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Biographical Television Drama: Real Lives on Television [1st ed. 2021]
 3030646777, 9783030646776

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction
1.1 Biography and Television: Truth, Value, Public/Private, Legacy
1.2 Approach
1.3 A Very Brief History of British Biographical TV Drama
References
Chapter 2: Genres
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Biopic
2.3 Docudrama
2.4 Artificial Intelligence: Dramatising Alan Turing
2.5 Melodrama
2.6 Period Drama
2.7 Televisual Brontës
2.8 Conclusion
References
Chapter 3: Representations
3.1 Introduction
3.2 From One Angle: Décor, Costume and Styling
3.3 Impersonations: Acting Real Lives
3.4 ‘In that inventive spirit’: Self-consciousness
3.5 Metabiography in Babs and ‘Daisy’
3.6 Conclusion
References
Chapter 4: Narratives
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Narrative Structure and Biographical Drama
4.3 Single Drama
4.4 Serial (Miniseries)
4.5 Series
4.6 ‘The main topic of any given conversation’: Two Anne Listers
4.7 Conclusion
References
Chapter 5: Adaptations
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Adaptation and the Biographical Drama
5.3 Adapting from What? Sources for Biographical Television Drama
5.4 ‘A flaunting of the ego’: The Alan Clark Diaries
5.5 Conclusion
References
Chapter 6: Reputations
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Trashing Reputations? The Ethics of Televisual Biography
6.3 Ken Russell and ‘Keepers of the Flame’
6.4 Regulation
6.5 The Curse of The Curse of Steptoe
6.6 Conclusion
References
Chapter 7: Biographical Television Beyond Drama
7.1 Introduction
7.2 Biography and Factual Television
7.3 The ‘Up’ Series: From Ethnography to Biography
7.4 Biography and Reality Television
7.5 Genealogy as Biography in Who Do You Think You Are?
7.6 Conclusion
References
Chapter 8: Conclusion
8.1 Introduction
8.2 Truth
8.3 Value
8.4 Public/Private
8.5 Legacy
References
Index

Citation preview

Biographical Television Drama Hannah Andrews

Biographical Television Drama

Hannah Andrews

Biographical Television Drama

Hannah Andrews Department of Creative Arts Edge Hill University Lancashire, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-64677-6    ISBN 978-3-030-64678-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64678-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Jakkapan Jabjainai / EyeEm Cover design: eStudioCalamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This book was conceived during my time at the University of York. I valued the support of colleagues there in the early stages of this project, especially Mary Luckhurst, Kristyn Gorton, Duncan Petrie, Martin ZellerJacques, Lisa Peschel and Simon Van Der Borgh, who inspired me to think seriously about the screenwriter’s relationship with biographical material. My colleagues at Edge Hill University have been unfailingly generous in sharing ideas with me and giving me the space to air my thoughts. Elke Weissmann, Ruxandra Trandafoiu, Owen Evans, Andrea Wright, Jenny Barrett, Jennifer Woodward, Paddy Hoey, Claire Parkinson, Matthew Pateman, Nessa Johnston and Aimee Mollaghan, thank you for your support. Thanks also to Edge Hill University’s Research Investment Fund for providing the research leave that enabled me to complete the book. My family have always been my champions. My thanks to them, particularly in helping me to make it through 2019 and 2020. This book would probably have been produced much earlier were it not for my darling son, whose arrival turned my life upside down in the best conceivable way. I would be lost without my husband, Gregory Frame, whose love, support and partnership have been indispensable. This book is dedicated to him.

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 1.1 Biography and Television: Truth, Value, Public/Private, Legacy  1 1.2 Approach 10 1.3 A Very Brief History of British Biographical TV Drama 16 References 23 2 Genres 27 2.1 Introduction 27 2.2 Biopic 28 2.3 Docudrama 32 2.4 Artificial Intelligence: Dramatising Alan Turing 35 2.5 Melodrama 41 2.6 Period Drama 44 2.7 Televisual Brontës 48 2.8 Conclusion 54 References 55 3 Representations 61 3.1 Introduction 61 3.2 From One Angle: Décor, Costume and Styling 62 3.3 Impersonations: Acting Real Lives 68 3.4 ‘In that inventive spirit’: Self-consciousness 77

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Contents

3.5 Metabiography in Babs and ‘Daisy’ 81 3.6 Conclusion 88 References 89 4 Narratives 93 4.1 Introduction 93 4.2 Narrative Structure and Biographical Drama 94 4.3 Single Drama 97 4.4 Serial (Miniseries)101 4.5 Series106 4.6 ‘The main topic of any given conversation’: Two Anne Listers112 4.7 Conclusion118 References119 5 Adaptations123 5.1 Introduction123 5.2 Adaptation and the Biographical Drama124 5.3 Adapting from What? Sources for Biographical Television Drama130 5.4 ‘A flaunting of the ego’: The Alan Clark Diaries139 5.5 Conclusion146 References147 6 Reputations151 6.1 Introduction151 6.2 Trashing Reputations? The Ethics of Televisual Biography153 6.3 Ken Russell and ‘Keepers of the Flame’158 6.4 Regulation167 6.5 The Curse of The Curse of Steptoe171 6.6 Conclusion179 References180 7 Biographical Television Beyond Drama185 7.1 Introduction185 7.2 Biography and Factual Television186 7.3 The ‘Up’ Series: From Ethnography to Biography192 7.4 Biography and Reality Television198

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7.5 Genealogy as Biography in Who Do You Think You Are?202 7.6 Conclusion207 References207 8 Conclusion211 8.1 Introduction211 8.2 Truth212 8.3 Value215 8.4 Public/Private218 8.5 Legacy220 References222 Index225

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

1.1   Biography and Television: Truth, Value, Public/Private, Legacy Biography, literally defined, refers to the writing of lives. It is an ancient cultural practice, adopted at least since the sixth century BCE to commemorate, to mythologise or to immortalise influential members of a society. Biography illustrates how a society understands what it means to live a life; conceptions of selfhood, of the life course and of personality development are implicated in biographical practice. Its functions and meaning shift over time and according to the prevailing cultural climate, so it provides a useful demonstration of what kinds of lives are valued at a given moment. The writing of lives is inevitably influenced by dominant ideologies, hermeneutics, philosophies or theories. Like any text, biography is also shaped by format, by generic or modal convention and, crucially, by medium. Whereas the bulk of biography theory and criticism has concentrated on its written variant, biographical representation and storytelling has also taken place in audiovisual media. This book aims to examine how one of these—television—can reconstruct, represent and restructure human lives, in the process becoming a moving-image biographer.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Andrews, Biographical Television Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64678-3_1

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There are numerous ways in which the practice of biography and the medium of television intersect. Especially for biographees1 who lived in the age of mass mediation, television provides a huge archival resource for biographers to draw on. Each new appearance by the biographee on the medium offers fresh, if ambivalent, audiovisual evidence of the progression of their life story. Television has created new ways of ‘knowing’ about individual lives. These can be troublingly superficial or misleading but are often complex and self-conscious. Television also routinely creates or consolidates famous personalities, about whom enough public curiosity is aroused to justify the writing of new biographical texts. Across a range of genres, from magazine programmes to chat shows, from documentary to live performance, television utilises discourses of biography to communicate the meaning and value of the people who appear on it. And television also tells biographical stories; from the truncated format of advertisements to the expansive exploration of the life course in series, fiction and non-­ fiction. Indeed, biography scholar Nigel Hamilton argues that since the late twentieth century: Television, especially, gloried in the biographical—spawning countless programs about notorious figures on the one hand, and Everyman or Everywoman on the other. It was as if Western society was undergoing a mass search for self, in which the life stories of real people were now felt to be more vital, more authentic, more accessible, and more revealing than the fictional lives that artists and writers had produced for several thousand years as models of good behaviour, and warnings of bad behaviour. (2007: 238–239)

Hamilton’s recognition of television as a significant medium of biography is noteworthy, opening discussion of how and why the form, aesthetics and institutions of television work with those of biography. This book will explore how the tools of the televisual medium are employed to the ends of biography: the exploration of the personality, psychology and events in the life of significant individuals. It will analyse the range of ways that biographical stories are told across diverse television formats and genres. It will do so by attending to conceptual convergences between 1  Biographee is a noun frequently used in biography studies to refer to the person about whom a biography is written. It is preferred to ‘subject’ because of the complexity of this term and because multiple subjectivities are relevant to the production and reception of biography. The term ‘biographee’ will thus be used throughout this book.

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television as a medium and biography as a form: both imply dichotomies of intimacy and distance, of fact and fiction, and of the public and the private. In short, this book examines the relation between the biographical and the televisual, and how it plays out in biographical dramatisation made for television. It does so in relation to four core themes which will be explored throughout: that of the complex role of truth in the construction of biographical representations; of the multiple and conflicting value systems at play in the production, broadcast and reception of these dramas; the publicisation of the private life and the personalisation of the public figure that takes place when biographies are dramatised for television; and the role of the biographical television drama in constructing and consolidating the legacy of the biographee. These themes are drawn from the intersections between the fields of television studies and biography studies. The following discussion outlines how the ideas of truth, value (in terms of both ethics and cultural hierarchies), the public/private dichotomy and legacy have been discussed in biography studies and indicates how they will be approached in the book. Scholars of biography are fond of using metaphors to explain this mercurial object of study. The autopsy and the portrait are frequent tropes (Lee 2009). Autopsy conjures images of dispassionate forensic investigation, a violation of the biographee’s self able to posthumously change the public’s view of the subject. Autopsies are unable to say much of the subject’s character, thoughts, beliefs or emotions. Portraits do enliven their subjects in this way though there are drawbacks here too, especially in the potential for flattery, idealisation or distortion. Portraiture is regularly contrasted with chronicle. Hamilton (2007) proposes that the chronicle/ portrait dichotomy is broadly one of discipline: chronicles are the province of historians, dependent on research and scholarship, whereas portraits suggest artistry, the capture of ‘essences’, subsuming fact into interpretation. If biographies are portraits, then we must accept that the biographer is ‘far from anonymous’ and is ‘as present in his work as the portrait painter is in his’ (Edel 1984: 31). This means that the biography is ‘inescapably subjective’ (Seymour 2002: 264), that there are two subjectivities involved (Long 1999: 101) and that we must accept that there are infinite variations on the representation of subjects (Lee 2009). Although biography as a genre is predicated on strong truth claims, the agency of the biographer in shaping the biographee means that they are always filtered through their perspective. The collaborative nature of television production means

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that the ‘authorship’ of televisual biographical subjects is less straightforward than the relationship between a biographer and their biographee. Nevertheless, it is still worthwhile to consider the power dynamics and ethical positioning of television ‘biographers’—an umbrella term incorporating the various agencies at play in constructing the biographee in television drama. Biographical storytelling relies on the imposition of order to the chaos and contingency of the human experience. Biography scholars have noted the risk that such structuration can simplify or distort, since human beings exist in a state of perpetual evolution; self and memory are constantly emerging and grounded in the body. Pierre Bourdieu (2000) argues that the existence of a singular self is a ‘biographical illusion’, the convenient but imaginary inscription of individuality into a body with a combination of social functions. For biography as a cultural genre to have any meaning, this fragmentary identity must be aligned in some way, and narrative is both familiar and congenial to knowledge production. For some feminist critics, this makes biography an inherently ‘totalizing’ genre, the effects of which should be resisted (Backscheider 1999: 155). However, as Christian Klein argues, this is a natural human instinct: ‘we cannot help but to create a narrative structure from particular fragments of a life in a way that follows specific patterns and formulae’ (2017: 85). Fitting life stories into established cultural structures is one of the primary ways in which biography communicates the meaning of lives. One pre-existing framework onto which biographical stories can be shaped is the convention associated with genre. Biography itself has been claimed by some critics as a genre with its own rules, mores and conventions, or as William H.  Epstein (1987) describes them ‘generic frames’ that are crucial to processes of ‘biographical recognition’. However, when biographical stories are told across media, representations of real people will inevitably be influenced by other generic formulae outside of biography. Biographical dramatisation for television has taken place across a range of genre formats. Chapter 2 will explore the relationship between biographical television drama and four other genres: biopic, docudrama, melodrama and costume drama. It analyses the various ways in which the generic inflections of these cross-media formats affect the telling of life stories for the television medium. Television and biography share an ambivalent placement between fact and fiction. As numerous television scholars have argued, the medium is highly adept at producing the illusion of reality and encouraging its viewer to ‘ignore all those determinations standing between the event and our

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perception of it- technology and institutions’ (Feuer 1983: 14). While Feuer is here describing live television, there is a broader suspicion of television’s effects, particularly its ability to lull its viewers into a state of uncritical acceptance of the reality of its images (Carroll 2002). For this reason, television genres that combine or confuse the boundaries of fact and fiction have historically risked accusations of dangerously misleading the audience, especially from a tabloid press with little faith in the critical faculties of the viewing public (Petley 1996). A similar critical and ethical concern around biography is that in selecting, arranging and interpreting the facts of a life, biographers take liberties that spill over into the realm of fiction (Nadel 1984). There is a sense that, while a biographer requires an empathetic imagination to be able to tell the story of a life, allowing this to morph into speculation or invention is a breach of the genre’s delicate moral code. Objections to the replacement of fact by fiction are predicated on a strong and intuitive sense of the distinction between them, but substantial definitions of these terms have proved elusive: At a textual level, within segments of a text, it may be hard to draw a clear line, and even though the context, the communicative situation and the act of reference are different in most cases, it is also important to note that we use our real life categories and our basic experiences and schemas when we relate to both fictional and factual forms. (Bondebjerg 1996: 28)

As Ib Bondebjerg notes, when it comes to the textual formats of fact and fiction, we are obliged to rely on contextual and tonal cues. When these are compromised, the schemas become confused. Moreover, as Thomas Leitch notes, the distinction between fact and fiction is as much performative as it is ontological, and fictionality or non-fictionality are ‘dependent on the ways they are framed by both producers and audiences’ (2018: 77). There is an overriding suspicion that the value of fact is undermined when we use schemas related to fiction to comprehend it. Fiction is treated in this analysis as by definition untrue, with its attendant assumptions of dishonesty and untrustworthiness. Though the underlying assumption that factual accuracy is the pre-eminent truth claim of the biography persists, many creative theorists see fiction as essentially truthful. As part of a broader defence of the adoption of the tools of fiction in the biographer’s work, Leon Edel quotes Coleridge: ‘how mean a thing a mere fact is except as seen in the light of some comprehensive truth?’ (1984: 110).

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Fiction trades in the presentation of rounded, human characters whose motivations, desires, fears and emotions are legible and credible. The ambition to write lives like this is usually shared by biographers. This led Laura Marcus to note that ‘the paradox that we “know” characters in fiction far more fully than we do “real life” figures, that they are imbued with far richer personalities and interiorities than we have access to in other contexts, increasingly became a rationale for the appropriation of novelistic strategies in biographical writing’ (2002: 202). Biographers must judge how much they can imagine the thoughts and feelings of their subjects, especially if their goal is to prompt empathy with their subject. Here, fiction tends to have the upper hand, as Bondebjerg argues: ‘in fiction we can identify more freely, because there is a distance; we know that what we see is just a metaphor for what might be reality’ (1996: 38). In biography, this is inverted: facts often acquire a metaphorical or metonymical flavour, as they are taken to stand in for the author’s sense of their biographee’s character, personality or circumstances. Ira Bruce Nadel argues that despite a tendency towards ‘objectivism’ as a social and moral force that has strongly influenced literal readings of biography, the texts themselves often have a ‘tropological character’ (1984: 157). As Chap. 3 examines, dramatised biography must take this metonymy one stage further through mise-en-­ scène and performance. If metaphor is a ‘verbal and rhetorical intermediary between the life of the subject, its presentation in language, and its understanding by the reader’ (Nadel 1984: 166), then there are further levels of intervention between life and its representation in the application of television style and aesthetics to biographical representation. It is not only the combination of fictional devices with factual material in biography that is a cause of critical concern. The structural process of narrativisation, of transforming the biographee into a character and the events of their life course into a story, has also been critiqued. Hermione Lee (2005) argues that biographers ‘appropriate’ their subjects, creating a new or special version of them, in much the same way a novelist does with their characters. The comparison between biography and novel is as prominent in scholarship as that with portraiture (Backscheider 1999; Bourdieu 2000; Edel 1984; Marcus 2002; Nadel 1984; Parke 2002; St Clair 2002; Woolf 2008). Much of the discussion is centred on the appropriateness of the novelist’s skills of composition, imagination and narrative construction to the process of writing biography. The tools of narrative, such as patterns of cause and effect, plotting in a tripartite story structure or the desire for closure, do not necessarily align with life

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experience, which is cyclical and repetitive. Paula Backscheider, for example, describes narrative as a ‘powerful and dangerous’ part of the biographer’s art, and therefore: The best biographers know that they are inventing and psychologizing through their selection and arrangement of materials, they are establishing cause-effect and other relationships, and they are determining what was most formative and important for someone else, someone they do not know. They must choose what to include, leave out, emphasize and subordinate, and when they do, they have constructed a narrative that, whether they are aware of it or not, partakes of cultural stories with expectations for resolutions and interpretations built in. (1999: 119)

The practice of biography, then, entails creative decisions about inclusions, exclusions and order, shaped by conventions of storytelling that pre-exist the writing of lives. In addition to broader structural features of narrative, television biographical dramatisation must also attend to medium specific principles and formats. Chapter 4 thus adopts a narratological approach to biographical television drama, exploring how life stories are shaped according to the narrative traditions of television single dramas, serials and series. Scholars tend to agree that, unlike a novelist, a biographer’s creativity is ‘fettered by the very nature of his enterprise’ (Edel 1984: 23). That nature is, in the words of Virginia Woolf, that it ‘imposes conditions, and those conditions are that it must be based upon fact’ (2008: 120). She advocated the use of the ‘creative fact’ in biography, the emphasis on a limited range of fundamental truths about the biographee that help illuminate more clearly their personality and its broader cultural meaning or influence. This is one way for the biographer to control the ‘anarchy of the archive’ (Edel 1984: 105), to construct a coherent and convincing protagonist from the mess of human life and the detritus it leaves behind. Paradoxically, without such selectivity, the complete picture of a subject presumed by biography cannot be achieved (Nadel 1984). Processes of research, analysis and selection of biographical materials are also undertaken by television biographers. Because in many cases these materials also include pre-existing biographical texts—including written biographies and, in some cases, precursor biographical dramatisations—this can fruitfully be compared to the practice of cross-media adaptation. Chapter 5 explores the biographical drama as adaptation, asking the important

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questions of what is being adapted, and how does the process work. If the truth claims of biography are predicated on its factual scaffolding (Wagner-­ Martin 1994), from where do these facts derive? Some of the suspicion of narrative in biography studies is centred on the anxiety that its readers are insufficiently critical. Edel (1984) suggests that readers take the facts given them for granted, assuming that biographies are documentary and not noticing marks of composition. Nadel (1984) accuses readers of passivity, of being unaware of their interpretative position. Phyllis Rose, by contrast, acknowledges readers’ critical faculties, but argues that this can break out into outright scepticism: ‘the public… distrusts artfulness in non-fiction and sees little difference between arranging and condensing and outright lying’ (1996: 131–2). The sense that a reader might be misled through the construction of biographical narrative is central to the ethical question mark many commentators place over the genre. Indeed, as Jerome G. Manis (1994) argues, the ‘dictum of truth’ is the most significant element of biographical ethics. We are thus obliged to judge the biography’s truthfulness on our trust in the biographer, or, as William St Clair proposes, their success in convincing us, the rhetorical merit of the text or our own skill as critical readers (2002: 226). Trust is intertwined with truth and underpinned by fact. This formula holds not only for the reader-biographer dynamic but for the assumed relationship between broadcaster and public. Public service broadcasters require public trust to maintain their credibility as a source of information, education and entertainment, as well as to justify their position of cultural prominence. Programmes which challenge the boundaries between fact and fiction, like biographical dramatisations, often reveal the fragility of the trust pact between broadcaster and public. As Chap. 6 will discuss, public perceptions of a breach of biographical ethics on the part of programme makers can result in considerable controversy and damage to the reputation of the broadcaster as well as the biographee. The relationship between biographer and biographee animates much discussion of the genre. Backscheider suggests that ‘the affinity of biographer with subject colours the tone and enriches the book’ (1999: 34). With affinity, though, comes the danger of over-identification with the subject or, in psychoanalytic parlance, ‘transference… a destructive emotional involvement’ (Edel 1984: 66). Working biographers have described how, during the research process, regard spills over into infatuation and the relationship with the biographee becomes ‘uxorious on a Grand Scale’ (Wilson 2004: 38). Also unavoidable is the spectre of narcissism

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(Robb 2004; Hughes 2004), the fear that the ‘true’ subject of the book becomes the biographer, or, as Woolf suggested, our versions of others are mere ‘emanations of ourselves’ (in Parke 2002: 28). Considering this problem from a feminist position, Liz Stanley notes that ‘any biographer’s view is a socially located and necessarily partial one’ (1992: 7), arguing that feminist praxis should embrace self-reflexivity and prioritise the voice of the subject (see also Backscheider 1999; Long 1999). Chapter 3 examines the ways in which some television biographical dramatisations have adopted a self-conscious approach that foregrounds the voice of the biographee and encourages awareness of the constructedness of biographical representations. This approach mitigates the obvious power imbalance between the biographee who cannot speak for herself, and the biographer, whose ‘version’ of the subject will, however temporarily, be pre-eminent in the mind of the public. For biographical television drama, the impact of such representations is many times exaggerated because television’s position as ‘cultural forum’ (Newcomb and Hirsch 1983) lends it a much larger impact and audience than the average published biography. Edel suggests that a justification for the ‘indecent curiosity’ that biography entails is that it ‘illuminate[s] the mysterious and magical process of creation’ (1984: 35). Though this applies largely to literary biography, the ethical equation he proposes is a common one. The invasion into the privacy of the biographee is legitimised by the social and cultural benefit that knowledge about their life might provide. As Klein argues, we engage with stories about real people because we assume they have something to tell us, such as the means and consequences of special human achievement, or what it means to have a ‘good’ life (2017: 79). As early as the first century, Plutarch suggested that the primary purpose for biography should be didactic. Biographies provided models of virtue which were ideal for moral edification (Parke 2002). By the early eighteenth century, this had developed into Roger North’s concept that the history of private lives might ‘instruct a private economy… tend[]to make a man wiser or more cautelous [cautious] in his own proper concerns’ (q. in Parke 2002: 18). More recent scholars of biography have deemphasised moral instruction as the main function of biographies but have retained the sense that they can usefully model lives, providing templates for understanding the self (Klein 2017). Hamilton suggests that biographies can offer insight into the ‘very nature of individuality at any one moment in culture’s history’ (2007: 11). Carolyn Heilbrun cautions that to understand biography in this way requires us to remember that ‘lives do not serve as models, only stories do

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that’ (1989: 37). Feminist scholars have argued that biography has historically omitted female lives, because the achievements that render a subject ‘worthy’ of biography occur in the public sphere, from which women have been excluded. This means that when women’s stories are told, they are exceptional in some way—in circumstance, in personality, in class status and so on. This weakens their ability to model identity to other women. The feminist response has been to expand the acceptable subjects for biography, and to ensure that their achievements in both public and private realms are fully accounted for. As Heilbrun points out: ‘there will be narratives of female lives only when women no longer live their lives isolated in the houses and the stories of men’ (1989: 47). Chapter 7 explores how biography is handled in non-fiction television formats, and focuses especially on the ways in which both modes are predicated on understandings of identity and the performance of self. Not only does biography provide models of selfhood, it also reveals much of how the complex relationship between individual and society works at a given moment in history. Biography may provide microcosmic insight into society and culture during the life of the protagonist. In the process of explaining the choices of the subject and interpreting the meaning of the events in their life, the biographer becomes a cultural historian (Wagner-Martin 1994). Furthermore, scholars suggest that at a further level of abstraction, studying the biographies published at a given moment can also be revelatory, for their selection of subjects and the ways in which they are written about. Hermione Lee suggests they help us to question ‘what does that society value, what does it care about, who are its visible— and invisible—men and women?’ (2009: 14). This book is infused with considerations of the relationship between television and biographical legacy, examining how biographical drama acts as an affirmation of cultural status and importance for the biographee, as well as a representation of their life story.

