The Trouble with TV Documentaries.

In the ocean of mindless drivel that constitutes most of the modern TV schedules, the documentary should stand out as a welcome landfall for the discerning viewer. Documentaries, we are led to believe, are intelligent, authoritative and impartial. Unfortunately, it isn’t so. Many years of studying them have revealed that there is much about them that is questionable. They have five characteristics that give me cause for concern.

1 It is common practice to offer some entirely speculative thesis at the outset, and then proceed on the dishonest assumption that it is proven fact.

2 They are often blatantly manipulative. They will claim to be offering a balanced view of some controversial subject, but they subtly manipulate the viewer into accepting a preconceived opinion. This is often done by careful selection of spokespersons for the conflicting views. Those speaking for the acceptable view are good communicators, and look safe and presentable. Those speaking for the opposing view are usually poor communicators, and have something about their appearance that the average viewer will find menacing, or at least unsatisfactory.

3 They like to hook the viewer’s interest by presenting an opening mystery. Then they proceed to “solve” the overall question, but conveniently forget to address the mystery. I once saw a documentary on the unexplained mass deaths of Harbour Porpoises. The opening mystery was that the animals had no external signs of injury. The hour-long programme finally concluded that they had been beaten to death by Bottlenose Dolphins. So why were there no external signs of injury?

4 Sometimes they even contradict their own commentary. A documentary on Mediterranean volcanoes claimed, in the first half, that the problem was exacerbated by the fact that “the prevailing winter wind is easterly.” They repeated the statement in the second half, but replaced “easterly” with “westerly.”

5 It is not uncommon for them to make the most blatantly inaccurate statements, suggesting that the writer simply doesn’t know the subject. One documentary about Queen Cleopatra claimed that “At the time of Julius Caesar, the Roman Empire stretched from North Africa in the south to Hadrian’s Wall in the north.” The average British school kid knows that Britain wasn’t even a Roman province at the time of Julius Caesar; and that Hadrian’s Wall was still two hundred years in the future.

I’ve found that one or more of the above shortcomings attaches to nearly every documentary I watch these days, be they scientific, historical, geographical, social – whatever. I watch them carefully now, for it isn’t sufficient to understand their analysis of the subject; it is also necessary to analyse the documentary itself, and choose what to believe and what to ignore.