedants.
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Submited at Thursday, May 12th, 2011 at 8:00 am on Entertainment by samantha
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