Real or Fake

I must admit, I really don’t get the entire hysteria about ‘faked’ TV programmes. (the latest one is here, about the ITV documentary of a man dying with Alzheimers)

Now while I fully understand the problems with the ‘live’ TV shows with the faked winners of phone-in prizes, this supposed revelation that TV programmes are cut and edited to show a certain story – or cut and edited to link things together that didn’t actually happen at the same time – is (to me, anyway) a complete no-brainer. After all, how fucking stupid would you have to be to think that – for example – David Attenbrough is just walking around finding all these super-rare animals? Or that he’s the one diving with sharks, whales etc.?

To me, documentary programmes are actually the worst culprits of the lot (as Matt says in his comment on Dragon’s semi-related post) – where a so-called survival “expert” appears to have been in the wilderness for days surviving by drinking rancid horse piss or whatever, when he’s actually shacked up overnight in some hotel. But at the same time, again, what form of crackhead would actually believe he’s out there ‘alone’ when there’s a bloody huge TV crew around him?

I really don’t understand why all this crap about “TV is lying to us” is coming up now. It always has lied to us – well, since the invention of video-tape, anyway, as that’s when TV stopped being broadcast completely live. Every non-live programme is recorded, cut, edited and hacked about until it bears little (and sometimes no) resemblance to what actually happened. With dramas and so on, you know it’s fiction (OK, you’re supposed to know it’s fiction) and thus prone to cutting. But the documentaries and docu-dramas are still, to some degree or other, also fiction – they merely show portrayals as the director wants them. It’s not reality. Never has been, never will be.

Actually, one of the more interesting things about Attenborough’s “Planet Earth” series (I think that’s what it was called) was the ten minute mini-documentary bits at the end of each episode, which went some way to showing that a) it’s not all just David Attenborough finding all the animals, and b) that it could take days, weeks or months of filming before finding that elusive animal/bird.

But in the meantime, anyone who thinks that documentary programmes on TV are filmed as is, and are accurate portrayals of reality, well, they’re just delusional crackheads in the first place.