RTE Get it in The Neck
Posted on November 25, 2007
Filed Under What's New |
Funny things are happening to the reputation of television. RTE the Irish state broadcaster is in trouble over a recent programme claiming that a senior politician had talked on record about his own cocaine use.
Views are divided over whether or not the evidence for this exists or not. It could be the start of one of those exposes that happened in the American press in the late 1990s and in British television shortly after - made up documentary and journalistic evidence.
The amazing aspect of the controversy is that it has taken so long to become public - I’ve said it here before: television factual is in large part a construction of a producer’s imagination.
To illustrate: I’ve been doing some work recently on an RTE documentary where the director will have shot around 25 hours of video by the time filming finishes - that’s for a 50 minute film. There’s no way you get from 25 hours to 55 minutes without a serious feat of imagination in which the desire to create a seamless narrative and our ability to sustain the truth of the matter are in tension.
Add in pressure from the broadcaster to create a water-cooler moment and clearly these twenty five hours will have had some imaginative “previous”.
Noel Curran and Kevin Dawson have been under pressure over the cocaingate scandal this week - they need to get out more.
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