1.2   Approach As I have highlighted so far, the concerns and conceptual frameworks biography studies has developed to discuss issues of truth, ethical and cultural value, the public/private dichotomy, and biographical legacy can be fruitfully applied to televisual biography. To date, though, there have been few studies that explicitly explore the relationship between biography and television. Biography studies is dominated by analyses of written

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biography and of biographical methodologies as used in the social sciences. Within film studies, the biopic has enjoyed a recent surge in scholarly engagement, and some critical attention has also fallen on what Marta Minier describes as the ‘bio-docudrama’ (2014). Compared to the wide range and scope of biographical dramatisation on television, though, the paucity of writing on the subject is surprising. It may be explained by the relative value placed on both forms within the academy. Television and biography, Gary Edgerton argues, have ‘shared company as second-class citizens in academic life’ (2001: 7). In the twenty years since he made this observation, though, television studies has matured into a complex and varied field (though one that perhaps still does not enjoy the broader legitimacy of familial disciplines in the arts and humanities or social sciences). Biography has similarly enjoyed a resurgence in the academy, such that scholars have described a recent ‘biographical turn’ (Caine 2010; Renders et al. 2017; Posing 2017). Yet, before now there has not been a substantial project which explores the ways in which television tells biographical stories. This book aims to address this gap. Biographical Television Drama focuses largely on one iteration of televisual biography: the fictionalisation of real lives in televisual dramatic forms. Biographical television drama has been rarely discussed as biography, certainly in comparison to the broadening field of biopics studies (Cartmell and Polasek 2019). Where it has been analysed, there has been relatively little attention paid to the televisual specificity of these dramas, in terms of aesthetics, structure and institutional origins, with the notable exception of Jonathan Bignell’s 2019 discussion. I am not attempting to stake out new territory for the biographical television drama, to claim for it a unified televisual form with consistent or dominant characteristics. I am less interested in coining the term ‘biographical television drama’ as a unique and specific genre, and dogmatically insisting on its application to certain programmes, than I am in exploring how biographical themes, ideas and stories are presented across a diverse range of television fiction. In delineating the kinds of television programme in which I am interested, I take a cue from the nearest familial relation of the television biographical drama, the cinematic biopic. George Custen defines the biopic as a film whose story ‘is minimally composed of the life, or the portion of a life, of a real person whose real name is used’ (1992: 6). Dennis Bingham refines this definition by adding an assessment of the genre’s cultural value, which, he argues:

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narrates, exhibits, and celebrates the life of a subject in order to demonstrate, investigate, or question his or her importance in the world; to illuminate the fine points of a personality; and for both artist an spectator to discover what it would be like to be this person, or to be a certain type of person, or… to be that person’s audience. (2011: 10)

This book draws on these two explications of the biopic when exploring the biographical television drama. When I am describing, analysing, assessing and contextualising biographical drama in this book, I am discussing a television fiction that focuses predominantly on the life or part of a life of a named real individual, though in some cases, as in written biography, there may be multiple biographees represented in a single text. Biographical dramas represent the public activities or roles of the biographee that render them unique and interesting as a subject to merit a drama about their life. They will also usually emphasise subjectivity, memory and the intersections or conflict between private experience and public persona. Much as in Bingham’s biopic, then, the televisual biographical drama will ‘illuminate the fine points of personality’ and will implicitly make a case for the cultural importance of the biographee. The differences in television’s apparatus—its aesthetic regimes, narrative structure, institutional organisation—mean that the process of representing personalities and of ‘making a case’ for the biographee will be subtly specific to the medium. The machinery of television, including not only stylistic and structural techniques of programming but also interstitial materials, scheduling tactics, supplementary materials and positioning/promotion, is a crucial part of the meaning-making process and contribute significantly to the case for the biographee and his/her personality that the programmes make. For this reason, paratextual analysis will complement the textual analyses of programmes this book offers. I employ a mixed methods approach that combines textual analysis, archival research, interviews with industry professionals and discourse analysis. Archival material from the BBC’s Written Archives Centre has been used to research the television work of Ken Russell featured in Chap. 6, providing valuable insights into the relationships he cultivated at the BBC, and the institution’s internal attitudes towards his work. The intention here was to discover first-hand television professionals’ working understanding of the ethical, practical and legal issues raised by biographical representation by using archived communications. Another way I have researched the working practices and attitudes of industry practitioners in

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the production of biographical dramas is to conduct a series of interviews with screenwriters. I spoke with the writers Amanda Coe (Elizabeth David: A Life in Recipes [BBC Two, 2006], Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story [BBC Two, 2008], Margot [BBC Four, 2009], Life in Squares [BBC Two, 2015], The Trial of Christine Keeler [BBC One, 2020]), Richard Cottan (Love Again [BBC Two, 2003], Hancock and Joan [BBC Four, 2009], Margaret [BBC Two, 2009]), Brian Fillis (Fear of Fanny [BBC Four, 2006], The Curse of Steptoe [BBC Four, 2008], An Englishman in New  York [ITV, 2009], Against the Law [BBC Two, 2017]), Daisy Goodwin (Victoria [ITV, 2016–]) and Gwyneth Hughes (Miss Austen Regrets [BBC One, 2008], The Girl [BBC Two, 2012], Dark Angel [ITV, 2016]) about the pragmatics of shaping lives into television form, the process of adapting disparate materials and constructing order from the anarchy of the human life, and the ethics of constructing their version of the biographee. I am grateful to them for generously giving their time to answer my questions. Their insights are drawn on throughout the book, but especially in Chaps. 4 and 5, which explore the role of the screenwriter in researching biography and adapting it to television-specific narrative form. This book’s analyses, interpretations and contextualisations are drawn from a survey of UK programming that includes production and broadcast information for 260 biographical dramatisations broadcast on UK television from 1936 to 2019. This was constructed using archival tools such as the BBC Radio Times Genome Project, the British Universities Film and Video Council’s (BUFVC) TV Times archive, BFI Screenonline, digital newspaper archives of The Times and The Guardian/The Observer, broadcaster websites and the Internet Movie Database. The survey is extensive but not comprehensive. It was compiled with the intention of providing as clear a picture as possible of the scope and scale of biographical drama on British television. My observations about biographical drama are therefore drawn from as wide a viewing programme as was possible given the availability of programme texts on DVD, on-demand services or via the BUFVC’s excellent Learning on Screen service, which also provides invaluable access to broadcast paratexts such as interstitial materials and continuity announcements. Where viewing has not been possible, contextual cues drawn from archival research have been used to make judgements about these texts. A striking limitation of the British biographical drama noticeable from this survey is the lack of diversity of the biographees portrayed. Put simply,

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the subjects of British biographical drama are overwhelmingly white, usually middle- or upper-class, most often male, heterosexual and cisgendered. Feminist critics of biography as a literary genre have long decried its overwhelming focus on white, powerful men, to the exclusion of other social groups whose stories are less frequently told (Wagner-Martin 1994; Long 1999). This is replicated in the findings of this project. Seventy percent of the biographical dramatisations surveyed feature male protagonists, with 25 percent focusing on female biographees and 5 percent centred on mixed gender pairings or groups. The picture is considerably worse in terms of ethnic and cultural diversity. Only 6 of the 260 dramas surveyed feature protagonists that are not white, and just two focus on black British biographees. One of these, Shirley (BBC Two, 2011) about the life of Welsh singer Shirley Bassey was broadcast as the flagship drama of BBC Two’s Mixed Race season. The drama’s placement within specific season of programming dedicated to people of mixed heritage implies a sequestration of the stories of black, Asian and people of other cultural minorities within television schedules. This speaks not only to the historical under-representation of people of colour as fully realised protagonists in drama, but also to the lack of recognition of the contributions of people of diverse identities to British social, cultural and political life. Class status is more difficult to quantify since it evidently involves a level of subjective interpretation. An indicative figure here though is that 17 percent of the surveyed programmes dramatise the lives of royal or aristocratic biographees, with seven different portrayals of Queen Victoria alone. Sexuality and gender identity are also tricky variables to measure since they are common arenas of biographical dispute. Seventeen of the dramas of the survey feature biographees generally understood to have been LGBTQ.  The extent to which sexual identity is explored varies depending on broadcast context and storytelling approach. Though there have been some shifts in attention to diverse subjects over time, these findings illustrate the prioritisation of lives from dominant social groups for biographical television drama. Close textual analysis of selected biographical dramas will form the basis of the case studies that supplement the chapters in this book. Chapter 2’s exploration of genre hybridity and the biographical drama illustrates generic overlaps with the biopic and docudrama via comparative analysis of representations of the mathematician and code-breaker Alan Turing in two television programmes, Breaking the Code (BBC Two, 1996) and Britain’s Greatest Codebreaker (Channel 4, 2011) and a feature film, The

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Imitation Game (Morten Tydlum, 2014). I examine the influence of melodramatic modes and the conventions of period drama in relation to two contrasting programmes about the Brontë family, The Brontës of Haworth (Yorkshire Television, 1973) and To Walk Invisible (BBC One, 2016). In Chap. 3, alongside a discussion of the mise-en-scène and performance styles in biographical dramatisation, I examine how some biographical dramas have adopted a self-conscious mode of presentation that reflects on the practice and meaning of biography while constructing a biographical representation. I compare two dramas which take this metabiographical approach: ‘Daisy’, a single drama from the anthology series The Edwardians (BBC Two, 1972–1973) about the scandal-driven life of a Countess-turned-socialist, and Babs (BBC One, 2017), about the actor and entertainer Barbara Windsor, which uses the metonymic conceit of the protagonist watching as scenes from her life are performed before her on stage. Chapter 4’s discussion of the translation of life stories into various narrative formats is illustrated by a discussion of two dramas about Anne Lister, a nineteenth-century businesswoman and traveller best known for her extensive coded diaries which detail her romantic and sexual relationships with women. Whereas The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister (BBC Two, 2010) uses the ninety-minute running time of the single drama to dramatise several years of Lister’s life, Gentleman Jack (BBC One/HBO 2019) concentrates the more generous screen time of an eight-part serial on only a few turbulent months. Chapter 5 considers the process of adaptation, concentrating first on the theoretical position of the biographical adaptation, and secondly on the various sources that are used as rhetorical guarantors of the authenticity or truth of biographical dramatisations. In the case study, I focus on the adaptation of diaries as biographical ‘evidence’ in the six-part dramatisation of the political life of Conservative minister Alan Clark, The Alan Clark Diaries (BBC Four, 2004). Chapter 6’s discussion of the ethics of biographical drama and its impact on various reputations (the biographee, the biographer, the broadcaster) first explores the influential figure of Ken Russell, whose controversial BBC profiles of composers and artists created tension between the filmmaker and the institution throughout the 1960s. The second case study examines The Curse of Comedy season, a collection of dramas about comedians broadcast on BBC Four in 2008 which prompted a media backlash. I trace the progress of one of these, The Curse of Steptoe, through the BBC’s institutional procedure for dealing with complaints, considering how ethical issues in the telling of biographical stories are handled by

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television’s regulatory organs. The book’s final chapter considers how television manages biography in non-fiction genres. I analyse the longitudinal documentary series that began with Seven Up! (Granada, 1964), considering how its examination of ‘ordinary’ lives has, over time, adopted the themes and methods of biography. The last case study explores how the popular factual genealogical series Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC, 2004–) dramatises biographical processes and aligns the life stories of their ancestors with the identity and biography of the celebrity. I have selected these case studies based on their fit with the themes and concepts explored in the chapters, and therefore they are diverse in their style, structure, theme and subject matter. As will be evident from the above outline, case studies are also varied in their era of broadcast. This book is not a history, but an exploration of the conceptual intersections between television and biography, and how these play out when biographical stories are mediated through the form of television drama. To make these connections and to give an expansive account of the range of approaches there have been to the process of dramatising biography, however, I have chosen to analyse texts from across the span of British television history. For this reason, below I provide a sketch of British television drama history and the place of the biographical dramatisation therein. This overview is designed to help locate biographical drama within broad trends in British drama production over time.

1.3   A Very Brief History of British Biographical TV Drama Drama formed a significant part of British television programming from the beginnings of the broadcast service. In the pre-war experimental television period (1936–1939), dramatic materials were largely adapted from pre-existing theatrical entertainments. The earliest example of biographical dramatised material on British television came within weeks of the inception of the BBC’s television service, in the form of scenes from a play called The Tiger about French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau broadcast on 23 November 1936. The play had been performed at the Embassy Theatre in the West End of London in September 1936, and the transmitted scenes were introduced by its producer, Ronald Adam. This was typical for drama broadcasts in this era, a replication of a night out at the West End to suit the tastes of an assumed middle-class audience for television in

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its pre-war period (Cooke 2015). When television re-emerged from its wartime hiatus between 1939 and 1946, drama production remained for a time dependent on pre-existing theatrical performances, hence the use of ‘television play’ to describe single dramas. These were transmitted in excerpt form, abridged or, occasionally, in their entirety. This could be a live broadcast from the theatre in which the play was performed, or translation of this existing play (text and cast) into a television studio for presentation to a TV audience, though as Jason Jacobs (2000) argues, there was considerable aesthetic innovation within these constraints. Theatrical plays re-interpreted for television had often already been broadcast on radio as well (Cooke 2015). Examples from the survey conducted for this book include Gordon Daviot’s Richard of Bordeaux, broadcast on the BBC Home Service in June 1941, then on BBC Television in April 1947 (repeated in December 1955); and Wild Decembers, Clemence Dane’s work on the Brontë family, broadcast on the National Programme in January 1934, then on BBC Television in April 1956. Laurence Housman’s plays about Queen Victoria, especially Victoria Regina (1934), were a popular source for television reinterpretation, broadcast under various titles in 1947 and 1952 on BBC Television, and in 1957 and 1964 on ITV. In 1947, the play was scheduled in the evening of the royal wedding of Princess Elizabeth to Philip Mountbatten, clearly intended to capitalise on the patriotic spirit of the day. Even at this early stage, biographical dramas were proposed to audiences as special ‘events’ within a festive schedule, a broadcast strategy that would continue in subsequent years. As the BBC’s television service matured, ‘television play’ came to mean a drama originally conceived and produced for television. The introduction of a competitor to the BBC in the ITV network continued this trend (Gardner and Wyver 1983), as well as advancing the development of popular series and serial formats. Indeed, the ABC anthology drama series Armchair Theatre (ITV, 1956–1974) paved the way for television ‘plays’ to become synonymous with authored, intellectually engaging work, often socially conscious and challenging the political establishment (Wheatley 2007; Caughie 2000). Other strands emerged which provided a dedicated slot, and therefore a level of protection, for the single play, such as The Wednesday Play (1964–1970) and its successor Play for Today (1970–1984). By the 1960s, as the television single play became a standard feature of weekly schedules supported in anthology strands, it would be reasonable to expect a rise in the number of biographical single dramas broadcast, but this is not borne out by the survey. Biographical drama was not prominently featured in the

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Wednesday Play or its successor Play for Today because these series tended to focus on contemporary social realities rather than the historical stories that dominate biographical drama. Exceptions include Dennis Potter’s Alice (BBC One, 13 October 1965), a dramatisation of author Lewis Carroll’s relationship with Alice Liddell broadcast first as a Wednesday Play, and Spend Spend Spend (BBC One, 15 March 1977), a Play for Today adaptation of a memoir by Viv Nicholson. Biographical single dramas were transmitted sporadically during the 1960s, for example, The Man Shakespeare (BBC Two, 25 April 1964), billed as a ‘dramatised documentary on Shakespeare’s life’ (The Times 1964), or From Chekhov with Love (Rediffusion, 14 June 1968), adapted by Jonathan Miller from the playwright’s letters and starring John Gielgud. The most prominent biographical dramatisations of the 1960s were made by Ken Russell for the arts strands Monitor (BBC, 1958–1965) and Omnibus (BBC One, 1967–2003)  (Hill  2015) (see Chap. 6). There were also surprisingly few biographical series broadcast in the 1950s and 1960s, despite the popularity of the literary adaptation as a source for serial drama (Cooke 2015). Exceptions include BBC Television’s three-­part serial Gilbert and Sullivan: Immortal Jesters, broadcast in December 1961, and Victoria Regina (Granada), a four-part adaptation of Housman’s plays broadcast in November and December 1964. Biographical subjects can more often be found in BBC Two drama strands such as Theatre 625 (1964–1968), Play of the Week (1977–1980) and BBC 2 Playhouse (1973–1983). Biographical subjects better suit the more explicitly educationally focused channel, in keeping with the didactic tendency of biography discussed above. There are also prominent examples of biographical anthologies in the early 1970s. In these, each edition featured a different protagonist and was authored by a different writer. Solo (BBC Two, January–February 1970) consisted of biographical monologues performed by well-known actors, many of which were based on the writings of the biographees themselves, including figures such as Byron, T.S.  Eliot or Charlotte Brontë. Biography, broadcast on BBC Two in October and November 1970, featured dramatisations of the lives of diverse historical characters like French revolutionary George Danton or astronomer Tycho Brahe. The Edwardians, the series from which the meta-biographical ‘Daisy’ was drawn (see Chap. 3), portrayed prominent lives from the early twentieth century. The series presented a provocative exploration of the paradoxes and hypocrisies at the heart of Britain’s last Golden Age, whether in relation to class conflict in ‘The Reluctant Juggler’, sexual politics in ‘E. Nesbit’ and ‘Lloyd George’, or colonialism and race relations in ‘Baden Powell’ and ‘Conan Doyle’.

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In 1969, The First Churchills, a twelve-part serial recounting the lives of the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, was broadcast on BBC Two. It would be the precursor to many period drama serials with biographical subjects to be broadcast in the 1970s and 1980s. The success for the BBC of The Six Wives of Henry VIII (BBC Two) in 1970 prompted the production of other biographical dramas which would follow a similar formula: representations of historical figures (often royalty) performed by acclaimed theatrical actors that dramatise how their personality was shaped by the events and people in their lives. Elizabeth R (BBC Two, 1971) and The Shadow of the Tower (BBC Two, 1972) form with it a loose trilogy, and the model was later repeated for I, Claudius (BBC Two, 1976), based on a novel series by Robert Graves, and medieval drama The Devil’s Crown (BBC Two, 1978). As Robert Giddings and Keith Selby (2001) note, such series were a means of differentiating BBC Two’s output from that of rival broadcasters and drawing in audiences for the relatively newly established channel. The channel’s ability to broadcast in vivid colour also offered an inducement to produce period dramas, which were well-suited to showcasing the distinctiveness of colour television (Wheatley 2016). Giddings and Selby argue that the commercial network ITV had also applied the lessons of the success of classic serial adaptation to the making of historical dramas, and biographical series formed a significant portion of these. Examples include Thames Television’s Napoleon and Love (1974) and Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill (1974), ATV’s Edward the Seventh (1975), Disraeli: Portrait of a Romantic (1978) and Will Shakespeare (1978) and Yorkshire Television’s The Brontës of Haworth (1973) and Dickens of London (1976). The First Churchills was significant for another reason. Two years after its initial transmission on BBC Two, it became the first broadcast on the US public broadcaster PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre strand (1971–). Masterpiece Theatre has been the key destination for the export of British ‘quality’ drama to US audiences, though as Laurence Jarvik (1992) and Simone Knox (2012) both argue, understandings of quality in these terms are determined by practices of marketing, promotion and positioning. Biographical series on Masterpiece Theatre during the 1970s and 1980s included titles such as The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Elizabeth R, Dickens of London, Lillie (LWT, 1978) about the British-American actress and mistress of Edward VII, Lillie Langtry, Edward and Mrs Simpson (Thames, 1978), which traces the fateful romance between Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII, and Nancy Astor (BBC Two, 1982) about the Virginian

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socialite who would become the first woman MP to take her seat in the UK’s parliament. The latter three examples, each of which focuses on the transatlantic lives of American women, demonstrate the extent to which biographical drama is shaped by transnational currents and export potential (Weissmann 2012). Indeed, as Knox contends: Scholars in the UK working on domestic British drama need to be mindful of the different dimensions of British drama’s manifold identities; that the British drama watched in Britain is not the same as the British drama as it appears in other countries (including, but of course not restricted to, the United States), marked as it is by particular broadcasting processes. Not simply being exported, but also increasingly being produced to be exported and exportable in a global marketplace, British drama has been part of trans-­ national broadcasting processes, and they have been part of and shaped British drama. (2012: 43)

The construction of biographical portraits is often underpinned by nationalistic sentiment (Nadel 1984), used for the creation of mythological national heroes (Buonanno 2011; Klein 2017) or shaped by understandings of national identity (Hearn and Wicke 2013). However, as Weissmann and Knox remind us, televisual biographical representations must also be considered in the context of global programme exchange. Although this book focuses on British biographical drama, then, inasmuch as many of these programmes are exported beyond the UK’s borders, they work beyond a nationalistic framework. Indeed, the global circulation of such images of British national figures may be viewed as part of British television’s—and especially the BBC’s—ambassadorial role. One of the BBC’s public purposes, as stated in their current charter, is ‘to reflect the United Kingdom, its culture and values to the world’ (BBC 2020). Masterpiece Theatre remains a key location for high-profile British biographical series, the most prominent contemporary one being Victoria (ITV, 2016–). Biographical dramas are also frequently made as transnational co-productions, implying a more outward-looking approach. Examples here include Fleming (2013), a collaboration between Sky Atlantic and BBC America, and Gentleman Jack, a BBC and HBO co-production. During the 2000s and 2010s, competition for audiences was growing in intensity thanks to, first, cable and satellite broadcasters and, later, digital streaming services. This increased the pressure on single dramas to have

