Bill Grundy. The following day, the exchange between Jones and Grundy was reported with some outrage by most of the British newspapers, providing punk rock with one of its more iconic labels: a banner headline in the Daily Mirror which exclaimed ‘The Filth and the Fury’.
Viewed now, the spoken dialogue between Jones and Grundy sounds curiously quaint, but the episode as a whole is still engaging. The actual swearing – ‘the muck’ that prompted Mr Holmes to put his boot through the tube – seems almost as weighed down by self-consciousness as Bill Grundy’s attempts to rise above his cheeky guests with a touch of schoolmasterly sarcasm. ‘What a clever boy!’ he purrs, with thinly veiled rage, as Jones responds to his challenge to ‘say something outrageous’ by calling him first a ‘dirty fucker’ and then a ‘fucking rotter’.
Leaving aside the early-evening transmission time – which was the overriding factor that got ‘Today’ into trouble and Grundy suspended – what remains compelling is the all too apparent manner in which the presenter loses control of his guests, and, as a consequence, reveals the speed with which television itself can lose its assumed authority. Throughout the shambolic interview, during which it becomes clear that the Sex Pistols are not going to submit to the role of ‘studio guests’, there is a gradual accumulation of tension – part embarrassment and part threat – that derives less from the inevitability of a conflict, than from the sense that we are witnessing an authentic breakdown in the power of television to contain its subject. As Grundy attempts to return to the autocue – his only lifeline to safety – we see a moment of extreme vulnerability in a medium that relies (or used to rely) on the illusion of control.
There is a common social impulse to witness spectacle, and, equally importantly, a desire to experience that frisson of excitement, shock or fear that accompanies the moment when the predictable passage of daily events is suddenly converted into drama by the occurrence of extreme behaviour. From a scuffle in the street to a major disaster, these moments of transition disrupt our sense of security and our perception of the world. To be present in the vicinity of such a disruption is to experience the adrenaline rush of confusion and fear we instinctively generate to protect ourselves. And to witness those same occasions in their mediated form is to experience all of their drama, but with none of the personal danger. We absorb the atmosphere of spectacle as a kind of narrative – a fact that has been well illustrated, in photographic terms, by Weegee’s stark images of life and death ‘as it happened’ on the streets of New York.
Through modern media we can pick out the soft centres, as it were, of heightened emotions and volatile situations. We can all become members of an invisible audience, the legitimacy of whose presence is morally and ethnically ambiguous. But whether we authorize our consumption of mediated events in the name of public interest and reportage, or whether we argue the fine line between voyeurism and documentary, we require, above all, that the occasions of disruption that comprise our sense of spectacle are authentic – ‘authenticity’ is the hallmark of truth, and hence the gauge of social value.
Today, authenticity as spectacle has become the Holy Grail of contemporary culture, the unifying style by which the zeitgeist is seen to be made articulate. From the gritty pop realism and boiled-beef brutalism of geezer fiction and Britflicks, to the interactive scenarios of third-person video games such as ‘Metal Gear Solid’ or ‘Silent Hill’ – in which media techniques of truthfulness are used to heighten action, control and suspense – there is now the sense that authenticity itself can be sculpted to suggest veracity as an image, in which truth remains ambiguous. This is not a marginalized creative form: the reshaping of current affairs programming to convey immediacy has been matched by the rise of broadsheet columnists recounting their personal lives as contemporary fables, embracing the breadth of the human condition.
But nowhere has this trend been more pervasive, and the issue of veracity more contested, than within the wake of ‘popular factual programming’: a genre which links the ‘authenticity’ of docu-soap and docu-drama to the studio-based spectacle of conflict of ‘The Jerry Springer Show’ or ‘Vanessa’. As a cultural phenomenon, popular factual programme-making – and its impact on television, advertising and commentary – can be seen as the defining spirit of the 1990s: how do we mediate ourselves and who defines the mediation?
Back in the mid-1970s, television barely understood that programmes could be made by simply filming volatile ‘real life’ domestic and civic situations, and rely entirely on flashpoints of confrontation to hold the attention of the viewers. Televised conflict, beyond the sphere of current affairs, was a rarity, and the occasions on which the medium had been challenged by circumstances beyond its control – as it had with the Sex Pistols – were regarded as memorable. When the dramatist and critic Kenneth Tynan became the first man to say ‘fuck’ on television, during a debate over censorship on Ned Sherrin’s ‘BBC3’, on 13 November 1965, he remarked that he would probably be remembered only for that incident. And the (now forgotten) fact that he had used the word within a dry academic discussion about an audience’s relationship with language was an irony that failed to save him from being branded, immediately, as ‘the man who said “fuck” on television’. What sealed his reputation was the objectivity of the medium: we actually saw him say it – our sense of stability had been challenged, and an evolutionary stage in the potency of television had been defined.
In 1974, a further defining moment in the evolution of TV took place when the BBC made a successful excursion into filming a factual series – regarded at the time as a radical experiment – about the daily life of a British family. In so doing, they discovered not only the power of the hand-held camera and the fly-on-the-wall point of view to convey tension and intimacy, but also the allure of authenticity. Paul Watson’s series ‘The Family’ was greeted by some critics with incredulity and distaste – how could a film about daily domestic routine, with no specific subject or story, possibly hold anyone’s attention? But the public proved the pundits wrong, and tuned in by the million to watch the volatility of a low-income, working family. Thus a template was established – already sketched out by the soft sociology of ‘kitchen-sink’ cinema – that authenticity was synonymous with dysfunctionalism.
The route to authenticity – or, more cynically, the allure of mass-voyeurism – lay in the simple televisual device of apparently removing the fourth wall of a person’s room and thus laying bare his or her privacy. By this means, a compelling sense of risk – absent in scripted soaps – was written into the TV format, answering our need for authenticity and spectacle.
Previously, such subject matter – ordinary British life – had been the highly politicized terrain of ground-breaking documentary directors like Humphrey Jennings, whose films, such as Listen to Britain (1942), would prompt the young left-wing film director Lindsay Anderson to pass an assessment of British cinema in 1957 which predicted the vogue for today’s popular factual television but assumed, wrongly, that social conscience and the rights of the individual would take priority over mere sensationalism and ritual humiliation: ‘I want to make people – ordinary people, not just top people – feel their dignity and their importance. The cinema is an industry, but it is something else as well: it is a means of making connections. Now this makes it peculiarly relevant to the problem of community – the need for a sense of belonging together. I want a Britain in which the cinema can be respected and understood by everybody, as an essential part of the creative life of the community.
What Anderson regarded as the ordinary person’s right to importance and significance as a subject for documentary – ‘the creative treatment of actuality’, as he cited from documentarist John Grierson – has now become what the Sex Pistols once described as ‘a cheap holiday in other people’s misery’. In the Nineties, following on from the success of such docu-soap series as ‘Hotel’, ‘Airport’, ‘Pleasure Beach’ and ‘The Cruise’, TV companies fell over themselves to combine the phenomenal appeal of ‘real’ characters (Jane McDonald from ‘The Cruise’ has now presented ‘The National Lottery Live’, published her autobiography and played at the London Palladium)
