Restyling Factual TV

Audiences and News, Documentary and Reality Genres

Annette Hill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134181124
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Fernsehen

Addressing the wide range of programmes and formats from news, to documentary, to popular factual genres, Annette Hill's new book examines the ways viewers navigate their way through a busy, noisy and constantly changing factual television environment.

Restyling Factual TV addresses the wide range of programmes that fall within the category of 'factuality', from politics, to natural history, to reality entertainment.

Based on research with audiences of factual TV, primarily in Sweden and the UK, but with reference to other countries such as the US, this book tackles issues such as legitimacy, ethics and value in contemporary news and current affairs, documentary and reality programming.

Drawing on the ethics of truth-telling and notions of quality, this wide-ranging, authoritative book expands the debate on popular factual entertainment and will be a welcome addition to the current literature.

Chapter 1
Restyling factuality

‘It seems that Reality TV, documentary, and news are all kind of mixed up.’

The Armstrongs (BBC 2006) is about Coventry’s third largest double glazing business. It’s the office Christmas party and the owners are wrapping presents which, amongst other everyday household items, include a frozen shepherd’s pie. Mrs Armstrong is worried it might defrost and give someone food poisoning. ‘Fuck em,’ says her husband. An ominous bell tolls as the employees gather, the funereal sounds accompanied by distorted shots of the party in progress, the factory workers drinking flat beer from a water cooler. There are flashbacks to a previous party, a similarly bleak affair that is reinforced by the music from the film A Nightmare before Christmas. The Armstrongs are unbelievable. One time they go on a trip to France to sell do-it-yourself conservatories, but they don’t speak French. They hire a motivational guru called Basil Meanie who alienates the staff. Mr Armstrong says baffling things like ‘What was was, and now what is is. And is tomorrow a new day? Yes it is.’ Surely this is made up. It’s a clever mock documentary, like The Office, only about double glazing rather than paper suppliers. And yet it is real. After the first episode aired, the Armstrongs received over four thousand emails, many asking if the show was a spoof. They established their own website with official merchandise and a regular blog, they made radio and television appearances, and signed book deals. The Armstrongs became famous for being themselves on television. As Mrs Armstrong explained: ‘This is the weirdest situation I have ever found myself in … and I thought the world of double glazing was exciting.’

This book is about the topsy turvy world of factual television. This is a world where things are not quite as they appear to be, where viewers constantly ask themselves ‘is this real?’ It is a space where familiar factual genres such as news, or documentary, take on properties common to other genres. It’s a place where reality TV runs wild, crossing over into fiction and non-fiction territories, taking genre experimentation to the limit. In the world of factual television a newsreader can be the presenter in a reality gameshow set on a desert island. A celebrity chef can change government policy on children’s school meals. A celebrity lookalike can win a celebrity reality gameshow. Producers can trick a group of people into thinking they are in space when really they are on a film set in Suffolk. Watching factual television can feel like a strange dream, where people agree to live in the Iron Age, go to a baby mindreader, undergo plastic surgery live on television. It can feel like being trapped between fact and fiction, where news footage of violent acts can be so difficult to comprehend that it seems unreal, and where fake footage of violent acts is passed off as real. Surrounded by factual programmes, viewers have to deal with the various ways programmes represent reality.

Restyling Factual TV is about understanding genres in relation to each other and in relation to popular audiences. It takes as a starting point the idea that factual television is being restyled, that various kinds of news, current affairs, documentary and popular factual genres are part of a turbulent time in broadcasting. Hybridity is now the distinctive feature of factuality. The boundaries between fact and fiction have been pushed to the limits in various popular factual formats that mix non-fiction and fiction genres. Popular factual genres are not self-contained, stable and knowable, they migrate, mutate and replicate. Significantly, they cross over into existing factual genres, with the cross-pollination of styles increasing the pace of change in news, current affairs or documentary.

Viewers do not experience factual genres in isolation but as part of a chaotic mix of factuality. The main research question is therefore one that asks what happens if we look at factual television from the position of the viewer? Using multimethod research with representative samples of British and Swedish audiences, a picture emerges of a viewer navigating their way through a busy, noisy and constantly changing factual television environment. As this viewer explains: ‘the last couple of years or so, you know, reality TV is going towards a documentary kind of thing, and documentary is moving down to reality TV, and the news is just somewhere in between, so, none of them is actually factual.’