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a mechanism for garnering audience interest pre-broadcast. Drawing on the recognition value of famous or newsworthy subjects to produce high-­ impact one-off drama was a technique that had been used in US broadcasting for some time. The single drama declined as a televisual form much more rapidly in the United States than in the UK, replaced by more commercially efficient series and serials. In the 1970s, though, a new format developed for the one-off dramatic unit in televisual schedules, called the ‘movie-of-the-week’. Stephen Lipkin (2002) found that producers developed the mantra that these shows should be ‘rootable, relatable and promotable’. This meant that they were based on a recognisable recent event, featured protagonists with whom a broad (and often female) audience could identify and could capitalise on the residual media interest in the original event to gain publicity and be more efficient to market. He summarises the utility of such programming thus: The recognisability of docudrama subjects has allowed them to fit well within the demands of television scheduling. Comparable to “high concept” feature film marketing, these stories come preequipped with headline concepts that foreground encapsulated explanations of their subject matter. (2002: 59)

Clearly commercialistic in intention, these processes nevertheless also apply to the ways in which biographical subjects are used to promote single drama in the UK. The name-recognition value of the subject makes promoting the drama more effective than having to introduce an unfamiliar character or set of events. There are also pre-made publicity opportunities inherent in biographical drama, as high-profile television dramas can be the catalyst for a re-appraisal of the biographee in other cultural outlets. After a two-decade lull, biographical dramas became a more regular feature of British broadcast schedules in the 2000s and 2010s, in no small part thanks to BBC Four’s identification of the genre as a means of producing high-impact content on relatively low budgets for an educated, older, niche audience (Andrews 2016). Single dramas in a context of intense competition must be carefully positioned, promoted and scheduled to maximise their cultural impact. One method is to organise diverse dramas into seasons, such as The Curse of Comedy or Women We Loved seasons on BBC Four in 2008 and 2009 respectively. Though the figures dramatised in these seasons had little in common with one another, grouping them enabled the broadcaster to

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promote them together, a more efficient means of gathering critical interest and audience attention. In the 2000s and 2010s, biographical dramas were also frequently used as the cornerstone of a broader season of programming. Examples include Miss Marie Lloyd: Queen of the Music Hall, the centre piece of BBC Four’s Edwardians: The Birth of Now season in 2007, Shirley, the previously mentioned flagship drama of BBC Two’s Mixed Race season in 2011, and Against the Law which was broadcast as part of the BBC’s Gay Britannia season in 2017, which celebrated fifty years since the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 which partly decriminalised homosexuality. Biographical drama is also frequently broadcast during seasonal holidays and on bank holiday weekends: a quarter of the biographical single dramas in the survey broadcast between 2000 and 2019 were shown during holiday periods. Constructed as a pseudo-event or scheduled within festive programming, biographical drama is frequently promoted and positioned as a special part of the schedule. The intense competition between television services in the 2010s for high-quality dramas with expansive casts, complex multiple storylines, expensive production values and which target elite audiences has led to the conception of the period as a ‘Golden Age’ or ‘Peak TV’. Discourses of quality, mobilised as a means of legitimating certain televisual forms via unfavourable comparison to others, have long been an ambivalent feature of UK television’s industrial and institutional rhetoric. The 2010s represented an escalation and internationalisation of this trend (Lotz 2018). Quality drama in this industrial context is used as a way of raising the brand equity of certain high-profile cable or streaming services, like HBO or Netflix. The elite brand values of companies like HBO can also, as Caetlin Benson-Allott (2013) argues, be reflected in the reception of biographical dramas shown on this network, with works like John Adams (HBO, 2008), Temple Grandin (HBO, 2010) and Behind the Candelabra (HBO, 2013) enjoying more critical respect and acclaim than biographical dramas produced for networks like Lifetime, a market leader in biographical docudrama which has a decidedly less high-brow brand image. Though these institutions are US based, they are global market leaders whose rhetoric, style and methods have been adopted in some sectors of the UK television industry. Dramas made in this context are produced explicitly for international export as well as domestic consumption. In the case of Netflix, localised production for specific geographical and cultural markets has formed a significant part of their strategy to increase the global reach of the brand (Lobato 2019). The Crown (Netflix, 2016–) represents a

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fusion of these two strategies: a blockbuster, high-budget period drama series that transforms British twentieth-century history into a melodrama that stars one of the world’s most famous (and inscrutable) families. The multi-season biographical drama is a relatively recent invention, a product of an industrial environment where there is a seemingly insatiable demand for television content, as well as for culturally resonant and internationally saleable stories. This can explain the repeated use of real lives as story material for broadcasters, narrowcasters and streaming services, in examples such as Z: The Beginning of Everything (Amazon Prime Video, 2017), Catherine the Great (HBO/Sky Atlantic, 2019), Dickinson (Apple TV +, 2019–) or Self Made (Netflix, 2020). The volume of such examples suggests that biographical drama is likely to endure even in the competitive and uncertain industrial landscape of contemporary global television. As this brief overview shows, throughout television history there has been programming that dramatises a huge variety of biographical subjects across a range of formats. It is not the aim of this book to attend to every instance of biographical dramatisation. Indeed, there are a range of television fictions that engage in biographical representation that are not substantially explored: examples include religious epics, true crime docudramas or sitcoms based on memoirs such as Raised By Wolves (Channel 4, 2013–2016) and Cradle to Grave (BBC Two, 2015). I do not seek to create concrete generic classifications, taxonomies or periodisations for the British biographical television drama. Instead, I seek to initiate a debate on the meeting of television and biography. I want to explore the result when the medium of television and the practice of biography converge. My investigation of the biographical television drama has led me to outline the core themes of truth, ethical and cultural values, the representations of public private lives, and the role of television in creating or consolidating biographical legacy. I hope that this book can provide a point of departure for future analysis of what it means to write, perform and represent real lives on television screens.

References Andrews, H. (2016) ‘BBC Four Biopics: Lessons in Trashy Respectability’ Journal of British Cinema and Television 13(3): 409–429. Backscheider, P.R. (1999) Reflections on Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. BBC (2020) ‘Charter and Agreement’ BBC Website. Available at https://www. bbc.com/aboutthebbc/governance/charter [Accessed 2 April 2020].

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Benson-Allott, C. (2013) ‘Made for Quality Television? Behind the Candelabra (Steven Soderbergh, 2013) Anna Nicole (Mary Herron [sic], 2013)’ Film Quarterly 66(4): 5–9. Bignell, J. (2019) ‘Television Biopics: Questions of Genre, Nation, and Medium’ in Cartmell, D. and Polasek, A.D. (eds) A Companion to the Biopic. London: Wiley, pp. 45–60. Bingham, D. (2011) Whose lives are they anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press. Bondebjerg, I. (1996) ‘Public discourse/private fascination: hybridization in ‘true-life-story’ genres’ Media, Culture and Society 18(1): 27–45. Bourdieu, P. (2000) ‘The Biographical Illusion’ in du Gay, P., Evans, J. and Redman, P. (eds) Identity: a reader. London: Sage, pp. 297–303. Buonanno, M. (2011) ‘Stories of exemplary lives. Biographies.’ Matrizes 5(1): 63–84. Caine, B. (2010) Biography and History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Carroll, N. (2002) ‘Is the medium a (moral) message?’ in Matthew, K. (ed) Media Ethics. London: Routledge, pp. 135–151. Cartmell, D. and Polasek, A.D. (eds) (2019) A Companion to the Biopic. London: Wiley Caughie, J. (2000) Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cooke, L. (2015) British Television Drama: A History (Second Edition). London: BFI. Custen, G.F. (1992) Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Edel, L. (1984) Writing Lives: Principia Biographia. New  York/London: W.W. Norton & Company. Edgerton, G.R. (2001) ‘Television as Historian: A Different Kind of History Altogether’ in Edgerton, G. and Rollins, P.C. (eds) Television Histories. Lexington, KY: University Press Kentucky, pp. 1–18. Epstein, W.  H. (1987) Recognizing Biography. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Feuer, J. (1983) ‘The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology’ in Kaplan, E. (ed) Regarding Television. Los Angeles: American Film Institute, pp. 12–22. Gardner, C. and Wyver, J. (1983) ‘The Single Play: From Reithian Reverence to Cost-accounting and Censorship’ Screen 24 (4–5): 114–124. Giddings, R. and Selby, K. (2001) The Classic Serial on Television and Radio. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Hamilton, N. (2007) Biography: A Brief History. Cambridge, Massachusetts/ London: Harvard University Press. Hearn, J. and Wicke, C. (eds) (2013) ‘Humanities Research Special Edition: Nationalism and Biography: European Perspectives’ Humanities Research XIX(1).

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Heilbrun, C. G. (1989) Writing a Woman’s Life. London: The Women’s Press. Hill, John (2015), ‘Blurring the lines between fact and fiction: Ken Russell, The BBC, and ‘Television Biography’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 12(4): 452–478. Hughes, K. (2004) ‘Fever’, in Bostridge, M. (ed) Lives for Sale: Biographers’ Tales. London: Continuum, pp. 151–153. Jacobs, J. (2000) The Intimate Screen: Early British Television Drama. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Jarvik, L. (1992) ‘PBS and the politics of quality: Mobil oil’s ‘Masterpiece Theatre”, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 12(3): 253–274. Klein, C. (2017) ‘Biography as a Concept of Thought: On the premises of biographical research and narrative’ in Renders, H. De Haan, B. and Harmsma, J. (eds) The Biographical Turn: Lives in History. London and New  York: Routledge, pp. 79–87. Knox, S. (2012) ‘Masterpiece Theatre and British Drama Imports on US Television: Discourses of Tension’ Critical Studies in Television 7(1): 29–48. Lee, H. (2005) Body Parts: Essays on Life-Writing. London: Random House. Lee, H. (2009) Biography: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leitch, T. (2018) ‘Not Just the Facts: Adaptation, illustration and history’ in Cutchins, D., Krebs, K. Voigts, E. (eds) (2018) The Routledge Companion to Adaptation. London: Routledge, pp. 67–79. Lipkin, S.N. (2002) Real Emotional Logic: Film and Television Docudrama as Persuasive Practice. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. Lobato, R. (2019) Netflix Nations: The Geography of Digital Distribution. New York, NY: New York University Press. Long, J. (1999) Telling Women’s Lives: Subject/Narrator/Reader/Text. New York and London: New York University Press. Lotz, A.D. (2018) We Now Disrupt This Broadcast: How Cable Transformed Television and the Internet Revolutionized It All. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Manis, J. G. (1994) ‘What Should Biographers Tell? The Ethics of Telling Lives’. Biography 17 (4): 386–395. Marcus, L. (2002) ‘The Newness of the ‘New Biography’ in France, P. and St Clair, W. (eds) Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 193–218. Minier, M. (2014) ‘Joining history to celebiography and heritage to documentary on the small screen: spotlight on the content of the form in the metamediatic royal bio-docudrama The Queen’ in Pennacchia, M. and Minier, M. (eds) Adaptation, Intermediality and the British Celebrity Biopic. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 79–100. Nadel, I.B. (1984) Biography: Fiction, Fact & Form. New York: St Martin’s Press.

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Newcomb, H. and Hirsch, P. (1983) ‘Television as Cultural Forum: Implications for Research’ Quarterly Review of Film and Video 8(3): 45–55. Parke, C.N. (2002) Biography: Writing Lives, New York and London: Routledge. Petley, J. (1996), ‘Fact plus fiction equals friction’ Media Culture Society 18 (1): 11–25. Posing, B. (2017) Understanding Biographies. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark. Renders, H. De Haan, B. and Harmsma, J. (eds) (2017) The Biographical Turn: Lives in History. London and New York: Routledge. Robb, G. (2004) ‘A Narcissist’s Wedding’, in Bostridge, M. (ed) Lives for Sale: Biographers’ Tales. London: Continuum, pp. 11–14. Rose, P. (1996) ‘Confessions of a Burned-Out Biographer’, in Rhiel and Suchoff (eds) The Seductions of Biography, London and New  York: Routledge, pp. 131–136. Seymour, M. (2002) ‘Shaping the Truth’ in France, P. and St Clair, W. (eds) Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 253–266. Stanley, L. (1992) The Auto/biographical I: The theory and practice of feminist auto/biography. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. St Clair, W. (2002) ‘The Biographer as Archaeologist’ in in France, P. and St Clair, W. (eds) Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 219–234. The Times (1964) ‘Weekend Broadcasting’ The Times 25 April 1964, p. 5. Wagner-Martin, L. (1994) Telling Women’s Lives: The New Biography. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Weissmann, E. (2012) Transnational Television Drama: Special Relations and Mutual Influence between the US and UK. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wheatley, H. (2007) ‘And now for your Sunday night experimental drama … Experimentation and Armchair Theatre’ in Mulvey, L. and Sexton, J. (eds) Experimental British Television. Manchester: Manchester University Press: 31–47. Wheatley, H. (2016) Spectacular Television: Exploring Televisual Pleasure. London: I.B. Tauris. Wilson, F. (2004) ‘A Love Triangle’ in Bostridge, M. (ed) Lives for Sale: Biographers’ Tales. London: Continuum, pp. 38–42. Woolf, V. (2008) Collected Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Genres

2.1   Introduction Biographical dramas are influenced by the forms, discourses and institutions of biography and of television, but they also share ambitions, aesthetics and tone with other cross-media genres. This chapter will explore some of the ways in which generic framings modify the core features of biography: the publicisation of the private life and the search among disparate facts for fundamental ‘truths’ about a famous self. Like biography, the biopic has been critiqued for its didactic values, the promotion of ‘official’ cultures, and its political and aesthetic conservatism. The imposition of formulaic generic structures on unique life stories translates biography into fiction formats, a scenario in which, for some critics, truth becomes a casualty (see Chap. 1). As Vidal (2014a) notes, this has led to a routine devaluation of the genre in the academy. By contrast to the putative fantastical excesses of the biopic, the docudrama is generally conceived as a more ‘sober’, rational form, borrowing from documentary’s reputation for a close relation to truth predicated on repeated appeals to verification and evidence. The presence of drama has been understood as a contamination of the more inherently ‘truthful’ form of documentary, a reading of the genre that ignores the constructed-ness and authorship of both modes of storytelling. Melodrama, conceived variously as genre, mode, sensibility or style, has a complex relation with truth. An ‘excessive’ mode which pulls against realist representational traditions, it has been © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Andrews, Biographical Television Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64678-3_2

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argued to have a superior relation to truth by giving expression to repressed or unspoken realities beneath the surface of everyday experience. It shares with period drama the use of mise-en-scène as part of its construction of spectacle, visual pleasure and meaning. Both forms emphasise the private sphere as their locus of interest, and privilege affect over action. Like the biopic, the period drama has been critically framed as a conservative and devalued genre. These genre critiques will be examined in relation not only to the biography as subject matter, but also to television as its medium of delivery. Two case studies will illustrate the impact of generic influences on the dramatisations of lives for television. In both, multiple versions of the life of the same person(s) will be explored to see how genre expectations and conventions can influence the representation of lives on television and film. The first will focus on biopic and docudramatic treatments of mathematician and codebreaker Alan Turing, and the second will look at the melodramatic framings of the lives of the Brontë family in costume dramas from different periods of television history.

2.2   Biopic The cinematic biopic is the closest familial relation of the biographical television drama. For the purposes of the following discussion, I take biopics to mean feature film fictionalisations of the lives of real historical figures. However, this is a simplification of a deceptively complex cinematic genre, one that is ‘notoriously difficult’ to define because of the absence of the ‘specific set of codes or conventions’ that tend to be applied by genre analysts (Cheshire 2015: 5). The pioneering biopic scholar George Custen observed that ‘we are already presuming a great deal in suggesting that biographical films are, a priori, such a grouping’ (Custen 1992: 82) and, indeed, his book Bio/Pics did much for the scholarly recognition of the biographical film as a significant if relatively small genre in the ‘classical’ Hollywood era. Custen defines a biopic as ‘minimally composed of the life, or the portion of a life, of a real person whose real name is used’ (1992: 6). He acknowledges the limitation of this formulation, and that what is understood as a biopic (and who is considered to be a worthy subject for one), changes over time. Part of the difficulty in demarcating the biopic as a genre is that there is, in theory, no core set of iconographic, narrative or aesthetic principles that should connect the audiovisual telling of one life to another (Cheshire 2015). Since lives and personalities are unique, and indeed, it is the exceptionality of the famous individual

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that warrants the telling of their story in film form, the imposition of generic formulae seems inappropriate. Nevertheless, there are enough shared narrational, performative and stylistic traits in films with biographical subjects that they have been seen as a loose or ‘impure’ genre (Bingham 2011). There is an important caveat here: though there is a genre of the biopic, not all films that deal in biographical representation are biopics. Biopics have been regarded as a sub-genre of the history film (Rosenstone 2006; Freeman and Smith 2019) because they depict real historical events and people, though filtered through the specific focus on a single self. As Belén Vidal (2014a) argues, the link to historical fact is the ‘generic contract’ between producers and audiences, the promise of recognition regardless of the depth of prior knowledge of the person or period. As with other historical films, the factual basis of biography can be a critical stick with which it is beaten. The genre is often compared unfavourably with the ‘norms of facticity and documentation’ of written history, and condemned as ‘anecdotal, unscholarly, and unrealistic’ (Landy 1996: 155). Marcia Landy sees critiques of biopics as compounded by the ‘long-standing animus against mass culture and its lack of “seriousness”’ (ibid), though the biopic is one of the few genres whose innate ‘seriousness’ is taken for granted, and, indeed, is part of the critical consensus against it. Tom Brown (2014) identifies the biopic as part of a middlebrow culture that academia has been slow to acknowledge because it is seemingly transparent and certainly unfashionable. Biopics are viewed as a conservative genre, both in terms of being at the ‘rearguard of aesthetic innovation’ (Vidal 2014a: 2) and because ‘biographical narratives have traditionally been an ally of dominant structures of socioeconomic authority’ (Epstein 2016: 2). Biopics tend to apply pre-existing cultural formulae to the lives of the already famous, perpetuating dominant (patriarchal and capitalist) models of public lives and value in similar ways that feminist scholars have critiqued of the biography (see Chap. 1). Capturing perceptions of the biopic as worthy, staid and dull, Bingham (2011) describes it as a ‘respectable genre of very low repute’. Rosenstone puts this starkly: ‘nobody has ever had much good to say about the biographical film’ (2007: 11), though it is unclear who the ‘nobody’ in this statement is, since films in the genre tend to enjoy favour, albeit muted, among popular critics, steady commercial success and overrepresentation in industry awards, particularly in acting categories. Biopics are ‘prestige’ films, and

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their overt pursuit of middle-class, middlebrow audiences may well be the source of scholarly dismissiveness about the genre (Cheshire 2015). An appeal to ‘respectable’ sensibilities was a core aim of the original cycle of Hollywood biopics. According to Bingham (2011), biopics in the 1930s were designed to prove to the Production Code Administration the studios’ ability to be socially responsible. Movies about heroes of science, invention or statecraft were designed to demonstrate Hollywood’s commitment to cultural uplift, a salve to its reputation for immorality and corruption. Custen (1992) argues that the deliberate intention to promote ‘public history’ was visible, for example, in the sending of campaign books to exhibitors with strategies to sell biopics to viewers as ‘educational’. He notes that the biopic’s central generic feature, its truth claim or relation to history, is used as both a ‘framing device that sets up audience and producer expectations’ and ‘a strategy used to differentiate a product… in a highly competitive consumer market’ (1992: 60). The classical Hollywood biopic then had both overtly commercial and institutional objectives, tied to their dual functions as exploitation of audience-friendly pre-sold materials, and cultural documents, identifying and publicising the edifying stories of great lives. In this sense, they align with biography as a literary genre. Though style and production methods have altered over time, biopics have retained a faintly didactic quality, and are often framed in promotion and publicity as a means for ‘worthy’ subjects to be brought to wider public attention. Custen concludes Bio/Pics by examining the move from the biopic as a genre in studio-era Hollywood to the biographical drama as a mode on television. He suggests television ‘seized’ the cultural initiative from film, constructing the self and fame in a very different image (1992: 29) For Custen, television’s medial attributes, in particular the smaller size of the screen and its placement within domestic rather than public environments, change the ritual surrounding the reception of fame, therefore altering public perceptions of celebrity and history. This movement from public to private sphere is looked on by Custen with suspicion, and not a little palpable regret. He argues that television’s industrial structure in comparison to film—shorter production schedules, smaller budgets, rigid, schedule-­ driven narrative formulae, technological limitations and domestic viewing conditions—means that altogether the frame for fame in biography is ‘shrunk’. He notes that US television producers in the latter part of the twentieth century tended to seek recent, tabloid-friendly stories and exploit their recognition value by creating made-for-television movies

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about real people who were not ‘already famous’ but ‘everyday famous’. He describes this as ‘democratizing’ fame, opening it up beyond the ‘great’, but suggests that this also ‘shrinks its contours’ (1992: 223). Television seemingly redefines fame, making it more vernacular and quotidian, focusing on victimhood rather than achievement. These observations about the fate of the biopic as it passed between cinema and television have been the basis for much subsequent discussion of the television biography. Steven N. Lipkin (2002) concurs that television docudrama with biographical subjects (‘movie of the week’ docudrama) has a ‘personal’ approach which encourages the viewer to understand how someone ‘just like us’ has become exemplary. Vidal agrees with Custen that ‘television alters our relationship with history in fundamental ways: it changes the scale of both subject and narrative frames, refocusing the genre into a more direct relationship with the everyday’ (2014a: 21). She (2014b) uses Custen’s concept of the ‘shrinking frame’ as the basis of her ‘compressed frame’ of televisual biography. This progresses Custen’s ideas by placing emphasis on television’s aesthetic of immediacy—of ‘timeliness and timelessness’ as well as intimacy and ordinariness. Vidal (2014b) places some distance between her own formulation and Custen’s in order to avoid some of the media hierarchies evident in his account. Vidal tends to see Custen’s dismissive attitude towards television as evidence of his work being ‘dated’, but it is also possible to view it as specific to the US context. Even a broad overview (see Chap. 1) of the British biographical television drama during the period Custen discusses (predominantly the 1970s and 1980s) will demonstrate a range of historical figures represented on television, most of whom are far from recent, tabloid-friendly or mediatised celebrities. These texts form part of the story of biographical drama on US television, because many of them were broadcast prominently on PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre slot. Overlooking these examples suits Custen’s anti-television rhetoric, but they render his censure of television for ‘shrinking the frame’ of the biopic not just dated but flawed. Indeed, beyond the United States and UK, there are numerous international examples which challenge the concept of televisual biopic as unserious, tabloidised and ephemeral (Ebbrecht 2016; Buonanno 2016; Fournier 2016). Vidal also notes that Custen’s critical assumptions about television’s triviality and inability to document and narrativise history are undermined by the fact that he has ignored an important source of criticism of television based on real life: television studies approaches to docudrama (2014b: 143).

