Cathy come home

What has the early docudrama (e.g. Cathy Come Home) contributed to the development of Reality TV?  Discuss in the context of a contemporary reality TV show.

How does Hill define reality TV?

Cathy Come Home (1966) is a hard-hitting television drama that brought the plight of Britain’s homeless into the public attention. Hill (2005) describes reality TV as having 4 elements; non-professional actors, unscripted dialogue, surveillance footage, and candid photography. Cathy Come Home has none of these elements. It is fiction, the only ‘docudrama’ elements being some passive voice-overs providing statistics on housing.

However Hill (2005) cites other authors who include fictional drama and even soap operas, which are not only fictional, they are often totally far fetched in the type of problems they portray. Under these definitions Cathy Come Home could be included in the docudrama sub-genre of reality TV.

This type of docu-drama highlighting social problems is certainly not dead and has influenced several more recent examples of the genre. In the field of animal rights, recent offerings include The Cove (2009), Speciesism: the movie (2013), and Carnage (2017). The latter is set in a utopian future where eating animals is as unthinkable as slavery is today, and uses a documentary format to describe the horrors that people of that time experience when they understand how animals were treated in the past.

None of the films mentioned above are available on standard television, which reflects the way in which broadcasting has become more commercialised in both the UK and New Zealand since Cathy Come Home was first broadcast. Ken Roach, director of Cathy Come Home, recently made a similar docu-drama on poverty in Britain (I, Daniel Blake, 2016), but this time it appeared as a film, not a television broadcast. The recent BBC offering Benefit Street (2014) has the same themes of unemployment and poverty, but it is treated in a more light-hearted manner, not as an advocacy piece, showing the way that television has changed its focus from education to entertainment.

There are exceptions. Mind the gap, a New Zealand documentary about inequality and poverty was broadcast on public television in 2013. It is ironic however that it was the commercial channel TV3 that showed this program, and not the government owned channels.

With the neo-liberal model spreading in the English speaking countries, public television is no longer seen as a public good providing quality information to ensure the voting public are aware of issues.   Instead it is simply one more commodity, which has to turn a profit to its share holders, in this case the government.

The irony of this change was brought home to me in the last lecture of this course. Soon after seeing a slide about reality TV headed with the rhetorical question ‘Education or Entertainment?’, we were asked to rate our course and our lecturers. These people will be judged on how they entertained their students, not on how well the students were taught. We have not yet got to the stage where the lowest polling lecturer is ousted from their job, complete with voice-overs and the catchphrase ‘You are the weakest link’, but if education policy goes the way of broadcasting policy, it is only a matter of time.

Reference

Hill, A. (2005) The reality genre. In A. Hill, Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television. (pp. 14 – 40). Oxon: Routledge.

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