Viewing strategies show how audiences are dealing with the restyling of factuality. They classify factual genres so as to make them knowable and manageable, to make order out of chaos. Striking similarities between British and Swedish viewing practices highlight an overarching social and cultural order to factual genres, with public service genres at the top and popular genres at the bottom. Reality TV is off the factual scale and has been re-classified as reality entertainment. Another strategy for factuality is that of genre work. Genre work involves immersive and reflective modes of engagement with factual genres, allowing viewers to personally respond to programmes and themselves in conscious and unconscious ways, and often in contradictory ways. These viewing strategies highlight how audiences engage with and reflect on various representations of reality. Audiences are living in a cosmopolitan factual television environment, dealing with a mass of programmes 24 hours a day, finding various routes through the changes taking place in factuality.

Factuality

Factual television is a container for a variety of genres, sub-genres and hybrid genres. The term ‘factual’ is shorthand for non-fiction content. It is a useful term that instantly says this television programme is fact and not fiction. Factual is also a value laden term, and its association with truth, information and other conceptual values ensures it means different things to different people. The term ‘factuality’ refers to broader cultural production and reception processes. Factuality is understood as ‘factual experiences, imagination, values, that provide settings within which media institutions operate, shaping the character of factual television processes and viewing practices’ (adapted from Corner and Pels 2003:3). Thus there are various interpretations of factual television commonly understood by audiences. Factual television is a container for non-fiction content; it signifies social and personal values for non fiction genres; and it is part of non-fiction production and reception practices. For most people factual television is concerned with knowledge about the real world; as this viewer explains, ‘factual means that the programme will contain facts and no fiction. Programmes that are true and about real issues.’ This is an idealized view of factual television, and the tensions between ideals and practices make the production and reception of factuality challenging and dynamic, as programme makers and audiences negotiate between what factual content ought to be and what it is on a day-to-day basis.

An overarching view of factual content as true and about real issues assumes that this content contains representations of reality. Audiences perform ‘a series of mental operations in order to assess the reality status’ of factual programmes (Grodal 2002:68). Most audiences evaluate factual programmes by using a criterion of truth. In this sense, factual content is perceived as authentic and true to life, and audiences focus on the referential integrity of factual content. The other overarching view of factual content is that it contains facts and provides knowledge about the world. Knowledge signifies specific information about a subject, event or situation, and it can also mean knowledge gained through experience. Audiences evaluate the knowledge status of factual programmes by assessing the level of information provided, and how objective or impartial the facts are in a given situation. Assessments about the factual status of non-fiction content are therefore connected to attitudes towards truth and knowledge. Although factual is shorthand for non-fiction content, it is rarely used to define any kind of non-fiction, such as light entertainment, but instead tends to be used by audiences to signify non-fiction programmes that make truth claims and are based on facts.

The kinds of non-fiction content that typically would be classified as factual are based on established genres within television production. Television genre refers to specific types of content that can be categorized as similar in style and communicative modes of address. Television genres are constructed through production and reception processes (Mittell 2004). Programme makers draw on production traditions, referring to previous practices to construct a factual programme similar to, or a variation on, another type of programme; and audiences draw on their knowledge of previous programmes to recognize it as a distinctive genre. News is the most well-established and recognizable factual genre. In terms of broadcasting, it has always been an important genre in early radio and television production, and although it has changed over the years in style and content it nevertheless is firmly rooted in long-standing journalistic practices and in public service broadcasting traditions (Schudson 1995; Seaton 2005). For audiences, news is the first, and still the most familiar, factual television genre, and in many ways all other factual genres are evaluated alongside viewers’ understanding and experience of news. Documentary is another genre that has a strong historical tradition within television production. The establishment of this genre as a way of documenting the world and observing people’s real lives and experiences is part of the development of public service broadcasting (Winston 1995). Audiences have come to recognize documentary as a genre, and to classify different kinds of documentary as sub-genres, such as natural history, with distinctive modes of address. A huge variety of other kinds of factual genres work alongside news and documentary, some of which can be classified as hybrid genres, where one established factual genre has been merged with another fiction or non-fiction genre. According to Neale (2001), all television genres become mixed up with others, and in this sense all factual content is based on multiple generic participation. However, the development of a range of popular factual genres in the 1980s and 1990s has ensured audiences have come to expect hybrid factual genres to be associated with what is most commonly described as reality TV, a term that, like misdirection in a magic trick, is not quite what it claims to be (Hill 2005). Popular factual genres therefore sit at the margins of factuality.

The primary aim of this book is to compare different kinds of factual genres based on the understanding that audiences experience factuality ‘in the round’. Corner describes something similar in his discussion of the fictionality of the factual and the factuality of the fictional (2006:96). The term factual television stands for factual and reality programming, an understanding of the term that is taken directly from audiences and their classification of factuality. Whilst popular factual is located in border territory between factual and other non-fiction and fiction genres, it is nevertheless part of the story of contemporary factual television and needs to be included in any discussion of factual categories (see Kilborn 2003; Nichols 1994, amongst others). Factual television also includes television programmes with interactive elements, such as voting, and related websites or mobile content. The interactive and multiplatform elements of various factual television programmes are part of the story of the restyling of factuality. Whilst these various forms of factual content point to further diversification of factual genres, and future directions for segmented factual content to diverse audiences and users, these multiplatform elements are background to the primary experience of factual television. The focus on factual television programmes is derived from audience experiences and reflects the story of factuality at a specific moment in time.