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2.3   Docudrama Discussing a cycle of dramas written by Peter Morgan and starring Michael Sheen as Tony Blair, Vidal (2014b) suggests that a versatile hybrid between biopic and docudrama there emerged. She argues that these dramas combine the docudrama’s immediate response to socio-political events in recent memory with the biopic’s more measured approach to depicting individuals in historical context. Vidal is not alone in suggesting the blurring of lines between biopic and docudrama. Television docudrama, according to Derek Paget (2016), has influenced ‘biopics’ and ‘based-on-­ fact’ films. Minier (2014) coins the term ‘bio-docudrama’ to account for the blending of the two modes in recent examples. In Tobias Ebbrecht and Derek Paget’s survey of European docudrama (2016), biographical drama is a prominent feature, discussed in Italian (Buonanno 2016), French (Fournier 2016), German (Ebbrecht 2016) and Spanish (Pastor-­ González 2016) contexts. This is because, as Milly Buonanno observes of the Italian case, ‘biography has often come to encompass history and topicality, further enhancing the inherent hybrid nature of the docudrama form’ (2016: 91). Georges Fournier also notes the ideological correlation between biopic and docudrama in the French film and television industries, whereas Victoria Pastor-González describes the aesthetic conservatism of Spanish docudrama as a characteristic it shares with the biopic. Like the biopic, the docudrama has been understood as fundamentally hybrid, though its impurity comes not from liberal combination of multiple genres, but from the deliberate blurring of lines between fact and fiction (Buonanno 2016). Paget (2011) describes the perceived contamination of fact with fiction as an ‘excess’ shared with biopics, though he locates the latter nearer to fiction on a spectrum from factuality to drama. Docudrama requires the mapping of a personal ‘micro-story’ onto a historical or topical ‘macro-story’ that renders the subjects of these forms as metonymic devices through which broader issues can be discussed, as in biography and the biopic. Ebbrecht observes that docudrama and biopic both ‘enable a variety of approaches to the past and are closely related to the ongoing shift towards personalized history’ (2010: 210). These links to the intimate and personal render docudrama, particularly in US contexts, susceptible to similar critical tendencies to biopic, particularly accusations of simplification or commercialisation (Lipkin 2011). Biopics and docudrama thus share a propensity to be perceived critically as a cheapening of history.

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Paget (2011) importantly argues that docudramas provoke questions about form, particularly the permissibility, usefulness or even danger of mixing drama with documentary. Docudrama challenges the claims of documentary to a superior relation to truth, or a monopoly on the serious televisual or filmic presentation of issues. Bignell (2010) suggests that the ‘textual world’ of the docudrama is proposed as authentic and plausible a priori, so assumptions about norms of subjectivity or identification are pre-established to a greater extent than in fiction. In documentary, this assumption is predicated on indexicality (the presence of a physical link between image and referent) and the presumption that the pro-filmic event is organically captured by the camera rather than staged. Paget argues that docudrama is ‘more indexical than drama, less than the documentary’ because it points ‘more insistently towards its origins in the real world’ than drama tends to do (2011: 8). Lipkin proposes this as a ‘quasi-­ indexical’ (2002), and later an ‘indexically iconic’ (2011) form of representation, where image and story have a motivated and direct relationship to the events portrayed. Like the biography, docudramas shape, interpret and represent pre-existing stories to be found in the real world. But here there is an added level of confusion at the level of form, where a mode of performance associated with fiction is used to re-construct the actual. As with the biography, the presence of modes associated with fiction may be perceived as undermining the factual basis of docudrama texts. This makes the role of trust ever more vital, as the presentation of facts in fictional formats will be more palatable when involving an author or institution that can supposedly be relied upon to provide truths. For example, Pastor-González notes that in the Spanish context, ‘audiences have so far trusted historical docudrama as long as its message functions within a commonly accepted version of events’ (2016: 141), highlighting the fragility of the trust-pact between programme maker and audience and the importance of pre-existing cultural framings for fictionalisation. Part of the trust that exists between viewer and docudrama hinges on the role of the camera and what it is assumed to mean. Paget describes the film/television camera as being assumed to have ‘privileged access’ to two kinds of reality: a record of external events, which constitute the basis of the documentary appeal, and a simulated reality of acted events. He argues that the power of documentary comes from a belief that truth is established from evidence, and in the camera’s ‘almost mythic status’ as provider of truth’ (2011: 121). Because the dramatic element in docudrama must always, to some degree, undermine this status, the form inevitably calls into question

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the limits of television representation and its claim to offer access to social reality. Although it has also been a prominent filmic mode, Paget describes the generic conventions of docudrama as ‘inherently televisual’ (2011: 127). This is partly a matter of televisual aesthetics, such as the propensity for intimacy, to display interiority and focus on the personal or the everyday. John Corner calls this the ‘proxemics of the dramatization—its capacity to “bring us close” to the local human detail within the larger themes and sphere of action being addressed’ (1999: 36), which sets drama in opposition to the documentary’s reputation for distance and disinterestedness. Docudrama’s televisuality is also related to the medium’s social function which displays ‘a tension between being a window onto, and a mirror of, the social worlds it represents and the audiences to whom it is addressed’ (Bignell 2010: 205). The window/mirror metaphor speaks powerfully to television’s dichotomous relationship to the public and private spheres and to debates about the role of media representation: to reflect our assumptions about the world and ourselves, or to reveal broad and sometimes unpalatable truths. The relation of docudrama to television form, however, is dependent on the context in which it is made. There are distinctions between the intentions and functions of US docudramas and those made in Western Europe, which reflect differences between public service and commercially driven systems. Fournier notes that in France docudrama fulfils public remits, including supplying the national population with information and education, even when it derives from privately owned channels (2016: 111). He argues that docudramas that combine history and biography are associated with the project of public service broadcasting to ‘reprocess [] mainstream popular culture’ (126). In the UK, docudrama has historically been considered a ‘duty’ genre (Paget 2011), aligned with the aims of investigative journalism and documentary in revealing unknown truths and igniting public debate on underexplored topics. US docudrama, by contrast, has tended to capitalise on recent and sensationalised stories which capture public attention, though also seeking to reveal underlying and unknown aspects of these stories. Paget describes this mode of docudrama as related to ‘tabloid culture’, and places it in hierarchy lower than the favoured ‘investigative’ mode of journalism seen in many UK examples (2016: 5–6). Changes to British television since the 1990s have brought the docudrama form closer to that of the US, particularly in the

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shaping of real stories into coherent and progressive narrative (Bignell 2010; Paget 2011). Paget (2016) suggests that the distinctiveness of docudrama as a genre resides in its simultaneous appeal to the ‘head’ and the ‘heart’. The ‘head’ here is a metaphor for rationality characterised by the relation to investigative journalism, documentary filmmaking and historical enquiry which requires proof, research and verification, an appeal to, in Bill Nichols’s well-known formulation, ‘discourses of sobriety’ (2017: 26). The ‘heart’ approach stems from attention to emotional dimensions, the core purpose of drama. Central to the appeal of the docudrama is its promise that the viewer can ‘ratify emotionally what has been understood intellectually’ (Paget 2011: 128). This combination of empiricism and emotion has been characterised as a fusion of gendered values. The factual agenda of docudrama, with its emphasis on politics, rationality and the public sphere, is deemed masculine, with an attendant ethics of rights and duties, whereas the presentation of personal lives, with its emphasis on empathy, emotions and the private sphere, is considered to be a feminine one, with an ethics of care (Bignell 2000). This connection with the world of emotions and interiority has led to several scholars to compare docudrama with melodrama (Bignell 2000; Buonanno 2016; Pastor-González 2016; Lipkin 2002, 2011; Paget 2011). Though melodramatic expression might be anathema to the ‘serious’ intentions and ambitions of fact-driven, exploratory or investigative docudrama, it is a core way in which the genre makes exterior the interior, and visible the invisible, ideals at the heart of the docudramatic mode.

2.4   Artificial Intelligence: Dramatising Alan Turing Alan Turing was a minor British public figure in his lifetime, known primarily as the author of influential academic papers on the ‘Turing machine’ that would provide an early blueprint for the digital computer, and on the nature of artificial intelligence. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ for a homosexual affair which came to light as the result of a burglary at his home. He opted to undergo chemical castration rather than imprisonment, which had a devastating impact on his physical and mental health. He died by probable suicide in 1954, at the age of 41. As documents from the Second World War were declassified, it was revealed that

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Turing had been instrumental in the decryption of the Enigma, a German encryption machine that produced an apparently unbreakable code. Breaking Enigma gave the British military access to intelligence which helped them win decisive battles, and, eventually, the war. Turing’s is a life of overlapping stories: his close relationship with schoolfriend Christopher Morcom who died aged 18 has been interpreted as a tragic romance; his talents for mathematics and ability to see the potential for automated computation have figured him as visionary genius; his activities during the war have retroactively placed him as a national hero; and his death related to unjust state persecution has seen him develop into a gay martyr. It is therefore unsurprising that there have been multiple moving-image versions of Turing’s biography. In Breaking the Code (tx BBC One, 5 February 1997), Derek Jacobi reprises his role as Turing from Hugh Whitemore’s 1986 theatrical adaptation of Andrew Hodges’ biography (2012). It was broadcast as part of a season of numeracy-focused programming across the BBC called ‘Count Me In’. The drama devotes significant attention to Turing’s career as a mathematician, including scenes in which his theories are explained in some detail. Britain’s Greatest Codebreaker (tx Channel 4, 21 November 2011)1 similarly attempts to represent Turing’s career holistically. It combines dramatised sequences with documentary style presentation, including voiceover narration, talking head interviews with colleagues and experts explaining the meaning of Turing’s achievements, and archive images of photographs, documents and items from Turing’s life, some captured using the rostrum camera technique familiar from television documentary. The performed sections dramatise Turing’s (Ed Stoppard) therapy sessions with psychologist Franz Greenbaum (Henry Goodman) working through the trauma of police persecution and hormone ‘treatment’. It is instructive to compare both these televisual treatments with a film biopic, The Imitation Game (Morten Tydlum, 2014), liberally adapted from Hodges’ biography. Unlike the other texts, it focuses primarily on the period of Turing’s (Benedict Cumberbatch) life about which there is the least reliable information: his activities during the war. The police investigation into Turing in the early 1950s is used as a framing device for the story, which also incorporates flashbacks to his time at Sherbourne school with Christopher (Jack Bannon), who the film presents as Turing’s great love and inspiration for his achievements. The film grossed more 1

 Titled Codebreaker for its international release.

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than fifteen times its budget at the global box office and was nominated for multiple international awards for its screenplay, music and acting, making it the most prominent dramatisation of Turing’s life to date. These texts provide useful contrasting examples of televisual and feature film biography, offering a case study in how a single identity can be reinterpreted across medial lines as well as through generic convention. The titular motif in The Imitation Game occurs during an interview between Turing and Detective Nock (Rory Kinnear), who suspects him of being a Soviet spy. Turing attempts to explain to him his thought experiment, ‘The Imitation Game’, which is intended to prove that machines are capable of cognition, provided that their responses to questions are indistinguishable from that of a human. An establishing shot shows the men sitting at opposite sides of a bare table in an austere, dimly lit room, mise-­ en-­scène that compounds the sense of emptiness and defeat in Cumberbatch’s performance. The scene proceeds with a series of briskly edited medium, over the shoulder shot/reverse shots between Nock and Alan. As Nock asks the question of whether machines can think, there is a cut to a tighter close-up of Alan. In a long take (59 seconds compared to an average shot length of 7.3 seconds in this sequence), he delivers a monologue about variances in human taste and personality, which he connects to his work on machines and thought. The close-up and long take prompts focus on Cumberbatch’s pained facial expression and measured vocal delivery. This creates a moment of empathy with Alan who, to this point, has been framed as a distant, difficult character. The speech itself focuses on the personal, on what constitutes individuality in humans, rather than the mathematical principles that underlie Turing’s work. Alan concludes by challenging Nock to judge him according to the rules of The Imitation Game: ‘Am I a machine? Am I a person? Am I a war hero? Am I a criminal?’ This dialogue recalls the biography’s project of identity exploration. While there are allusions to Turing’s theoretical accomplishments in artificial intelligence, these are not foregrounded. The sequence instead promotes an emotional response to Alan’s predicament, identification rather than evaluation, despite Alan’s entreaties to Nock. Breaking the Code also uses an interview sequence as a pretext for biographical exploration, though in this case it is an extended engagement with Alan’s scholarship. Alan attends a job interview with Dillwyn Knox (Richard Johnson), head of a code-breaking unit at Bletchley Park. The editing pattern of this sequence is similar to The Imitation Game, a combination of a wide shot showing the two men conversing across a desk,

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this time in the cosier environment of an untidy office, and medium close­up shot/reverse shots of their dialogue and reactions as the conversation progresses. The sequence is far longer than The Imitation Game’s interview set piece, over fourteen minutes, with double its average shot length (14.9 seconds). The measured pace of the scene thus enables greater time and attention to be dedicated to a thorough exploration of Turing’s work. This indicates that its purpose is to explore his impact on the academic field as well as represent him as a man. Knox asks Alan to explain his paper ‘On Computable Numbers’ in ‘general terms’. This prompts Alan to begin a lengthy, enthusiastic monologue explaining the mathematical principles behind the paper. This is filmed in a single take of five and a half minutes, broken only once by a reaction shot of Knox’s perturbed face. Jacobi’s animated performance, captured in a medium close-up, evidences Turing’s passion for his subject, while also demonstrating his influence on a core mathematical debate. The didactic intention of the television play is clearest in this moment, since a significant moment of attention is focused on the outline of mathematical concepts. By contrast, The Imitation Game’s director Morten Tydlum argued that the film’s goal was to capture what Alan Turing ‘feels like’ (Katz 2015), which speaks to affective rather than pedagogical intentions. The conceit of Britain’s Greatest Codebreaker is to give apparently privileged access to the most sequestered form of interview possible: the confidential conversations between a therapist and his subject. This is reflected in the framing patterns used in the dramatic sequences, which are dominated by medium close-ups and mid-shots that enable the viewer to register Alan’s anguish through facial and bodily cues. Details from the dramatisation reiterate aspects of Turing’s biography told in the documentary segments. For example, as the impact of chemical castration on Turing’s health and wellbeing is discussed by the voiceover, Stoppard’s Alan compares the poison from Snow White’s apple to the chemicals used in his hormone ‘therapy’. This is a poetic interweaving of several facts about Turing: his fondness for Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (David Hand, 1937), his chemical castration and, by inference, the cyanide laced apple that caused his death. In the documentary-style segments, expert views are delivered in talking head or voiceover, often over close-ups of relevant documents such as academic papers. These provide a ‘warrant’ (Lipkin 2002) that reinforces ideas presented by the drama, an equivalent to biography’s use of facts to authorise its interpretation of the biographee. The programme is overt about its status as biographical text. For

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instance, David Leavitt, one of Turing’s biographers, is pictured in the archive of Sherbourne school, looking at photographs and library records. Leavitt interprets the meanings of these documents, speculating on, for example, Turing’s motivations for reading Alice in Wonderland. In this way, the programme captures a biographer in the process of biographising. Documents and interview evidence in Britain’s Greatest Codebreaker render the drama ‘indexically iconic’, providing an extra layer of authentication (Lipkin 2011). Although Britain’s Greatest Codebreaker appeals to the documentary record to authorise its version of Turing, it shares with the other texts the romantic approach to its subject that typifies the biopic. The primary way in which his story is romanticised in all three narratives is the focus on Christopher Morcom. Britain’s Greatest Codebreaker stresses Leavitt’s interpretation of this relationship, that Turing was ‘quite in love’ with Morcom, though it was ‘innocent of sexuality’. In an early scene, Stoppard’s Turing confesses to Greenbaum that he ‘carries Christopher around’ with him, telling him about the letters he wrote to Christopher’s mother. In the next shot, the real letter sent by Turing to Mrs Morcom is shown in close-up, reinforcing the truth claim of the dramatic scene by visualising the evidence on which it was based. Stoppard’s intense performance of Alan’s lifelong grief is captured in a high angle medium close-up in which he lies on the therapist’s couch, clutching a cushion as though futilely attempting to hold on to the past he has lost. In The Imitation Game, Christopher appears as a character in flashbacks which punctuate the primary story. Alan and Christopher’s close relationship is made clear in a short sequence in which Christopher introduces Alan to ciphers. They are seated together beneath a tree, bodies touching, enjoying a quiet moment of privacy in the public space of the school field. A tightly framed two-shot of their faces registers Christopher and Alan’s affectionate gaze at one another. Breaking the Code similarly portrays the mutual regard between the young Alan (William Mannering) and Christopher (Blake Ritson) in a close two-shot, this one held for more than thirty seconds, in which Alan dreams aloud of a house of his own that they could share without interruption. The romantic register of this scene is underscored by ‘Someday my Prince Will Come’ from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (drawing again on Turing’s known fondness for the film) on the soundtrack. The shared emphasis on Christopher in these texts indicates the tendency in the biography to locate adult personality in childhood or adolescent experience, and in the biopic to find a figure in the subject’s personal life

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who acts as an inspiration to explain their public achievements (Custen 1992). Breaking the Code concludes with an abrupt cut from a scene from the diegesis of 1954 to extra-narrative images of a contemporary ring road in Manchester, revealed to be called ‘Alan Turing Way’. A voiceover states ‘Alan Turing never received the recognition to which he was entitled. We now have a chance to put that right’. This is a comment on the efforts of the drama, which is part of the process of ‘putting right’ by drawing public attention to Turing’s story and achievements. The programme performs the function theorised of docudramas: advocacy and intervention in social and political injustices via airing them in the public forum provided by television broadcasting. Britain’s Greatest Codebreaker similarly concludes with a final intertitle that states ‘In September 2009, the British government apologized for the way Alan Turing was treated’. The Imitation Game’s final titles update the story to include the posthumous pardon granted to Turing in 2013. The codas of these texts place the story they have told in a real-world setting, but also are self-reflexive gestures, proposing that the text itself is part of the process of recognition. These biographical representations form an important part of publicising the Turing story and reaffirming his legacy. The Imitation Game contains many of the generic features of the biopic: a focus on the intensities of performance, an emphasis on questions of identity and a proposal of the meaning of a life. Britain’s Greatest Codebreaker is ambitious in attempting similarly to explore the development of a self within the generic conventions and syntax of the documentary-­drama. It shares with Breaking the Code a determination to account for Turing’s intellectual achievements and represent his personality in a way that meets the threshold both of accuracy and of satisfying drama. Strict adherence to fact is not so much part of The Imitation Game’s agenda, though perhaps this is its prerogative as a cinematic biopic, a genre that will tolerate a higher level of speculation or fictionalisation than other biographical forms. Broadcast on public service networks, the presentational rhetoric of both the television texts is broadly pedagogical: as a documentary/drama hybrid in the case of Britain’s Greatest Codebreaker, or as part of an educational season for Breaking the Code. However, the insistent focus on Turing’s legacy both intra-textually in the former, and in the latter’s coda, suggests that both texts also seek to use the public platform provided by broadcast television to rehabilitate Turing’s reputation for posterity.

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2.5   Melodrama As with all the other genres and forms discussed in this chapter, a standard definition of melodrama has eluded scholars. Peter Brooks provides a well-­ known summary of its general connotations: the indulgence of strong emotionalism; moral polarization and schematization; extreme states of being, situations, actions; overt villainy, persecution of the good, clarification of the cosmic moral sense of everyday gestures. (Brooks 1976: 10)

The presence of these features across a range of genres prompted critics to see it as a sensibility, mode or series of modalities (Zarzosa 2012). Ben Singer (2001) describes it as a ‘cluster concept’, a configuration of five basic features: pathos—eliciting pity, a visceral sensation caused by moral outrage but also the over-identification with victimised characters that prompts a masochistic form of viewership; overwrought emotion, visible in heightened states of emotion; moral polarisation, a simplified Manichaean world view where ethics are highly legible, and good and evil very apparent (Brooks 1976; Gledhill 1987; Williams 1998; Mercer and Shingler 2004); nonclassical narrative structure, which has a greater tolerance for unmotivated, implausible or coincidental action or episodic plotting than classical realist forms’ goal- and cause-and-effect-driven narratives; and sensationalism, seen as an expressionist insistence on spectacle and style as revelatory, with the ironic effect that melodrama is seen as a genre able to speak profound beneath-the-surface truths by overcoming the repressions of bourgeois society. Thomas Elsaesser notes that when we talk in everyday parlance of ‘melodrama’, we are usually pointing to exaggeration, a ‘foreshortening of lived time in favour of intensity’ (1991: 76). The fluctuation between intense modes of being, euphoria and despair, that characterise melodramatic storytelling has resulted in a definition of it as a mode of ‘excess’ in opposition to a classical realist ‘norm’ (Williams 1998). It is to this understanding of melodrama that Michael Holroyd refers when he suggests that most readers of biography ‘prefer melodrama and romance to a laborious reconstruction of a life’ (2002: 12). This implies that melodrama is in some way antithetical to the serious intentions of biography, or sober recounting of its subject’s life story. However, the application of ‘classic realist’ storytelling modes, with goal-oriented cause-and-effect

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storytelling, is responsible for imposing false coherence onto individual life stories (Andrews 2018). Like biography, melodrama seeks to move past realism at a local or surface level to assert more fundamental or essential truths. Indeed, Sonia Amalia Haiduc goes as far as to say that ‘biography must be “melodramatic” in order to be true’ (2020: 24). She qualifies this by arguing: By ‘truth’ I understand a certain readable, recognisable, coherently constructed sense of interiority that speaks to the reality of the human condition and is encoded in the presence and the gestural performances of the actors’ bodies on screen, expressed through (melo)dramatic form. (2020: 24)

Haiduc’s formulation opens a reading of melodrama as a means of accessing and expressing biographical truths without necessitating recourse to empiricism or precise mimesis. Melodrama also provides a convenient answer to a problem for biographical narrative formats: how can a satisfying story be constructed from events whose outcome is already known? For biographical fiction, ‘in the spirit of melodrama, the emphasis is on the affect accompanying the predicted outcome’ (Landy 1996: 24). The viewer’s extra-textual knowledge about the life story of the protagonist can heighten one of melodrama’s key narrative logics: the construction of divergences between the knowledge, understanding and point of view of the characters and of the viewer. According to Steve Neale (1986), it is this discrepancy that produces the pathos in melodrama and moves us to tears. If melodrama has been a central tenet of cinema storytelling, what characterises its relationship with television? Programme types like the made-­ for-­television movie and the soap opera have been analysed as having a ‘melodramatic register’ (Singer 2001), demonstrating the presence of, for example, overwrought feeling without necessarily eliciting pathos. Melodramatic conventions are present across a wide range of television genres, to be found even in unlikely places, such as the lurches between extremes of anticipation and disappointment or elation on television quiz shows, or in the moralising reportage of news and current affairs. However, both David Thorburn (2000) and Lynn Joyrich (1992) go further than this, to suggest that melodrama as a sensibility and an aesthetic are embedded within television’s communicative practices. Thorburn argues that the inflexible narrative structures of commercial television have fostered a form of melodrama specific to it, one that ‘offer[s] an especially persuasive

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resolution of the contradiction or tension that has been inherent in melodrama since the time of Euripides’ (2000: 606). For Joyrich, television parallels melodrama because its customary focus on ‘familial space’ obliges it to conform to melodramatic conventions ‘including a reliance on background music, the close-up, confined interior, and intimate gesture rather than action’ (1992: 234). In these analyses, television is not just the natural inheritor of the melodramatic mantle from cinema, but a medium that is, at core, melodramatic. Many of Thorburn’s and Joyrich’s contentions about television’s specificity as a medium appear to be outdated in the face of technological, industrial, aesthetic and narrative changes to television over the past three decades. However, even genres which epitomise these changes most— such as popular factual or ‘quality’ television drama—still manifest features traditionally associated with melodrama. Serial dramas like Twin Peaks, The Sopranos and The Wire have been explored in relation to melodramatic storytelling and affect, with critics keen to emphasise the debt owed by these series to soap opera as well as more culturally legitimated influences like the novel (Newman and Levine 2011; Williams 2014; Szalay 2019). Williams re-draws the boundaries of television melodrama, advocating for it as capable of being ‘good, rich, complex, socially relevant, and politically efficacious’ (2014: 90), features which are often assumed to be beyond the scope of melodrama and on which realist registers are assumed to have a monopoly. Examining the presence of emotive imperatives and moral legibility in texts which, at surface, appear to eschew them is an important feature of contemporary television drama analysis (Gorton 2019). The serial drama’s presentation of moral universes, however compromised by the complex, flawed characters which populate them, is a feature shared with melodrama. As Brooks notes, the melodrama is characterised by ‘the location, expression and imposition of basic ethical and psychic truths’ (1976: 11). He argues that in a ‘post-sacred’ twentieth-century society, this performed the important social function of articulating the ‘moral occult’, a repository for the ‘remains of sacred myth’ that had previously influence moral attitudes in sacral societies. Melodrama’s ethical clarity makes its stories comprehensible within secular moral frameworks. Lipkin argues that this is shared with docudramas, that Suggest [] that lost moral structures can be recovered and restored. While the actuality the work re-creates may show the exercise of right and wrong thrown into jeopardy, the treatment of actual people, incidents and events in

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the docudrama ultimately allows a literal moral “refamiliarization”, a restoration of a moral system in the universe. (2002: 5)

Such moral clarity sits uneasily with the shades of grey encountered in any real-life ethical circumstances, potentially reducing the plausibility of melodramatic representations. However, to represent lives using these frameworks can make their social meanings more apparent, and their potential impacts greater. In biographical dramas, this moral system tends to be situated within the subject, with their actions circumscribed by their own moral vision. This is in line with the melodrama’s presentation of the ‘personality as the source of overriding imperatives’ (Gledhill 1987: 31). Whether or not melodrama is deemed excessive, it is certainly expressive. The original definition of the term combines the Greek for music (melos) with theatre and indicated drama whose tonal and emotive register was heightened through musical scoring. Elsaesser returns to original description when noting that ‘it allows melodramatic elements to be seen as constituents of a system of punctuation, giving expressive colour and contrast to the storyline, by orchestrating the emotional ups and downs of the intrigue’ (1991: 74). In this formulation, melodrama’s problems are ones of ‘style and articulation’. Critical accounts of melodrama have paid careful attention to performance style, cinematography and, especially, mise-en-scène often reading excessive style as expressing psychic or ideological realities repressed in the narrative. The excesses of melodrama might have been cause for critical censure in previous generations, but it is now more likely to be read as an anti-repressive gesture, one that ‘attempts to articulate those things that it is almost impossible to represent’ (Mercer and Shingler 2004: 97). In its capacity to exteriorise the interior, melodrama is a mode fit for the dramatisation of the individual psychology appropriate to biographical representation. Melodrama can therefore share this use of visual style as a core locus of meaning and pleasure with a genre which is characterised by its prioritisation of mise-en-scène, the period drama.

2.6   Period Drama Biographical dramas are always set in the past, even when the events they portray are recent. Films and television dramas set in the past involve an idiosyncratic issue of definition: multiple and overlapping expressions that refer to the same kind of texts. They are variously called period drama,

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costume drama, historical film, classic serial or heritage drama. Each of these generic descriptors has subtly different connotations, and scholars have constructed precise nomenclature and detailed taxonomies in their analyses of such texts (Monk 2002; Harper 2004). ‘Period drama’ simply suggests that the actions depicted in the text are temporally dislocated from the time of its making. Like ‘costume drama’, it can be identified in the centrality of sumptuous or ‘authentic’ mise-en-scène and costuming to its pleasures. Narratives can be but are not necessarily drawn from pre-­ existing materials like novels, plays or historical fact. By contrast, the ‘classic’ serial is specific to broadcast media and usually refers to a multi-episode adaptation of canonised literature but is sometimes applied to biographical dramas such as Edward and Mrs Simpson (ITV, 1978) or Portrait of a Marriage (BBC Two, 1990) (Giddings and Selby 2001; Butt 2014). ‘Historical film’ suggests the dramatisation of actual events, even if the characters therein are fictional or composite versions of real historical actors (Landy 2001; Rosenstone 2006; Burgoyne 2008). The most contentious of these, certainly in the British context, is the ‘heritage film’, a genre with complex relations to representation and broader cultural politics (Higson 1996, 2003, 2011; Monk 2002, 2011; Voigts-Virchow 2004; Vidal 2012). James Leggott and Julie Taddeo (2015) assert that the costume drama in the UK context necessarily must be read in the light of the ‘heritage film’ debates that emerged in British film studies during the late twentieth century. The heritage film is an artificial genre, constructed by scholars to describe a series of high-profile British costume dramas in the 1980s which were perceived as nostalgic recreations of the national past, like Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson, 1981), A Passage to India (David Lean, 1984) and the E.M. Forster adaptations made by Ismail Merchant and James Ivory. Heritage film is a misnomer, because the debates usually incorporated television series like Brideshead Revisited (Granada, 1981) and The Jewel in the Crown (Granada, 1984). These texts were viewed as serving broadly propagandistic purposes, reminding audiences of the nation’s glory days which had supposedly been lost to twentieth-century progressive politics, particularly the growth of social democracy and multiculturalism. Critiques also note the tendency to draw on aristocratic iconographies, suggesting a conservative, elitist view of the national past. The ‘heritage’ title derives from the incorporation of audiovisual representations of the past into a broader cultural policy in the 1980s and 1990s which sought to commoditise British history within the leisure, tourism and cultural industries.

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In the film and television industries, this amounted to ‘the projection of a nostalgic, upper-class version of Englishness [which] solidified into a national myth that found unparalleled success in the international image markets’ (Vidal 2012: 14). The term ‘heritage’ film, then, refers as much to the putative ideological functioning of these texts in a conservative political and cultural climate, as it does to their shared aesthetic or narrative characteristics. The debate on the heritage film shifted in the late 1990s and 2000s from a politicised and largely negative critique, to one with greater accommodation for both the pleasures it offers to audiences (Monk 2011) and its ability to reconstruct the past in critical or, at least, ambiguous ways (Vidal 2012). The underlying assumption of the ideological criticism of the heritage film, then, is that films set in the past play some role in public conceptions of history and its relation to the present. Marcia Landy (2001) points out that the process of historicising is central to the construction of national, ethnic and gendered identities: national boundaries (geographical and cultural), the nature of the ‘citizen-subject’, the forms of education, and conceptions of rights and duties are all dependent on constructed versions of the past. Interpretations of history thus play a powerful role in determining how individuals and groups inherit and understand their social and cultural milieu. Landy’s observation refers not to the heritage film specifically, but to history on film more generally. However, critics have drawn a distinction between the period film and the ‘historical film’: ‘to be considered “historical” rather than simply a costume drama that uses the past as an exotic setting for romance and adventure, a film must engage, directly or obliquely, the issues, ideas, data, and arguments of the ongoing discourse of history’ (Rosenstone 2007: 26). More than a hint of the masculine/fact/head and feminine/story/heart dichotomy familiar from debates on docudrama can be perceived here, where historical film is proposed as a rational, empiricist genre by comparison to the seemingly fluffier offerings of period drama. Like in the study of biography, one of the core debates on the historical film is the relation between fact and narrative, and the licence of the filmmaker to invent as part of historical storytelling. Peter C. Rollins (2007) frames this discussion as the distinction between ‘artistic’ and ‘historical’ truth, suggesting that historians tend to dismiss filmic versions of history for their manipulation of facts. He goes on to propose that the source of much of this suspicion derives from discomfort with visual language, and a difficulty with reading what Hayden White has called ‘historiophoty’ (in

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Rosenstone 2001). Rosenstone suggests that, for historians, film is a ‘disturbing symbol of an increasingly postliterate age (in which people can read but won’t)’ (2001: 50), seen as fundamentally incompatible with the traditions of history which rely on evidential support and careful interpretation. He points out a logical inconsistency in this view, which is that the written history is assumed to hold a transparent relation to reality, and its processes of selection and interpretation are not viewed as merely one way of ‘using the traces of the past to make that past meaningful in the present’ (52). Historians tend to criticise the use of generic convention, narrative structure, especially false closure, the personalisation of history and the fetishisation of period aesthetics which are features of history on film. Rosenstone concludes that film can be a valuable way of dealing with the past in a postliterate age, but that, to be taken seriously by historians, films must respect the ‘overall data and meanings of what we already know of the past’, so that changes or inventions must be ‘apposite to the truths of that discourse’ and emerge from ‘accumulated knowledge of the … historical texts into which the film enters’ (2001: 66). In other words, filmmakers must accede to historians the right to shape public discourses about the past. Much as historians have been critical of filmic representations of the past, televisual history has been the source of displeasure, with the medium accused of ‘dumbing down’ and simplifying historical discourse (Bell and Gray 2010). Gary R.  Edgerton begins his collection Television Histories (2001) with the supposition that television is now the primary central source of historical knowledge for most people. Television has been held accountable for creating an ‘epidemic of cultural amnesia’ that amounted to de-historicising and constructing a perpetual present (Anderson 2001: 19). Steve Anderson counters this argument by applying the concept of ‘popular memory’, the process of constructing unauthorised communal histories, to account for television’s reconstructions of history across multiple genres and formats. He argues that televisual historiography is significant, like popular memory, because of its ‘flexibility and intangibility by comparison with “official histories”’ (2001: 22). Television’s handling of history can endow its viewers with the useful ability to ‘remember their own past with creativity and meaning’, forcing them to adopt a critical, discriminating stance towards both conventional and more fanciful presentations of history. The popular memory concept also helps to explain how televisual (and cinematic) representations of real lives have the

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propensity to alter public perceptions of biographees and impact  upon their cultural legacy. Television has a dual function in relation to history; it is at once an ever-­ expanding but ideologically dubious source for the historical record, and a medium through which historical ideas can be aired and stories told. This is a broadening out of television’s role as source of biographical material and of biographical narratives. Indeed, biography and history on television are intertwined: history on TV tends to stress the twin dictates of narrative and biography, which ideally expresses television’s inveterate tendency towards personalizing all social, cultural and (for our purposes) historical matters within the highly controlled and viewer-involving confines of a well-constructed plot structure. (Edgerton 2001: 2)

For Edgerton, properties usually agreed to be quintessentially televisual—intimate storytelling and aesthetics with a privatised view of the public sphere—shape the way in which the medium tells its stories. Biographical drama is a form of mediated history, one which draws on and contributes to ‘popular memory’. It shares with historical fictions the specificities of person and place, and, often, the extratextual appeal to the historical record. It is period/costume drama, since many of its pleasures derive from seemingly authentic mise-en-scène, costumes and settings that are temporally separated from the viewer. And, in its choice and representation of figures of national interest within their private spaces and intimate stories, biographical drama shares the heritage film’s ambivalent politics.

2.7   Televisual Brontës For the US broadcast of Sally Wainwright’s television film about the Brontë family, To Walk Invisible (BBC One, 2016), a promotional video called ‘A Unique Biopic’ was featured on the PBS website and Masterpiece Theatre YouTube feed. It featured snippets from the programme and talking head interviews with the cast. Great emphasis is placed on the drama’s realism. For example, Charlie Murphy (Anne Brontë) describes it as a ‘real depiction—warts and all’. The cast highlight that the film avoids, in the words of Finn Atkins (Charlotte Brontë), the ‘fairy tales’ that have developed about the family over the years. An appeal to a greater truth, to the

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reality behind the myth, is a standard method of differentiating any new biography from previous interpretations, since it provides a unique selling point that justifies a visitation of well-trodden ground. These comments serve not just to distinguish this drama from other depictions of the Brontë family, but to distance it generically from the period drama. Wainwright’s insistence that ‘it’s not a chocolate-boxy world’ speaks to a sense that television dramas set in the past are overladen with expectations of inauthenticity, bowdlerisation and outright fantasy. It is difficult to mistake To Walk Invisible for a chocolate box, with its earthy colour palette of greys and browns, serious, intense characters with coarse manners, and gritty, expletive-­laden dialogue. Wainwright describes the difficulty of getting the voices of these historical characters right, writing ‘I desperately wanted to get away from making it sound like just another period piece’ (Wainwright 2016). The promotional paratexts for To Walk Invisible expended effort in ensuring it was not seen as period drama, but as a magical realist text. The subject matter for the television film may explain some of this desire to proclaim its realist credentials prior to broadcast. The Brontë family have been the subject of debate, interpretation and mythification over the course of two centuries (Miller 2001). This is partly because the literary works have been repeatedly dissected, pored over and canonised. The family’s identities over the years have eroded into caricature: Patrick, an aloof intellectual; Branwell, a Byronic addict; Charlotte, a determined pragmatist; Emily, a passionate introvert; and Anne, mousy and overshadowed by her talented sisters. In the four-year period between 1845 and 1849, the Brontë sisters wrote and published under pseudonym novels and poetry collections that would become classics of English literature, while Branwell succumbed to alcohol and opium addiction which rendered him unemployable and terminally ill. Emily and Anne both died of tuberculosis shortly after Branwell’s death, to be followed only six years later by Charlotte. This is not to speak of the intriguing events within these short lives: Branwell’s adulterous affair with his employer’s wife, Charlotte’s fixation with Belgian teacher Constantin Héger, or the fact that the women managed initially to conceal their publishing efforts and commercial success from their father. With so many remarkable achievements within this family, it is surprising neither that numerous myths about them have sprung up over the years, nor that a viewer may come to a dramatisation of the story of their lives with expectations of sensationalism or romance. Indeed, Haiduc’s (2020) exploration of melodrama and

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the biopic also focuses on a case study of film adaptations of the Brontë family’s life. To Walk Invisible shares its ambition of an authentic portrayal of the family with The Brontës of Haworth (Yorkshire Television, 1973), though their very different approaches to realism evince the many changes in television drama production and presentation in the 43 years that separate their production. The Brontës was one of many costume dramas broadcast in the UK in the 1970s, a time Claire Monk (2015) describes as ‘forgotten’ in discussions about television period drama. She suggests there has been a critical distaste for the style of these series, made predominantly using videotape technology in television studios that could give them a sterile, quasi-theatrical aesthetic. The Brontës exploits studio production style tonally and thematically. Studio sets are used to produce a sense of claustrophobia and introversion which mirrors the theme of the domestic dichotomy: home as both restrictive and fostering the conditions for the Brontës’ genius. Tom Bragg suggests that in 1970s, period television dramas, studio sets, were ‘boxy and artificial’, aesthetically equivalent to a ‘stage space’ but ‘explored by the narrating camera in a manner quite unavailable to conventional theatre’ (2015: 24). The Brontës bears this out, particularly in the expressive use of the camera to convey interiority or personal anguish. The camera frequently reframes to close-up (through zoom or tracking shot) in moments of extreme duress, a gesture which underscores the exteriorisation of emotion that is displayed in the performance. For example, in Episode One, as Emily (Rosemary McHale) snarls at Charlotte (Vickery Turner) that she wishes to be left in peace to be herself, the camera zooms into a close-up, which focuses on her expression of torment, her furrowed brow and widened eyes. This provides a clear visual index to reinforce the dialogue, which is used here to set out Emily’s character as intense but reclusive. Visual grammar, dialogue and performance work together in the melodramatic mode to express the inner life of this biographee. Faye Woods (2019) argues that, like other dramas in the Wainwright canon, To Walk Invisible can be understood as familial melodrama which dramatises ‘moral quandary’ and ‘emotional fracture’. She reads landscape as the emotive centre of the programme, suggested to be the locus of the Brontë sisters’ creative sensibilities and source of spiritual nourishment. Indeed, as Haiduc (2020: 35) notes, the use of the landscape in this manner had been established as a trope in earlier cinematic versions of the Brontë story. The most spectacular moments in the drama take place

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during walks on the moorland, often used as backdrop to intense conversations between the sisters. As Woods notes, the swirling camerawork in these sequences is in sympathy with the passion of the poetry delivered in voiceover on the soundtrack, a tribute to the affective power of nature. Much less of the action in The Brontës of Haworth takes place in exterior settings, with minimal location shot footage incorporated between studio-­ produced scenes. This is in keeping, as Bragg (2015) notes, with typical production practices for period drama in the 1970s. However, in its brief sequences set on the moors, it finds a useful substitute for illustrating the strained relationship between domesticity and passion for nature in the injured merlin-hawk that Emily takes in as a pet and names Nero. The hawk, like Emily, is a wild spirit that submits to domesticity. A genuine fact about Emily Brontë—that she kept a hawk as a pet—is deployed as a metonym for her character and subsumed into a key theme in the drama. Paralleling domestication with repression and masochism is a regular feature of texts made in the melodramatic mode. In both dramas, the freedom of the landscape operates in tension with the restrictions of home. There are contradictory impulses at play here: the sisters’ desire for protection from the home and to escape its confines. The Brontës of Haworth finds visual expression for this tension in the frequently recurring motif of the sisters musing (aloud or in interior monologue voiceover) while gazing out windows, a trope also found in Les souers Brontë (André Téchiné, 1979), as analysed by Haiduc (2020: 35). Home is not presented as a space of privacy and comfort, but as one where the inhabitants are under constant threat of intrusion and interruption. Both programmes incorporate a dramatisation of an incident in which Charlotte violated Emily’s privacy by reading her poems without permission. The significance of this intrusion is demonstrated in both dramas through Emily’s outburst of fury at her sister. The lack of privacy, a matter of intense unease for the introverted Emily and Anne, is demonstrated in To Walk Invisible by the number of incidents which take place in the yard, a liminal space between domestic safety and public openness. Branwell (Adam Nagaitis) and Emily spar in the yard as he returns home drunk; in another scene, the sisters intervene to stop Branwell being dragged off by debt-collectors, the public shame of the incident compounding the distress it causes. Both dramas also depict the house ringing with the noise of squabbling, both in the Brontës’ childhood games, or in scenes in which the sisters’ activities are punctuated by Branwell’s self-pitying howls, heard off-camera from an unspecified elsewhere in the house. The parsonage is no cloister, its porous

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walls offer little protection from the distractions of family life. Set design, cinematography and performance combine to render the home space, constructing an affective mise-en-scène typical of both period drama and melodrama. The expressive combination of televisual style and performance is particularly noticeable in the numerous death scenes in The Brontës of Haworth. In episode four, Branwell’s (Michael Kitchen) death scene is composed so that his ailing body occupies the foreground, and his family are lined up behind him. As he dies, the camera slowly tracks to register the faces of each sister close-up, superimposed over an image of the family as a unit watching over their dying brother. The scene is played out without dialogue, except for Patrick’s (Alfred Burke) prayers. In place of the music that conventionally carries emotional meaning in melodrama, editing and cinematography is used here to capture both the individual and collective pain the family experiences. Pathos is wrung from the scene by this doubling of the image. Emily’s death is painstakingly depicted. The extended time available to the series format (see Chap. 4) permits a sequence of five slowly paced scenes—covering over ten minutes of screen time—that portray her succumbing to tuberculosis. McHale performs Emily’s suffering through bodily gesture: slow, deliberate movements, including the audible struggle for each breath, indicate her physical agony. This is supported by make-up and hair design that render her face pale, her eyes sunken and her hair unkempt. In the scene that depicts her death, Emily lies prostrate on a wooden sofa, the wheezing of her breaths dominating the soundtrack, mingling with the rattling of the wind through the home. As she dies, the camera tilts down and zooms to capture Emily’s hand becoming limp and dropping to the ground a stem of heather Charlotte has brought her from the moor. This is an apt visual metaphor: a wildflower brought into a domestic space, rendered pathetically lifeless. The drama’s death scenes thus utilise range of stylistic techniques, performance, make-up, sound design, cinematography and editing to express the characters’ anguish. Their combination produces the narrative redundancy but emotive legibility characteristic of melodrama, what Agustin Zarzosa (2012) calls the mode’s primary focus on the ‘visibility of suffering’. Wainwright (2016) wrote that, while the tragic aspect of the Brontës is appealing dramatically, she did not want them to be defined by their deaths in her television film. For this reason, Branwell’s is the only death dramatised in To Walk Invisible, and it is done obliquely. The final scene begins

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by returning to a conceit from the beginning of the drama (and that periodically recurs throughout): a fantasy image of the siblings as children, seated imperiously round a long wooden table, crowned with floating, flaming haloes. In the conclusion’s rhyming scene, Branwell’s halo has disappeared, and Charlotte tells him ‘you can go now’. As he slowly leaves, the twinkling leitmotif that underscores these fantastical childhood sequences reaches a climax, and the sound of the door slamming shut after him brings with it an abrupt silence, an aural rather than visual signifier of Branwell’s death. The sound effect heralds a cut to an overhead shot of Branwell’s pallid face. Emily and Anne arrive to prepare his corpse, their servant Tabby (June Watson) matter-of-factly telling them that they will have to sit him up to remove his shirt. This final sequence synopsises the key themes of the drama: the jarring relationship between fantasy and reality, Branwell’s growing distance from the rest of his family and the sisters who must take responsibility for him, cleaning up after him even in death. Branwell’s death highlights a tension found throughout To Walk Invisible between reality and romance, between authenticity and fantasy, between biography and melodrama. At the conclusion of The Brontës of Haworth, Patrick, the only surviving member of the family, and Nicholls (Benjamin Whitrow), Charlotte’s widower, discuss Elizabeth Gaskell’s (Barbara Leigh-Hunt) planned biography of his wife. Nicholls wants to censor the work, believing the story too personal and sacred to be made public. Patrick counters that they cannot keep his daughter to themselves, enabling the invasion into the family’s privacy that has allowed them to become figures of perpetual biographising. He then retreats to the fireplace, and, in the only moment of direct address in the drama, speaks intimately to the camera, and, it is implied, to the viewer. His final speech concerns his own personality, conjecturing that if he had not been an eccentric, he should not have had such extraordinary children. The series thus concludes with a direct biographical assessment of the Brontë family. To Walk Invisible’s final moments are equally concerned with biographical legacy. The drama’s final image is a long shot of the empty interior of the parsonage, haunted by the echoing shouts of the Brontë children playfighting on the soundtrack. A dissolve moves us through time to the present-day Brontë museum which now occupies the building. Titles which give details of Emily and Anne’s death are superimposed over images from a handheld camera providing the point of view of a young visitor to the museum. It roves round the space, capturing its buzz of excitement among the people who scrutinise its

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attractions. The intention here is clearly not to dwell on the dour note of the deaths, but to demonstrate the endurance of the Brontë family and their works. The Haworth parsonage in its present-day setting represents the machinery of the heritage industry and ‘the forms of retro-tourism [that] reinforce the links between the past as an object belonging to visual consumer culture’ (Vidal 2012: 15). To Walk Invisible, as a revision of the lives of the Brontës that reintroduces them to wide public notice, takes its place self-reflexively as part of a mythologisation of the Brontës that it also seeks to critique. These dramas about the Brontë family demonstrate generic features of the period drama, particularly in the use of mise-en-scène, costume, make­up and hairstyling to authenticate their version of the biographical characters. For The Brontës of Haworth, the priority is to capture the spirit of their literature, and to display wigs, costumes and patterns of performance, particularly of speech, appropriate to the period according to the contemporary conventions of the period drama. Bragg (2015) notes that in 1970s period drama, ‘authentic décor’, such as period costuming, antique furniture and props, is evocative of a historical period thanks to metonymic and referential qualities, rather than strict verisimilitude. I have shown how metonym and metaphor work in the drama to evoke these biographees, utilising the technologies and aesthetic customs of period drama at that time. To Walk Invisible defiantly rejects many genre conventions of period film and television, adopting a naturalistic cinematography and visceral performance style, highlighting the Brontës as ‘real people’ as Finn Atkins puts it. As might be expected of dramas made in different historical, industrial and institutional contexts, the approaches taken by The Brontës of Haworth and To Walk Invisible to this literary family are quite distinct. However, they share the use of melodramatic techniques, and a thematic concern with creativity and constraint, nature and home to reproduce the lives of these biographees.