Speaking in broad terms, there is a classification of factual content according to the specific genres of news, current affairs, documentary, and reality programmes, with further sub-genres applied within each of these categories. News is a category that encompasses regional, national and rolling news programmes. The major news programmes are often flagship productions, providing the main source of public information (Corner 1995). Current affairs and investigations is a broad category that encompasses both long form journalism, political debate, consumer-based stories, and investigative journalism (Turner 2006). Documentary is a category made up of different documentary modes (Nichols 2001). Selected documentary modes include specialist documentaries, observational documentaries and general documentaries, which can either be a strand or stand-alone documentaries on any number of topics. Reality TV, or popular factual, is a catch-all category for a variety of different one-off programmes, series and formats that follow real people and celebrities and their everyday or out of the ordinary experiences. Popular factual sub-categories include infotainment about crime or emergency services; docusoaps about institutions or groups of people; lifestyle, often about how to do gardening, or making over someone’s home or personal appearance; life experiment programmes where people experiment with different social experiences; reality gameshows where a game element is introduced to a group of people in a controlled situation; reality talent shows where members of the public or celebrities audition for and perform music or other artistic endeavours; and the reality hoax, a mock situation that usually mocks those deceived by an elaborately staged set up (Hill 2005). There are other emergent categories within popular factual, such as reality business series like The Apprentice, and the wide range of hybrid genres shows how all encompassing this type of non-fiction content can be. The industry term ‘reality event’ sums up the scale and influence of hybrid genres such as The X Factor, that can run for up to twenty weeks, delivering a large audience share over a long period of time, and forcing competing genres to work hard to retain a place in the schedules. Popular factual is therefore a wide-ranging category that makes factual television top heavy with reality entertainment-led programming.

Factual and reality trends

In a report by the regulatory body the Office of Communications on British television in 2005, general factual (meaning all factual content that was not news or current affairs) was the largest growth genre. Across all five main channels there were more hours devoted to general factual content in peaktime than drama. For BBC2 and Channel 4, general factual was the dominant genre for peaktime schedules (46 per cent and 35 per cent, respectively). The BBC’s digital channels were dominated by news, making up half of all output. The most dominant genre in daytime television across the five main channels was also news, followed by general factual. For example, for BBC1 28 per cent of all daytime content was news, and 24 per cent general factual; for ITV1 general factual was the largest single category, taking up 35 per cent of daytime content. For multichannel television a quarter of all broadcast hours were devoted to news and general factual.

In the top twenty British shows of 2005 were reality talent shows I’m a Celebrity … (ITV), The X Factor (ITV) and Strictly Come Dancing (BBC), with over ten million viewers and an audience share of 40 per cent. The BBC’s Ten O’Clock News was the only other factual programme in the top twenty shows of the year (Reevell 2006). Other factual and reality shows that did well in 2005 included the CGI documentary Supervolcano (BBC, eight million viewers), Big Brother (Channel 4, seven million) and Hell’s Kitchen (ITV, six million). In the top ten multichannel programmes dominated by sports, the reality football series The Match came number six, with almost two million viewers. Amongst the highest earning independent production companies of 2005 were Talkback Thames (£145 million), the makers of Pop Idol and X Factor, Endemol UK (£120 million), the makers of Big Brother and Fame Academy, and RDF Media (£64 million), who produce Wife Swap and Faking It.

The industry magazine Broadcast (2006) compiled a report on the most creative programmes, channels and genres of 2006, including programmes that either won or were nominated in 27 international award ceremonies, ranging from the British Academy Programme Awards, the Golden Globe Awards, to the Rose d’Or and the International Emmy Awards. The results indicate the growth genre of factual not only generates high ratings but also attracts international acclaim. News and reality entertainment are award-winning genres for commercial channels, and public service channels dominate all other factual genres. The best news coverage was awarded to Channel 4 news for the coverage of the leaked document from the Attorney General questioning the legality of the Iraq war; Sky News won best news channel, and ITN best news production company, showing the range of quality news provision on public service and commercial channels. The BBC won the award for best current affairs for their investigation into the Saudi royal family and their relationship with the USA; the BBC also won best current affairs channel, and best production company, highlighting the absence of commercial channels in this genre. For single documentary, Children of Beslan (BBC...