2.8   Conclusion This chapter has considered the question of genre and explored familial relationships between the televisual biographical drama and the forms with which it overlaps. Each of the genres explored—the biopic, the docudrama, the melodrama and the period drama—is constitutionally hybrid. They all in different ways entail combinations and convergences between fact and fiction, expressionism and realism and private and public history.

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Just as biography entails a combination of the skills of historian and novelist, biographical drama combines drama’s orientation towards emotion and affect with the respect for verifiable truths associated with more ‘sober’ forms like documentary or history. Each of these generic forms draws on the complex dynamic between public and private spheres. In biopics and docudramas, this manifests as a focus on the personal story behind public figures, events or achievements as in biopics and docudramas. In melodrama and period drama, style is used to express the private, ineffable or repressed aspects of human lives, making visible the invisible. Biographical dramas discussed in this book are frequently described using the generic classifications discussed in this chapter. The generic descriptors biopic, docudrama and period/historical drama are more often used than ‘biographical drama’ to describe television dramatisations of the life or portion of a life of a famous individual. However, by themselves, none of the generic descriptors discussed in this chapter seem to capture the distinctive features of biography as it appears in fiction television: the emphasis on interiority and selfhood, generally constructed using televisual aesthetics of intimacy; the exploration of the dynamics between public and private life, borrowing from the medium’s placement between these spheres of experience; the delicate balancing act between fact and fiction involved in the process of re-interpreting lives for the medium; and the processes of evaluation, re-interpretation or reclamation that occur when biographies are presented through the scrutinising gaze of the television camera. The next chapter will explore how these features are evoked and invoked via television’s representational regime.

References Anderson, S. (2001) ‘History TV and Popular Memory’ in Edgerton, G. and Rollins, P.C. (eds) Television Histories. Lexington, KY: University Press Kentucky, pp. 19–36. Andrews, H. (2018) ‘Real people’s lives rarely fall into a three-act structure’: Writing biographical drama for British television’ Journal of Screenwriting 9(1): 41–56. Bell, E. and Gray, A. (eds) (2010) Televising History: Mediating the Past in Postwar Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Bignell, J. (2000) ‘Docudrama as Melodrama: Representing Princess Diana and Margaret Thatcher’ in Carson, B. and Llewellyn-Jones, M. (eds) Frames and

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Fictions on Television: The politics of identity within drama. Exeter: Intellect, pp. 17–26. Bignell, J. (2010) ‘Docudramatizing the Real: Developments in British TV docudrama since 1990’ Studies in Documentary Film 4(3): 195–208. Bingham, D. (2011) Whose lives are they anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press. Bragg, T. (2015) ‘History’s Drama: Narrative Space in “Golden Age” British Television Drama’ in Leggott, J. and Taddeo, J. (eds) Upstairs and downstairs: British costume drama television from The Forsyte saga to Downton Abbey. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 45–57. Brooks, P. (1976) The Melodramatic Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Brown, T. (2014) ‘Consensual pleasures: Amazing Grace, oratory, and the middlebrow biopic’ in Brown, T. and Vidal, B (eds) The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 118–139. Buonanno, M. (2016) ‘Italian Docudrama: From the Experimental Moment to Biography as Text of Identity’ in Ebbrecht, T. and Paget, D. (eds) Docudrama on European Television: A Selective Survey. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 79–108. Burgoyne, R. (2008) The Hollywood Historical Film. Oxford: Blackwell. Butt, R. (2014) ‘Melodrama and the Classic Television Serial’ in Stewart, M. (ed) Melodrama in contemporary film and television. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 27–41. Cheshire, E. (2015) Bio-Pics: A Life in Pictures. New York: Wallflower Press. Corner, J. (1999) ‘British TV Dramadocumentary: Origins and Developments’ in Rosenthal, A. (ed) Why Docudrama? Fact-Fiction on Film and TV. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, pp. 35–46. Custen, G.F. (1992) Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Ebbrecht, T. (2010) ‘(Re)constructing Biographies: German Television Docudrama and the Historical Biography’ in Bell, E. and Gray, A. (eds) Televising History: Mediating the Past in Postwar Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 207–220. Ebbrecht, T. (2016) ‘German Docudrama: Aligning the Fragments and Accessing the Past’ in Ebbrecht, T. and Paget, D. (eds) Docudrama on European Television: A Selective Survey. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 53–78. Edgerton, G.R. (2001) ‘Television as Historian: A Different Kind of History Altogether’ in Edgerton, G. and Rollins, P.C. (eds) Television Histories. Lexington, KY: University Press Kentucky, pp. 1–18. Elsaesser, T. (1991) ‘Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the family melodrama’, in Landy, M. (ed) Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, pp. 68–91.

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Epstein, W.H. (2016) ‘Introduction: Strategic Patriotic Memories’, in Epstein, W.H. and Palmer, R.B. (eds) Invented Lives, Imagined Communities: The Biopic and American National Identity. Albany, NY: State University of New  York Press, pp. 1–21. Fournier, G (2016) ‘French Docudrama: ‘Patrimony Television’ and ‘Embedded Biopic” in Ebbrecht, T. and Paget, D. (eds) Docudrama on European Television: A Selective Survey. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 109–134. Freeman, T.  S. and Smith, D.  L. (eds) (2019) Biography and History in Film. Cham: Palgrave. Giddings, R. and Selby, K. (2001) The Classic Serial on Television and Radio. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Gledhill, C. (1987) ‘The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation’ in Gledhill, C. (ed) Home is Where the Heart is: Studies in Melodrama and the ‘Woman’s Film’. London: BFI, pp. 5–42. Gorton, K. (2019) ‘Enlightened melodrama: excess, care and resistance in contemporary television’, Screen, 60(4): 606–623. Harper, S. (2004) ‘The Taxonomy of a genre: Historical, Costume and “Heritage” film’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 1(1): 137–142. Haiduc, S. A. (2020) ‘Biopics and the Melodramatic Mode’ in Cartmell, D. and Polasek, A.D. (eds) A Companion to the Biopic. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 23–44. Higson, A. (1996) ‘The Heritage Film and British Cinema’ in Higson, A. (ed) Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema. London: Cassell, pp. 232–248. Higson, A. (2003) English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama since 1980. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Higson, A. (2011) Film England: Culturally English Filmmaking since the 1990s. London: I.B. Tauris. Hodges, A. (2012) Alan Turing: The Enigma (Second Edition). London: Vintage. Holroyd, M. (2002) Works on Paper: The Craft of Biography and Autobiography. London: Abacus. Joyrich, L. (1992) ‘All that Television Allows: TV Melodrama, Postmodernism and Consumer Culture’ in Spigel, L. and Mann, D. (eds) Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 227–252. Katz, E.J. (2015) ‘Imitation Game’ Writer Slams ‘Fact-Checking’ Films As Misunderstanding Of Art’ Huffington Post 8 January 2015, https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entr y/imitation-­g ame-­f act-­c hecking_n_6436712? ri18n=true accessed 1 October 2019. Landy, M. (1996) Cinematic Uses of the Past. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

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Landy, M. (ed) (2001) The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Leggott, J. and Taddeo, J. (eds) (2015) Upstairs and downstairs: British costume drama television from The Forsyte saga to Downton Abbey. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Lipkin, S.N. (2002) Real Emotional Logic: Film and Television Docudrama as Persuasive Practice. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. Lipkin, S.N. (2011) Docudrama Performs the Past: Arenas of Argument in Films based on True Stories. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. Mercer, J. and Shingler, M. (2004) Melodrama: genre, style, sensibility. London: Wallflower. Miller, L. (2001) The Brontë Myth. London: Vintage. Minier, M. (2014) ‘Joining history to celebiography and heritage to documentary on the small screen: spotlight on the content of the form in the metamediatic royal bio-docudrama The Queen’ in Pennacchia, M. and Minier, M. (eds) Adaptation, Intermediality and the British Celebrity Biopic. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 79–100. Monk, C. (2002) ‘The British Heritage Film Debate Revisited’ in Monk, C. and Sargaent, A. (eds) British Historical Cinema. London: Routledge, pp. 176–198. Monk, C. (2011) Heritage Film Audiences: period films and contemporary audiences in the UK. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Monk, C. (2015) ‘Pageantry and populism, Democratization and Dissent: The Forgotten 1970s’ in Leggott, J. and Taddeo, J. (eds) Upstairs and downstairs: British costume drama television from The Forsyte saga to Downton Abbey. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 27–44. Neale, S. (1986) ‘Melodrama and Tears’ Screen 27(6): 6–23. Newman, M. Z. and Levine, E. (2011) Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status. London: Routledge. Nichols, B. (2017) Introduction to Documentary Third Edition. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Paget, D. (2011) No Other Way to Tell It: Docudrama on Film and Television (Second Edition). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Paget, D. (2016) ‘A New Europe, the Post-Documentary Turn and Docudrama’ in Ebbrecht, T. and Paget, D. (eds) Docudrama on European Television: A Selective Survey. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 1–26. Pastor-González, V. (2016) ‘Spanish Docudrama: Of Heroes and Celebrities’ in Ebbrecht, T. and Paget, D. (eds) Docudrama on European Television: A Selective Survey. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 135–166. Rollins, P. (2007), ‘Introduction: Film and History: Our Media Environment as a New Frontier’ in Francaviglia, R. Rodnitzky, J. and Rollins, P.C. (eds) Lights,

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Camera, History: Portraying the Past in Film. Arlington: Texas A&M University Press, pp. 1–10. Rosenstone, R. (2001) ‘The Historical Film: Looking at the Past in a Postliterate Age’ in Landy, M. (ed) The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, pp. 50–66. Rosenstone, R. (2006) History on Film, Film on History. London: Pearson. Rosenstone, R (2007) ‘In Praise of the Biopic’ in Francaviglia, R.  Rodnitzky, J. and Rollins, P.C. (eds) Lights, Camera, History: Portraying the Past in Film. Arlington: Texas A&M University Press, pp. 11–30. Singer, B. (2001) Melodrama and modernity: early sensational cinema and its contexts. New York: Columbia University Press. Szalay, M. (2019) ‘Melodrama and Narrative Stagnation in Quality TV’ Theory and Event 22(2): 465–488. Thorburn, D. (2000) ‘Television Melodrama’ in Newcomb, H. (ed) Television: The Critical View (Sixth Edition). New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 595–608. Vidal, B. (2012) Heritage Film: Nation, Genre and Representation. London: Wallflower. Vidal, B. (2014a) ‘Introduction: The biopic and its critical contexts’ in Brown, T. and Vidal, B (eds) The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 1–32. Vidal, B. (2014b) ‘Morgan/Sheen: The compressed frame of impersonation’ in Brown, T. and Vidal, B (eds) The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 140–158. Voigts-Virchow, E. (ed) (2004) Janespotting and Beyond: British Heritage Retrovisions Since the Mid-1990s. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag. Wainwright, S. (2016) ‘I didn’t want To Walk Invisible to be just another period drama’ Radio Times Online December 2016 https://www.radiotimes.com/ news/2016-­12-­29/sally-­wainwright-­i-­didnt-­want-­to-­walk-­invisible-­to-­be-­ just-­another-­period-­drama/ Accessed 27 September 2019. Williams, L. (1998) ‘Melodrama Revised’ in Browne, N. (Ed) Refiguring American Film Genres. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 42–88. Williams, L. (2014) On The Wire. Durham: Duke University Press. Woods, F. (2019) Wainwright’s West Yorkshire: affect and landscape in the television drama of Sally Wainwright. Journal of British Cinema and Television, 16(3): 346–366. Zarzosa, A. (2012) Refiguring Melodrama in Film and Television: Captive affects, elastic sufferings, vicarious objects. Lanham: Lexington Books.

CHAPTER 3

Representations

3.1   Introduction In Chap. 1, I discuss the common trend in biography studies to compare the work of biographers with that of portraitists. The metaphor of biography as portrait is usually employed to contrast with the biographical chronicle which recounts events, but declines to interpret the personality or evaluate the meaning of the life. Conceptualising biography as portrait requires a recognition that it is a representation of a real life. Hermione Lee observes that The image of the portrait…suggests what can go wrong with biography— flattery, idealization, flatness, inaccuracy, distortion. It makes us think, too, about the viewer’s dependency on the artist’s approach and technique. Another portrait might have given us a completely different idea of the subject. The possibilities for the representation of a self are infinitely various. (2009: 3–4)

As Lee suggests, understanding biography as representation prompts a consideration of the tools—the ‘approach and technique’ used to construct its interpretation of the biographee. Liz Stanley argues that it is important to treat biography as representation, ‘because these are shared ideas, conventions, about a cultural form: not descriptions of actual lives but interpretations within the convention’ (1992: 62). Attention has been paid in biography scholarship to the practice of biographical © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Andrews, Biographical Television Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64678-3_3

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representation in written forms, from the construction of biographee as character to the use of tropes, metaphor, metonymy and other fiction devices to convey the meaning of the life (Nadel 1984; Epstein 1987; de Haan 2017). The aim of this chapter is to analyse how televisual techniques are employed in the representation of real lives. This chapter will explore three prominent representational tactics of the biographical television drama. I begin by addressing aspects of style in biographical drama. The construction of mise-en-scène (particularly set design, costuming and hair/make-up) to establish apparent verisimilitude will be examined. Mise-en-scène for the biographical drama shares with period drama an overt signalling of space and time through period detail and, often, paratextual materials which incorporate discourses of accuracy into their promotional rhetoric. As established in Chap.  2, biographical drama can also share with the melodrama the expressive mobilisation of mise-en-scène for the revelation of intimate truths about character. Working in this context, actors in biographical dramas make a series of performance decisions, from imitation to inhabitation of a character, from vocal mimicry to adapting their own voice, from ostensive presentation to emphasis on interiority. While many actors dislike the term ‘impersonation’, it is apt to describe their work to embody a person who exists/ed in the historical world. Both verisimilar mise-en-scène and the performance-as-­ impersonation are attempts to authenticate the version of the biographee presented by the drama, with accuracy as a guarantor of truth. Another way in which biographical dramas have handled the awkward question of truthfulness is to self-consciously acknowledge their own fabrications. Self-reflexive biographical dramas critique the process of biographising, call into question the sources and validity of biographical knowledge or use televisual style to encourage a sceptical spectatorial pose. Such dramas will be explored as offering an alternative vision of ‘truth’ in the biographical drama, one which exposes the epistemological fragility of the famous self as subject matter for drama.

3.2   From One Angle: Décor, Costume and Styling After the broadcast of Elizabeth David: A Life in Recipes (BBC Two) in 2006, its writer Amanda Coe (2017) discussed the drama with the nephew of its subject. He asked her why it was that from one angle, the set looked precisely like his aunt’s kitchen, down to the finest detail, but from another it seemed a totally alien space. She answered that she presumed that this

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was because the set designer had worked from a limited amount of still photographs of David’s kitchen, enabling her to be accurate only from a certain point of view. This anecdote indicates much about how biographical dramas attempt to communicate real-life identities through judicious use of mise-en-scène. The accuracy of the replication of Elizabeth David’s kitchen reinforces the idea that this space communicates to the viewer a sense of the real-life identity of the subject. But the limitations on re-­ creation mean that this view of the person through the spaces they inhabit, items they own or use, or clothes they wear can only ever be partial, from one angle. The example of Elizabeth David’s kitchen also usefully demonstrates a curious feature of the mise-en-scène of the biographical drama. Elizabeth David was made on a restricted budget, yet significant effort was expended on the set design to make it resemble David’s actual home. It is unlikely that many viewers (aside from family members) would have a substantial mental picture of the inside of David’s house. A period-appropriate interior design without obvious anachronisms in décor or props would suffice to construct a convincing setting in which the biographee might have lived. The effort to match archive photographs of David suggests a search for authenticity in the production of this drama. The programme is bookended by two scenes which show an auction in David’s home, in which items from her kitchen—prominent props throughout the drama—are sold off. This implies the spiritual importance of these personal belongings: having been used by David confers upon them a special status, an auratic trace of her personality. This auction creates a public commodity of the private individual, a metaphor for the process of dramatising a life. The auction sequences imply that this kitchen is temporarily a semi-public space, one which is infused by the biographical personality. Attention to detail in mise-en-scène is a means of authenticating the fiction of the biographical drama. There is a paradoxical appeal here to various (and sometimes conflicting) meanings of the term ‘authentic’, as outlined by Theo van Leeuwen (2001). He notes that authenticity can be understood in three ways: to mean that something is ‘genuine’ as in, not an imitation or copy; to mean a faithful reconstruction or representation; or to mean ‘authorized’, bearing a verified signature. In some cases, all three meanings of authenticity converge. For example in Tommy Cooper: Not Like this Like That (ITV, 2014), props used by the comedian in his magic act were found by the production team while filming at Cooper’s home, and were subsequently used by David Threlfall in his performance

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(Dowell 2013). Here, items used by the biographee are integrated into a faithful reconstruction of the entertainer’s act, with the permission to use his home and possessions as a form of authorisation from the biographee’s estate. There is a pleasing irony in the fact that these ‘genuine’ props are objects such as false bottles used for misdirection in Cooper’s magical illusions. Proclamations of the accuracy of mise-en-scène are common in the biopic genre, particularly in its Classical Hollywood variant. George Custen discusses the collaborations between the research department and, for example, set design, to construct a ‘factual mise-en-scène’. He describes the results as ‘historically accurate Christmas decorations’: invented characters perform implausible actions and speak unlikely dialogue within sets that had been constructed in luxuriant detail to affirm historical authenticity (1992: 128). The faithfully recreated mise-en-scène was part of the bid for respectability and edification central to the promotion of these films. Though there may be a commercial or institutional motivation behind such attention to décor, props, costume and setting, it is also possible to see this as the moving image equivalent of the biographer’s efforts in situating their biographee in context. James L. Clifford describes this as ‘setting a relation between foreground and background’, comparing it with a Renaissance painting in which the principal figure is seen in the front, while behind the landscape or city-scape is traced minutely (1978: 46). More than simply a believably ‘authentic’ setting, mise-en-scène expresses underlying truths about story and character (Gibbs 2001). Biographical drama is predicated on the exposure of pre-existing selves, so mise-en-scène takes on a doubly important role in supporting the version of the personality presented in the drama, as well as situating them in space and time. A good example of this is Kenneth Williams’ home in Fantabulosa! (BBC Four, 2006). Although its character-study of Williams (Michael Sheen) is complex, the drama emphasises rigidity as a central facet of his personality. His posture is upright, his manners uptight. He is obsessive to the point of compulsion about cleanliness. He is celibate, not by lack of opportunity but by his sexual inflexibility. He is lonely, sharing a truly intimate relationship only with his mother, whom he both adores and despises. These details of personality are all reflected in the interior of his home. It is simple, sparse and scrupulously neat. It is the home of a single person: there is only enough furniture for one, and the pillows on the bed are arranged into the middle for a single head to sleep on. There is no luxury; it is not a space of comfort or pleasure. The grey and blue

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tones for wallpaper and tiling in the living area make it a cold, uninviting place. In an early domestic scene, Kenneth is pictured sitting stiffly in a chair, sipping tea. The camera is placed at a slightly high angle, and at a medium-long distance, watching through open glass doors (a common trait in docudrama framing, as David Rolinson [2016] notes). This composition renders Kenneth small and lonely in the frame, unable to relax even in his moment of solitude. This supports the characterisation of Williams the programme offers as a tormented man profoundly uncomfortable in his own skin. The use of mise-en-scène as expressive and metaphorical in this way is common in biographical television drama and speaks to its generic debt to the melodrama (see Chap. 2). While mise-en-scène may be expressive in this way, it can also share with melodrama and period drama the pleasure of visual excess. The best examples of this can be found in royal biographical dramas. These usually share a sumptuous mise-en-scène with every part of the represented space covered in ornamentation. The visual splendour of sets in these dramas is often used to promote the drama. The Crown (Netflix, 2016–), for example, was pitched to audiences as the most expensive television drama series ever made, with significant emphasis on the location shoots, set decoration, lavish costumes and use of computer-generated imagery (Lee et al. 2016; Brown 2016; BBC News 2017). It borrows from a long tradition of period dramas featuring the royal family which use the excesses of mise-­ en-­scène as a selling point for the series. The expense of the mise-en-scène here is a cypher for the wealth (or waste) associated with the royal family. Indeed, there was some speculation during the filming of The Crown’s second series that it cost more to produce than is spent on the maintenance of the UK’s royal family (Seales 2017). Much of the expenditure on productions like this is used for vivid, mimetic re-constructions of historical buildings, costumes and props. Just as events of the public record have evidence to support their reality, re-creations of the public spaces and personal style of the royal family are comparable to a real referent. Their verisimilitude is theoretically verifiable, although genuine royal residences are not routinely open to film crews for drama. They are, in Lipkin’s terms, ‘indexically iconic’ (2011: 3), a manifestation of the real, an authentication of the illusion. Dramatising events in re-constructions of real royal houses adds an ironic veneer of authenticity to these texts. These are believable royal residences, because they match cultural expectations of what such spaces would look like, rendered through photography of

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palace interiors, through portraiture or through documentary film and television. This is an extension or elaboration of a more general feature of the biographical drama, the presentation of mise-en-scène as verisimilitude. Pennacchia (2014) suggests that the biopic’s claim to offer a ‘transparent window’ on the life of a famous person is supported through the exhibition of ‘evidence’ which authenticate its view. These are visual and aural materials which capitalise on cinema and television’s ‘media combination’: documents, portraits, photographs, footage, excerpts of aural material, because the screen can host them. Mise-en-scène acts as a central part of the truth claim of the biographical drama: verisimilitude is wielded as evidence of the authenticity of this version of a life. The biographical drama (as a branch of historical representation) fuses two kinds of verisimilitude, the generic and the social/cultural (Neale 2000). The generic promise of the biographical drama is a mise-en-scène that resembles closely the social and cultural milieu that we expect the biographee to have moved in. The construction of an apparently verisimilar mise-en-scène, sometimes accompanied by diegetic or narrative gestures of authentication like Elizabeth David’s auction, is a rhetorical move to validate the portrayal of the biographee. Costuming is a particularly useful way to present this kind of visual ‘evidence’ in an aesthetically satisfying way. It is also an important facet of the televisual pleasure offered by biographical dramas, since the human body is the predominant focus of the camera’s eye, drawing attention to the garments in which it is clothed. It is a common feature of biographical drama in both television and film for at least some of the costumes to be replicas of real outfits worn by the biographee. Costumes are ‘verifiable’, because they can be compared to the originals documented in visual evidence like photography or film. For instance, in The Girl (BBC Two, 2012), a drama about the problematic relationship between Alfred Hitchcock (Toby Jones) and Tippi Hedren (Sienna Miller), an entire scene is devoted to recreating Hedren’s screen test for The Birds (1963). She wears a long, cream, satin gown with a lace covering, and expensive looking jewellery. In Hedren’s original screen test, she places a lot of emphasis on what she is wearing, pointing out its luxury and expense. This dialogue is dispensed with for the re-creation, perhaps because it would draw attention to its status as simulacrum and break the illusion of authenticity. Screen tests are not intended for public consumption, part of the hidden operation of the film industry. They do not show the ‘real’ actor, but

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neither do they portray a fictional character. Instead, they are a hybrid, the tactical performance of a persona for an audience of film personnel. In The Girl, this replicated screen test is offered as a liminal piece of evidence, operating on the edge of public and private, of fact and of fiction. There is a hyperreal quality to its reproduction as evidence, an insistence on the reality of the original which should, at least, be called into doubt. In addition to costume, make-up and hair are essential to the authenticating process. A minimal function of hair and make-up is to make the actor ‘look like’ the person they are performing. This aids with recognition and helps the viewer to maintain the illusion that the person they are watching within the drama is both a character in the drama and a person who they know existed in real life. It is also an effective way to promote a biographical drama, as part of the pleasure of the genre is akin to the pleasure of the dressing up box—seeing the actor changed into a familiar face. The transformation of Sheridan Smith into Cilla Black, largely achieved through a series of red-headed wigs, was a significant part of the publicity material for Cilla (ITV, 2016). Biographees who had a consistent hairstyle are the most effective to re-render with carefully chosen wigs and make­up. Mary Whitehouse, for example, was well known for her neat, greying perm and horn-rimmed spectacles, which are reproduced faithfully for Julie Walters’s performance in Filth (BBC Two, 2008). Prosthetics can sometimes be used for this purpose, as in Toby Jones’ protruding chin for portraying Hitchcock in The Girl. The use of prosthetics or make-up to reproduce biographical characters can have ambivalent effects. For example, in Victoria (ITV, 2016–), there is something very striking about the queen’s eyes. The irises are a brilliant pale blue, the pupils unnaturally dilated and the whites clear and bright. They lend her an expression of permanent intensity. This is underlined in the title sequence, which portrays Victoria in close-up in long takes which dissolve into one another as she transforms from teenage girl to monarch via changes in hairstyle and jewellery, underscored by anthemic choral music. She looks directly to camera, an assured gaze in which her eyes operate as a signifier of her power and poise. They also have a somewhat supernatural sheen to them, as though they belong to a creature of fantasy rather than a real woman. The queen’s eyes are conspicuous because the actor Jenna Coleman has dark brown eyes, whereas Victoria’s eyes, documented in hundreds of portraits, were blue. Coleman therefore wears specially constructed contact lenses to change her eye colour. The attempt to make actor resemble biographical figure more closely has the

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contradictory effect of imbuing her character with an otherworldly quality that makes her appear more decidedly to be a creature of fiction. Jenna Coleman’s eyes provide a neat metaphor for the paradox of biographical representation: the greater the attempt to authenticate the fictions of biographical drama, the more obvious the illusion becomes, and the more fantastical the biographical subject appears. The attempt to change the appearance of the actor to suit that of the historical figure she portrays demonstrates the importance of re-­ construction to the biographical drama. For Lipkin, the truth claims of the docudrama are dependent on the acceptance of ‘indexical icons’, which work through the authenticating gesture of verisimilitude. Where the biographical drama is concerned, this is doubly important and doubly difficult, because the subject matter in question is the fluid, contingent and multifaceted stuff of the self. Efforts to mutate actors’ bodies and faces in closer resemblance to their subject are part of the broader effort in the biographical drama to construct believable mimesis to the biographee. Dennis Bingham argues that the primary appeal of the biopic is seeing an actual person transformed into a character, a process which requires the fusion of private behaviour and public events that are then interpreted dramatically (2011: 10). The representational regime of the biographical drama operates on a finely calibrated line between the public persona, a self-consciously created fiction and the private individual, the apparently real but less easily ascertained self of the biographee. The work of mise-en-­ scène, costuming and make-up is to construct a credible setting and recognisable physicality for the representation of the biographee as a means of supporting the performance of public and private self undertaken by the actor(s).

3.3   Impersonations: Acting Real Lives If acting itself is a ‘notoriously tricky process to analyse’ (Luckhurst 2010: 2), then the modes of performance in biographical drama have additional layers of complexity that make it difficult to interpret. As Mary Luckhurst notes, one of the major problems is the lack of an agreed upon lexicon of terms that mean ‘acting as a real person’. Frequently used terms such as ‘incarnation’, ‘embodiment’ ‘imitation’ and ‘impression’ are used interchangeably, though each is vaguely defined. ‘Impersonation’ is particularly controversial. Jonathan Bignell contends that lead performers in biographical docudramas are required to adopt strategies of impersonation.

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These ‘draw attention to the fact they are not the real people they represent, but at the same time their performances alert audiences to the drama’s factual base’ (2010: 203). Impersonation is unavoidable in the biographical drama, since the actor must pretend to embody the person of someone else rather than incarnating a character’s spirit. However, when Luckhurst and Tom Cantrell interviewed actors who have appeared as real people on stage and screen, some were keen to distance themselves from impersonators, seeing this as a specific performance role, like an impressionist or a celebrity impersonator, which is not the same as acting. The actor Michael Sheen, who has appeared in multiple television biographical dramas, told them ‘impersonation tends to be satirical or involve a sketch. What I do has to involve a whole journey, a whole narrative. I have to find a balance and incorporate enough of the external stuff—voice, mannerisms and physicality—to satisfy an audience’ (q in Luckhurst 2010: 11). It is this implication that impersonation is unsatisfying that Bélen Vidal (2014b) is referring to when she describes it as a ‘devalued’ form of performance. Why is impersonation devalued as a performance mode? One answer may be in its links to entertainment forms like comedy, skit or cabaret which are less culturally legitimated than straight theatre. There is a sense that impersonation is intrinsically superficial, such that actor Siân Phillips describes as ‘surface work’ the mastery of the physicality and voice of her subject, Marlene Dietrich (Luckhurst 2010: 9). There is also the ‘paradoxical effect’ of the impersonation identified by James Naremore, that the more ‘perfect’ or virtuosic the performance is, ‘the more conscious we are of the performer who accomplishes it’ (2012: 35), such that it no longer seems to be the acting of a character, but a close imitation of a model. The biographical dramatic performance thus requires a sensitive balancing act: enough ‘copying’ to remind the viewer who is being represented but avoiding an excess of imitation that would render the performance ‘inauthentic’. It depends on a performance that is both imitative and naturalistic, modes of performance which, according to Naremore, are thought to contradict one another. Not only do performances need to signify naturalism, they must do so within the conventions appropriate to the medium, genre or mode. Derek Paget argues audiences have become ‘acculturated’ through repetition, in television and film dramas, to an acting style that covers a relatively small range of

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­ redominantly naturalistic techniques. ‘Serious’ styles contrast quite markp edly with the more melodramatic styles of the soap and the series, which are more heightened but usually just as naturalistic. (2011: 156–157)

Expectations of performance in a biographical drama are more likely, as with the docudrama that Paget discusses, to be in the ‘serious’ range, even where the dramas are heavily inflected by melodramatic techniques and aesthetics (see Chap. 2). There is some specificity to television acting which is distinct from film and theatre aesthetics. David Thorburn suggests some historical features of the medium that have challenged the actor: The medium’s reduced visual scale grants him a primacy unavailable in the theatre or in the movies, where an amplitude of things and spaces offers competition for the eye’s attention. Its elaborate, enforced obedience to various formulas for plot and characterization virtually require him to recover from within himself and from his broadly stereotyped assignment nuances of gesture, inflection, and movement that will at least hint at individual or idiosyncratic qualities. (Thorburn 2000: 598)

These comments speak to television’s past, and there have been many changes to typical television production and aesthetics since they were originally written in the 1970s. However, aspects of Thorburn’s account still hold true. Television remains a medium where the human body, and particularly the human face, is the central point of interest (Lury 2005), the visual anchor to which the camera inevitably returns. Television representation still relies on ‘nuances of gesture’ to demonstrate the individuality or interiority of its characters. Luckhurst and Cantrell’s interviewees agreed that television (and film) demand ‘greater specificity’ than theatre because ‘of the mediation of the camera and the viewer’s magnified proximity to the actor’s face and body on screen’ (Luckhurst 2010: 7). For biographical drama, this is doubly important, because it is the accuracy or plausibility of these inflections that will enable a viewer to accept the imitation as a credible version of the real referent. These associations of naturalism with a relatively limited gestural range are complicated by the biographical drama, which often portrays real people whose behaviours, activities and personalities are extrovert or exaggerated. The Naked Civil Servant (Thames, 1975) provides a good example here. John Hurt’s performance as the raconteur and queer pioneer Quentin Crisp won plaudits for its accuracy, but to portray Crisp is to

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perform a performer, to act as a person who was a self-consciously fictional creation. The Naked Civil Servant writes this into its address to the audience from the outset. The drama opens with the real Crisp, holding forth while wielding a teacup in what appears to be his own drawing room. This borrows from conventional non-fiction television grammar of the talking head interview, implying that what will follow will be a documentary. However, the visual aesthetic is at odds with the speech that Crisp will deliver, in which he says: When these people came to me and said ‘we should like to make a film of your life’, I said ‘Yes, do. Films are fantasies. Films are magical illusions. You can make my life a fantasy as I have tried but failed to make it.’ But then they said ‘we want the film to be real. You know, real life’. So I said ‘Any film, even the worst, is at least better than real life’. Then they said, ‘though of course, we shall have to have an actor to play you’. I said, ‘I have spent 66 years on this Earth painfully attempting to play the part of Quentin Crisp. I have not succeeded. Yes of course you must have an actor to play me. He will do it far better than I have done.

This speech sets up conflicting expectations for Hurt’s performance in the role. He will be acting as Quentin Crisp, simultaneously performing a real person and a fantasy. Hurt’s approach is to emphasise ostensive, virtuosic and extravagant movement and speech, in mimicry of Crisp’s demeanour. This is in keeping with the register of fantasy that has been set out from the start, but also makes sense of Quentin’s tendency to deliver even the most poignant emotive pronouncements as matter-of-fact statements, such as his curt assessment that he regards ‘all heterosexuals however low as infinitely superior to any homosexual, however noble’. Quentin’s eccentricities are strategies to distance himself from emotional connections and ugly realities. Quentin is a curious mixture of truth and fantasy, and Hurt’s portrayal is overstated, theatrical and therefore, paradoxically, accurate. A key part of the specificity of television acting is the complexity of production practices, technologies and schedules (Hewett 2015; Cantrell and Hogg 2016). Though it is important to avoid generalisations, especially in an age of increasing convergence between television and cinema (Vidal 2014b), television budgets are typically smaller than film ones, which for actors tends to translate into reduced time: time for rehearsals, and time in front of the cameras to perfect a performance. As Hewett

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notes, the ways in which these privations manifest themselves in texts are dependent on historical context, so a lack of rehearsal time is more likely to affect contemporary television actors, where acting in television studios historically imposed technical limitations, especially the requirement of restrictive physical blocking which limited the amount of spontaneity and improvisation an actor could undertake. Cantrell and Hogg (2016) note that the reduced time for rehearsal for contemporary television actors (a result of budgetary restrictions and changes in production practices towards single-camera and extensively edited programming) places more individual responsibility on them for research, preparation and interpretation of their character. As Derek Paget points out, whereas actors are usually required to interpret from ‘freely imagined dramatic writing’, in docudramas they are ‘placed in the moment of performance, at the very point where facts and interpretation intersect’ (2007: 165). For actors performing as real people, there is a huge wealth of potential material that might constitute research, particularly where their character exists in the age of photographic or cinematic reproduction. Therefore, as several of Luckhurst and Cantrell’s (2010) interviewees discussed, the amount of biographical information actors incorporate into their preparation regime is a matter of personal preference. Actors therefore have agency in the television representation of biographical characters, creating their performed version through interpretation and performance in collaboration with creative choices made by other personnel, especially director, writer and producer. Whether or not the actor chooses to delve deeply into the biography of their subject to gain insight into their possible psychology, motivations or emotions, there is one decision that they need to make about mimetic representation that is non-negotiable: how closely to imitate their subject’s physicality. The emphasis on the actor’s body in screen versions of real lives leads to the problem of a ‘body too much’ identified by Jean-­ Louis Comolli (1978) as a feature of the reception of the historical film. He argues that viewers have to reconcile three ‘bodies’ on screen in historical drama: the body of the actor, the implied body of the character and that of the ‘real’ figure being portrayed. This can result in the awkward conflation of actor and subject in the mind of the spectator. While Comolli uses the term ‘body’, this applies also to other relevant aspects of the actor’s performance, especially facial resemblance and voice. As Ian McKellen told Luckhurst and Cantrell, ‘the voice is ‘easier to capture’ than the face, which is ‘impossible’ to capture in its volatility’ (2010: 9).

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The face is usually the largest impediment to a close approximation, since it is the part of a human body that is the most idiosyncratic, the most uniquely identified with the personality of its possessor. Even when facial features are superficially similar, then, it is very difficult for an actor to precisely replicate the minute inflections of any human face without exaggerating them into caricature. Since television often focuses so intently on the human face, it can be particularly unforgiving for actors seeking to re-create the facial expressions of their subject. The problem of the lack of likeness in body or face, or the distraction that a close-but-not-quite-there likeness can produce is usually overcome by an actor closely reproducing the recognisable gestural, physical and vocal range of their subject. Doing so, they are replicating not the person as such, but their public persona. Personas are the public expressions of a private identity, the performance of personality in the social world (Marshall and Barbour 2015). P. David Marshall argues that personas are presentational, deliberate strategies for the creation of selves in the public realm, but that celebrity personas have historically been managed in, through and for representational media like radio, cinema, television, newspapers and magazines. In these representational media, celebrities became representatives of their public, where the presentation of persona involves the projection of individuality into the public. Personas therefore have a ‘fictive quality’; they are fabrications based on an inner truth, an interpretation of individual identity to create a public entity (Marshall et al. 2015: 292). The term ‘persona’ derives from the Latin for ‘mask’, and therefore it has been associated with exteriority and appearance. Persona is the outward expression of personality, the presentation of the self in society. For these reasons, replicating a famous persona in the biographical drama is a key acting strategy, exploiting the recognition of repeated performances, acts or gesticulations to render their impersonation of the real figure more convincing. A good example of this can be found in the several television films about the cast members of the Carry On… films (Rolinson 2016). The personas of Barbara Windsor (Samantha Spiro), Kenneth Williams (Adam Godley) and Sid James (Geoffrey Hutchings) are re-produced precisely in Cor, Blimey! (ITV, 2000), although the drama largely focuses on the private relationships and rivalries behind the scenes. The personas are captured by reproducing their voices in accent and timbre, and, especially, their laughs: Windsor’s feminine giggle, James’s throaty, lustful snigger and Williams’s raucous, shrill titter. These are parts

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of their ‘star idiolect’ (Drake 2006), the aspects of the personality and performance style which immediately conjure a celebrity persona. So dependent is the drama on the continual reassertion of these idiolects, that the intrusiveness of these fictive personas in their lives is addressed in dialogue between Barbara and Sid. Sid chastises Barbara ‘why do you insist on treating me like this leering, lecherous bastard?’, attempting to distance himself from the Sid James screen persona. This rhetorical flourish does not land in this drama, since the portrayal of Sid closely aligns his actions and attitudes behind-the-scenes with those of his Carry on persona. This reflects the distinction between the ‘real’ self, and the public persona, a distinction that is purposely unclear in Cor Blimey! resulting in a fusion between the public and private selves of these performers. This is a very common feature in the biographical drama, with the deliberately blurred lines between public persona and private person delivering narrative impetus, aesthetic strategies of authentication and affective address. As this example demonstrates, the portrayal of the famous persona or star idiolect in the biographical drama must sit alongside the portrayal of a private individual. The actor must decide how to mark the distinction between public and private personas. Luckhurst notes that ‘private moments allow actors to be inventive’, but also that the ‘performance of a real person’s private face is a distinct challenge—how, for example, wondered [Timothy] West when he was performing Winston Churchill, did this great public rhetorician ask his wife for a cup of tea?’ (Luckhurst 2010: 12). In private moments, the problem of impersonation is at its most acute. As Erving Goffman (1956) influentially argued, all people perform a different version of themselves depending on context, presenting a ‘front stage’ self for public consumption and a ‘back stage’ self in private. A credible performance of a biographee could, then, draw on these distinct versions of self, especially because the differences between ‘front stage’ and ‘back stage’ selves are often very pronounced for public figures. However, in the context of drama, lurches between different styles of speech, behaviour or movement in public and private spaces may seem inauthentic or implausible. A large disparity between private and public behaviour as represented in a drama can also contain an implicit judgement of the biographee: that their public image was a sham, or that they engaged in dissembling. This is the case with Helena Bonham Carter’s performance in Enid (BBC Four, 2009). She portrays Enid Blyton as a woman whose private identity—impatient, cold and selfish—is at odds with her public image as an idealised model of middle-class domesticity (Andrews 2017).

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Another option is to portray the public and private personas as more or less the same. Gracie! (BBC Four, 2009) for example has very little marked difference between on-stage and off-stage Gracie Fields (Jane Horrocks), indicating that her stage persona is a lightly exaggerated performance of her ‘real’ self. This implication is strengthened by the alignment in star personas of Fields and Jane Horrocks, both plain-speaking, funny women from the North of England (Andrews 2016b). Either strategy entails a decision about authenticity, about how to best convey the complexity of public figures without compromising on their recognisability, their humanity or the audience’s ability to empathise with them. A third option is to produce a direct imitation of the biographee’s public performance of self, in the form of the re-constructed text. These can be fictions (such as films, plays or television series) in which the biographee performed, or non-fiction texts like television or radio interviews or documentary. Most biographical television dramas will make some reference to pre-existing, recognisable texts to signal the overlap between the diegesis and the ‘real world’. For biographees from the twentieth century and later, texts will usually be reconstructed through what Sara Brinch describes as ‘visual mash-up’, the restaging of a piece of ‘real’ visual evidence, such as a photograph or film clip, with the actor replacing the biographee. Brinch calls this a ‘strategy of indexing something as authentic by presenting it as mediated’ (2013: 230). Re-staging texts from the biographee’s life has a double-authenticating effect: the accuracy of the actor’s reconstruction of gesture, movement and voice from these texts serves as the ‘iconic index’ (Lipkin 2011) of docudrama, overtly signalling a relation to the ‘real’; but showing the construction of these texts marks a contrast with the dramatised performance of the private self that is proposed as the ‘real’ biographee (Rolinson 2016). For television biographical drama, this is often complicated by the scheduling of documentary material alongside the drama, so that the viewer is given the opportunity to compare the constructed public persona to the private individual whose life they have been given the opportunity to re-witness. It also gives a referent against which the performance of the actor can be evaluated. Re-constructions of screen performance are shorthand, metonymic intertextual references to the performer’s career. Their integration into the drama enables moments of impersonation that serve to superficially authenticate the actor-as-subject in the drama. The reference to intertexts is usually marked through a shift in visual style, for example, in the change from colour to black and white imagery or from high definition to a

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simulation of analogue filmstock or television transmission. The shift between diegetic production context and images from another storyworld is sometimes motivated on screen either by the presence of cameras and lights, a clapperboard, or a studio monitor revealing that these are images being taken from a set. For example, at the beginning of Stan (BBC Four, 2006), an elderly Stan Laurel (Jim Norton) sits in his living room projecting a Laurel and Hardy film against a wall. The scene Stan is viewing is a re-constructed pastiche with actors Nik Howden and Mike Goodenough imitating a younger Laurel and Hardy. While he watches, Stan places a bowler hat on his head, recreating the star image of his screen persona. This action has two effects: firstly, it aligns Jim Norton’s performance of Stan Laurel with the star image, a brief mnemonic trigger to signify his place in popular memory. Second, in narrative terms, it shows that Stan is not a passive spectator, nor is this simply a moment of idle entertainment. Watching the film is a spur to memory, a search for a dormant identity. As the film continues, Stan’s wife (Dearbhla Molloy) interrupts with a phone call from Oliver Hardy’s wife. This prompts Stan to remember the production of the film he is watching, marked from a slow dissolve from the black and white of the projected image to the colour of the ‘real’ world of the film set. The actions in the film continue briefly and then the scene is concluded. The men then exchange pleasantries, with Laurel offering a rather condescending assessment of Hardy’s talents. Though the action here is low-key, the moment is significant, the first meeting of the two stars who would form a lasting double act. The reconstruction of the film with the drama’s actors in place of Laurel and Hardy has a narrative function: it is shown as a moment that crystallises Stan’s sense of self, persona and memory. The dissolve between the projected film and the film set dramatises a collapse in boundary between star persona and private self. Television actors are only one (important) cog in a machine with many other moving parts. While they are responsible for embodying their character, making their actions, facial cues, voice and so on believable and affective, other members of production teams are responsible for reinforcing these meanings, as discussed above. For biographical drama, as for docudrama, the actor’s performance is metonymic, inasmuch as it signifies an external referent, subsuming the whole person into idiomatic gesticulation, facial movements and voice. As Paget puts it, ‘the actor marks with voice and body the space of an active and/or latent knowledge that has been, is being, and will be articulated more fully elsewhere’ (2011: 47).

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References to this latent knowledge can be subtle, but they can also be overt and self-conscious, as will be explored in the next section.

3.4   ‘In that inventive spirit’: Self-consciousness Attempting to reproduce faithfully the settings in which biographees lived, their customary modes of performance are strategies for authorising the fiction of biographical drama. Close approximation signifies authenticity, which in turn signals truth. Dramas in this mode are addressed to audience with a dichotomous request for belief in the story and suspension of disbelief in its presentation. This is not the only option for dealing with the question of truth and the trust pact between drama and audience. Another is to overtly acknowledge the contingency of biographical truths, the process of biographical interpretation and the placement of biographical drama between fact and fiction. Vidal suggests that this self-reflexive approach has become commonplace in the contemporary cinematic biopic, which has become a ‘metagenre’ that ‘intently reflects on its own forms of life writing’ (2014a: 15). Some biographical television dramas foreground the processes of biography: the multiple interpretations of identity, overlapping and conflicting truths of a life or an identity, and the impossibility of being transparently faithful to a single life story. As David Rolinson argues, ‘biographical docudramas are often the site of postmodern concerns, problematizing their own depictions even while paratexts stress their fidelity of reconstruction’ (2016: 212). This section will explore some of the reflexive strategies in these biographical dramas, situating them in the context of television culture at the time of their broadcast and considering the aesthetic effects of the self-conscious mode of dramatising a life. Biographical television dramas are usually framed paratextually to signpost to viewers that they are constructions and interpretations rather than straightforwardly factual representations. British broadcasters, especially the BBC, have traditionally been cautious about the blending of fact and fiction in docudrama and biography (Paget 2011; Hill 2015; Andrews 2016a), given the propensity for controversy around these programmes (see Chap. 6). Biographical television dramas therefore use captions to situate dramatised scenes in the factual world. Derek Paget describes captions in docudrama as ‘multi-functional’, intended to set the dramatic scene, argue a ‘representational case’ and protect against legal action. Captions ‘open up’ docudrama to historical time, complicating its

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storytelling by relating it to previous events, other contexts and ‘future contingency’ (2011: 99). For the biographical drama, captions are used to reassure the audience of the factual basis, but fictional execution of the programme. These are usually a variation on the term ‘based on a true story’, a phrase that Thomas Leitch describes (when discussing cinema films) as ‘strategic or generic rather than historical or existential’ (2007: 282). Rolinson (2016: 205) identifies the expression ‘based on real events’ as a generic signpost for docudramas, signalling their ‘mediating strategies’ while also containing the genre’s regular truth claim. For biographical television drama, this is also tactical, a forewarning for viewers that functions as a disclaimer. Because British television biographies are made in the regulated context of public service broadcasting, these disclaimers tend to be less vague than ‘based on a true story’. The tenor of these is usually solemn, a sincere warning against taking too literally the dramatic scenes, or reminding the viewer of the importance of creative licence. This will be discussed in more detail in Chap. 6. In some cases, though, captions are used playfully, self-reflexively satirising the convention of using titles to gain the audience’s trust in the programme that proceeds. This is usually to set a tone for the programme that is less than serious, by gently mocking the solemnity of the conventional disclaimer. The opening titles of Filth! The Mary Whitehouse Story, for example, exclaim ‘The story you are about to see really took place’. The screen fades to black briefly, the first caption replaced with another ‘only with less swearing and more nudity’. The truth claim of the first caption is immediately undermined by the second. This has the set-up and punchline pattern of a joke. It establishes the comedic register of the programme, a light-hearted depiction of a person who took herself and her campaign very seriously. Like most jokes, it also relies on an understanding of extra textual context for comprehension. It draws on the public image of Mary Whitehouse as a prudish campaigner against television depictions of swearing and nudity. There is also an element of the in-joke here. The drama’s writer Amanda Coe (2017) recalled that when the programme’s producer showed it to the son of Hugh-Carleton Green, Director General of the BBC and Whitehouse’s self-chosen nemesis, he remarked that he had never heard his father swear, which the fictional version played by Hugh Bonneville does rather a lot in Filth. Captions like these are designed to evade potential complaints about the accuracy or sensitivity of the portrayals of real people in the programmes. They imply that to complain of historical anachronism,

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imprecision or dishonesty is to miss the joke, to take the programme too seriously, to misjudge the appropriate spectatorial pose. Desperate Romantics (BBC Two, 2010) is a good example here. Its titles read: In the mid-nineteenth century, a group of young men challenged the art establishment of their day. The “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood” were inspired by the real world about them, yet took imaginative licence in their art. This story, based on their lives and loves, follows in that inventive spirit.

Each new line of this caption is cued by a playful melody on the soundtrack. The light tone of the disclaimer is supported aesthetically. Its content provides a textual justification for inaccuracy, one that aligns the intentions, tone and narrative strategies of the programme with its subjects. Desperate Romantics presents a raucous take on the pre-Raphaelites. Its overall register is comedic, drawing on performance tropes from farce and sitcom in addition to a burlesque on the period drama. The ‘inventive spirit’ alluded to in the title is as much a generic contract as it is a reference to the artistic style of the biographic subjects of the series. The graphic design of titles is another way of communicating their tone. The conventional disclaimer caption presents simple white-on-black lettering in an unfussy font. The letters are typically small in the frame, focusing the mind on the contents and devoid of stylistic flourish. This is to convey the serious intention of the titles. The Desperate Romantics captions are in dark brown on a background of stained, slightly distressed embossed letter paper, in a font that recalls the typeface of nineteenth-century novels. This is a reiteration of the claim to be taking on the ‘spirit’ of the pre-­Raphaelites in the drama, communicating the idea in non-representational signs. Some dramas utilise self-conscious gestures that appropriate the camera’s implied status as transparent mediator between event and viewer. Direct address is a particularly effective way to do this, borrowing a common trope in non-fiction television for establishing a trust pact between figure on screen and audience. It is particularly overt and self-conscious when it takes place in period dramas, because the historical character converses with the contemporary viewer against the logic of time. Period dramas customarily operate as though their events unfold in a closed loop of history and are distinctly past tense in presentation. Direct address suspends this fantasy, implying a present and living connection. Gentleman Jack (BBC One, 2019–) borrows this convention to establish a

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connection between Anne Lister (Suranne Jones) and the viewer. Direct address enables Anne, and, occasionally, other characters such as her sister Marian (Gemma Whelan), to offer spoken and non-verbal judgements on events. This creates an intimate connection with the viewer which remediates the personal address of a journal, mirroring Lister’s status as a famous and prolific diarist. It is also a means to encourage empathy with a character whose gruffness and self-assuredness can be off-putting, both to characters in the diegesis and to the viewer (see Chap. 4). Direct address can also be used to make ironic comment on the distance between a biographee’s place in popular memory and the reality of their life. The Secret Life of Mrs Beeton (BBC Four, 2006) opens on a funeral, the camera circling slowly around a grave. On the other side, Isabella Beeton (Anna Madeley) is waiting for it, radiantly youthful and wearing an ethereal light-coloured dress, carrying a dainty parasol. She introduces herself as the recipient of the funeral service, showing that we are either to conceive of her as a diegetic ghost or as a non-diegetic tour guide in the proceeding events. Either way, the drama indicates from the outset that the story it tells is of uncertain provenance. She introduces herself, first as Bella, and then suggests that the viewer may know her better as Mrs Beeton: ‘I know what you were thinking. I’d be larger and middle-aged. Queen Victoria in an apron? That’s what we wanted you to think’. The dialogue immediately indicates that the programme’s aim will be to cut through the historical illusion of the ‘Mrs Beeton’ brand, performing an act of biographical reclamation. Doing this through the intimate mode of direct address cuts against the layers of historical reputation, giving seemingly closer access to the ‘real’ Mrs Beeton and her ‘secret life’. Self-conscious style in the biographical drama has several functions. It can be used as a means of destabilising the trust between programme maker and audience. This can be, for institutional reasons, to sidestep the anxiety about reneging on a trust pact between broadcaster and audience. It can also be used to deliberately place events within in a fictive frame that is paradoxically more truthful than a drama that relies on tropes of authenticity to appeal to an audience’s sense of belief in the narrative. It can be used as a way of making historical biographees vital, while also placing them in twentieth- and twenty-first-century communicative contexts, where they can address a watching viewer against the grain of chronological time. This capitalises on television’s twin aesthetics of intimacy and immediacy to bring the biographee into closer relation to the viewer, while simultaneously encouraging a note of caution with how far the claims of

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the drama can be believed. In acknowledging, even foregrounding, the limits of fact and its presentation, self-conscious style paradoxically suggests a truthful account of the biographee, saving room for the conflict and complexity inherent to human lives.

3.5   Metabiography in Babs and ‘Daisy’ The biographees of Babs (BBC One, 2017) and ‘Daisy’ (Episode seven of The Edwardians, BBC Two, 1973) could scarcely be more different. Barbara Windsor is a popular British screen star of the twentieth century, famous first for her ‘bubbly blonde’ character in the Carry On series of comic films in the 1960s and 1970s, and later for appearing as Peggy, the matriarch of the Mitchell family in popular soap opera EastEnders (BBC One, 1985–). Her persona is intertwined with both her performance of comically excessive femininity and her class status as an ‘authentic’ cockney. Daisy Greville, Countess of Warwick, married into nobility in the late nineteenth century, and was infamous for her high-profile infidelities, most notably as a mistress of Edward VII. She was an enthusiastic convert to socialism and seen as a threat to the British establishment because of her liaisons with the King, and possession of evidence of his indiscretion in the form of letters. The dramas were also made in different production and broadcast contexts (see Chap. 1). ‘Daisy’ was an episode of an anthology series of plays called The Edwardians (BBC Two, 1972–1973), broadcast in a period where the single drama was a common feature in the television schedules, particularly on the BBC, where it was institutionally supported as a way of featuring innovative, authored work. By the time of Babs’s broadcast in 2017, the single drama on British television was a much rarer occurrence. The competitive environment of twenty-first-­century television made building an audience for single dramas particularly challenging. Biographical subjects, particularly famous and popular ones, provided a valuable promotional tool, a means of engaging public interest in a drama prior to broadcast (Andrews 2016a). Despite these contrasts, the dramas share a key feature: both use a stage-like setting for the performance of the biographee’s memory. This is a self-conscious gesture which has several implications. The theatrical milieu suggests a contraction between public persona and private individual, where the biographee is under constant public scrutiny even in her most intimate moments. The stage setting also provides a liminal space between fact and fiction, foregrounding rather than attempting to obscure

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the compromises inherent to factual storytelling. In both dramas, theatrical performance is also used as a metaphor for the process of remembering, with memory, self and performance intertwined in the unfolding of events in a theatrical space. Babs and ‘Daisy’ thus function in a similar way to docudramas, as described by Steven Lipkin: Since docudramas do not purport to be historical records but instead, representations of the past that perform history, it is not surprising to find that events docudramas often focus their performance of history by replicating, directly or indirectly, the process of remembering the past. (2011: 15)

Here, I will compare the approaches of Babs and ‘Daisy’ to the representation of selves, by examining their mise-en-scène and performance style. I will analyse how these dramas self-reflexively situate their subjects in liminal spaces of memory, performance and story. Both Babs and ‘Daisy’ open on non-stage spaces. ‘Daisy’ begins in a drawing room, where the Countess of Warwick (Virginia McKenna) greets journalist Frank Harris (John Bennett), who agrees to ghost write her memoirs for her. She tells him she will dictate for him her memories, providing a diegetic motivation for the storytelling structure of the drama, in which Daisy’s recollections are delivered in voiceover, as the scenes she describes are acted out in a fictive quasi-theatrical space. The first transition between present and past is represented via the metaphoric device of the mirror as a signifier of self-contemplation. As Daisy begins dictating her memoirs, she stares at her reflection in an ornately framed looking glass. A slow dissolve transitions to reveal the younger Daisy gazing intently back at her, followed by a cut to a wide shot which takes in the entire theatrical space. To the sound of a male-voice choir performing ‘Daisy Bell’ (a song supposedly written for the real Daisy Greville), she dances around a large, spare set in carefully choreographed movements. Musical moments like this will punctuate the entire television play, a dramatic chorus providing a parallel commentary to Daisy’s voiceover. The register for her recollections is thus framed from the outset as fictive, suggesting that these sequences be understood as a performance of memory. Daisy’s claim that she remembers little detail, only ‘people and events… so little reality’, is repeated at the beginning and the end of the drama. It creates a distancing device, which comments on the incompleteness of memory and the necessarily problematic process of writing autobiography. In the final scenes, it transpires that these memoirs are being used by Daisy as

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a bribe to try to clear her debts. She plans to blackmail the royal family by using her letters from her ex-lover, King Edward VII, as collateral. ‘Daisy’ is therefore a metabiography, a story about the function and process of biographising. Babs similarly situates its events in a diegetic ‘real world’ before the biographical storytelling begins. It starts in the dressing room of a theatre at the end of a pier. Barbara (Samantha Spiro) sleeps on the floor, covered in her fur coat, woken by her partner Scott (Charlie Archer) who is helping her regain control of her life which has spiralled into chaos following a messy divorce and a stalling career. When Scott leaves, in her solitude Barbara begins to reflect on her life. As she wanders from backstage to onstage, the theatre provides a backdrop for her memories to play out. ‘Daisy’ and Babs use parenthetical diegetic spaces in a supposed ‘real world’ to place the memories that form the biographical story in a performance frame. This acts as a distancing device, suggesting a complex relation between the public persona as performed in the theatrical space, and the ‘real’ person whose memories are being dramatised. The memory events in ‘Daisy’ play out in a large, open room with white floors and walls. The set is very spare, dominated by a symmetrical staircase that stands in the centre of the space, forming a skeletal proscenium arch. Daisy’s voiceover that explains the divided top strata of London society in the late nineteenth century indicates that this set is to be understood as symbolising in shorthand the social and cultural milieu of that period. On the left side of the arch sits Queen Victoria, obsequiously attended to by various members of court. On the right is the ‘Marlborough set’, around her son Prince Edward. The arch therefore initially has a representative function the unseen but ever-present influence of the Queen, whose position atop enables her to oversee activities in her court and wield her authority over the players below. Besides the arch, there is little distinction made in the set between public spaces, like the one occupied by a bandstand, and private ones, marked with domestic furniture such as beds or desks. Daisy’s most intimate activities, including sex, appear therefore to take place out in the open. The sparseness of the theatrical set may be motivated narratively by Daisy’s claim that she will give only the ‘essence’ of her story and that her memories contain ‘no detail’, but the metaphorical effect is to represent the collapse of distinction between public and private life. The mise-en-scène complements both the story told, where Daisy’s personal life was the stuff of society gossip, and the act of biography as revelation of private story in a public frame.

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Whereas ‘Daisy’ explores the living of a public life, Babs organises the biographical story within the highly personal frame of family relationships. Barbara’s recollections are prompted by viewing through a window a little girl playing with her father. As Barbara smiles, the voice of her father (Nick Moran) echoes in her mind. She turns to find he is standing behind her, though he appears as a middle-aged man costumed in a 1940s’ three-piece suit. The contrast with her costume—a lilac jumpsuit and baby pink sequinned cardigan—indicates that this is an encounter with a ghost of the past rather than a person who exists in the reality of the diegesis. The presence of Barbara’s father has both a biographical and a narrative function. It enables the drama to propose a biographical interpretation of her life: that being abandoned by her father as an adolescent drove her to pursue a career in the stage, seeking the attention he had denied her, and caused her strained relationships with men. Narratively, his presence is justified by making him the catalyst for her memories. He challenges her: ‘Take some time. Think through what happened. Go back over everything. Work out what you did wrong. And don’t do it again’. Barbara’s father acts as a fact checker, challenging Barbara on her interpretations of events, or a lack of honesty. For instance, when her husband Ronnie (Luke Allen-Gale) is arrested, her father reproaches her ‘you must have seen that coming’, and she insists that she did not. He also self-consciously comments on the conceit of the drama itself. During a heated moment, he contends ‘I’m not the one in an empty theatre talking to myself’, negating his own existence and Barbara’s process of recollection. This moment deliberately draws attention to the way in which the drama constructs Barbara’s story as a fictionalisation of memory. The drama combines two different kinds of memory representation. Some of Barbara’s memories are presented as faithful diegetic recreations of the time and space in which they took place. For example, Barbara’s first memory is of her childhood theatrical career. She recalls auditioning on stage, singing ‘Sunny Side of the Street’, which will become a musical motif throughout the drama. Presenting this moment as an important early memory indicates that performance is intrinsic to Barbara’s sense of self. This validates the use of the theatre as a metaphoric arena in which her memories are explored. The song is returned to at various points to recall this formative moment, borrowing a common biographical trope of explaining the behaviour, attitudes and actions of biographees via childhood experiences. These sequences take place in diegetically ‘real’ spaces, marked as such by a verisimilar mise-en-scène which credibly stand in for,

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for example, Barbara’s childhood home, a shoe shop where she works as a young woman or a prison where her husband is incarcerated. These are recreations of the spaces of a life that are conventional for the biographical drama. Other memories play out within the theatre space that the adult Barbara inhabits. Important figures from her story—like lovers, friends, employers, her agent—suddenly appear in the theatre, playing out scenes from her life. There is a broadly chronological logic to their appearances so that the story can be comprehended, but they appear and disappear with the evanescent quality of half-formed remembrances rather than fleshed out characters. These micro-vignettes of her biography occur in various parts of the theatre—not only on stage, but in the wings, in the circle and other backstage locations. Barbara’s stage life and her private life collide in this memory space. Examples of this can be found in the scenes which detail her work with Joan Littlewood (Zoë Wanamaker). The scene in which the women meet  is presented as diegetically ‘real’, taking place in an alley outside a theatre where Barbara (played in flashbacks by Jaime Winstone) mistakes Joan for a cleaner. Barbara then auditions for Littlewood for the part of East End prostitute Rosie in Fings Ain’t What They Used T’be on the stage of the theatre on which her other memories have been shown. In her audition, she reprises the ‘Sunny Side of the Street’ performance from her childhood. Winstone concludes the performance with Windsor’s trademark giggle, incorporating part of her star idiolect to reflect the development of her public persona. Memory, character and persona collapse in this stage space. This scene, and others that portray Barbara’s work as part of Littlewood’s theatre company, plays out on the stage of Barbara’s memory, with Barbara and her father watching from the audience. The theatre is an empty space, rendering it a blank canvas on which her memories can be painted. The theatre space as ‘blank canvas’ is also crucial to ‘Daisy’, and much more literal. The plain white memory space, a quasi-theatre, is populated by characters or simple props at appropriate moments of the story, which plays out like brief sketches of her life rather than a consistent narrative. Daisy’s memories are bold, exaggerated caricatures of the people and places she encountered in her life. This is particularly reflected in costuming; Prince Edward (Thorley Walters), for instance, wears his full military regalia to attend a private assignation with Daisy, even commenting on how fiddly it is to attach the medals to his breast. The division between memory and ‘reality’ is marked in a change in acting style between the diegetically ‘real’ sequences, which are played naturalistically, and the sequences in the white theatrical room, which are more ostensively

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performed, presentational more than representational. Indeed, as Daisy begins her affair with the Prince (a calculated move for self-protection), she turns to the camera and directly addresses the viewer: ‘well, what would you do?’ This acknowledgement of the audience implies a self-­ consciousness about biography as the overt display of life experience for public consumption. These implicit ideas are made explicit in Daisy’s dialogue: ‘an autobiography’s like that. How could it be otherwise?’ This cements the status of the programme as meta-biography, an exploration of the purpose and meaning of (auto)biography. The appearance of the real Barbara Windsor as a character in Babs performs a similar function. Her presence acts as an ‘authorization’ of this fiction which has ambivalent effects. Her appearance implies that she has endorsed the drama as a representation of her life and memories, which in turn strengthens its truth claims. However, her involvement also limits the drama’s ability to disinterestedly critique her choices and actions. Windsor’s first appearance comes in a sequence which explores the young Barbara’s relationships with men. In the theatre space, a series of men approach Barbara, each wanting something from her. Some of these requests are professional, but often they are sexual. Barbara (played by Spiro) defends herself to her father, saying ‘there weren’t that many blokes’. He responds with a quizzical raised eyebrow. After she denies again, a cut reveals the theatre’s audience, every seat filled with a man. The drama undermines the diegetic Barbara’s claims, suggesting a higher level of truth than that which she allows herself. Another cut reveals the real Barbara Windsor, standing in a corner of the theatre and appearing unimpressed at this judgement of her, grimacing as she says, ‘that’s not funny’. Spiro momentarily breaks character to apologise to her. This self-conscious scene is played comedically, but it speaks to a fundamental issue with the biographical drama: multiple competing interpretations of the self. Self-­ conscious biographical dramas like ‘Daisy’ and Babs have found the solution to this problem by handing the interpretive power to the viewer. Layers of truth are shown in the drama, and the audience is invited to choose what to believe. The lightness of touch and comedic tone of both dramas enables them to incorporate these moments of self-consciousness and complex storytelling structures while maintaining narrative momentum and coherence. Both Babs and ‘Daisy’ conclude with a performance. Babs ends on an empty stage space lit with a single spotlight. Footsteps echo on the soundtrack, as the real Barbara Windsor takes her place on stage and sings

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‘Sunny Side of the Street’, initially acapella, then joined by accompanying band. She finishes with a dainty curtsey, accompanied by the sound of applause. A reverse shot shows a cheering audience, including Winstone and Windsor’s husband Scott Mitchell. This brings the narrative full circle: the song acts as a motif of her strained relationship with her father and choice of performing as a compensation for the loss of his love, and also as a signifier of her talent and the special quality which render her a popular public figure. This is reinforced in the final image, Windsor receiving the audience’s praise with her emblematic giggle. Daisy’s end credit sequence similarly features a performance with the cast of characters from her life. In an approximation of the theatrical curtain call, characters from the drama gradually approach the camera and the choir singing ‘Daisy Bell’ reprises on the soundtrack. Bringing the theatre-as-life metaphor to a conclusion, Daisy challenges the audience by repeating her claim that ‘An autobiography’s like that. How could it be otherwise?’ in direct address to the camera, defying the viewer to disagree. This coda underlines the interpretation of Daisy, borrowing the television convention of direct address as simulated intimacy to finally align the viewer’s point of view with hers. In doing so, it self-reflexively comments on the television biography as performance of self and memory. Babs was rebroadcast on BBC One on 11 December 2020, a day after the death of its subject. It was introduced by the continuity announcer as a ‘tribute to the much-loved Dame Barbara Windsor’. The drama is recontextualised in this broadcast; in addition to its original function as biographical storytelling, it takes on the role of obituary. The announcer goes on to say, in a somewhat humorous tone, ‘with a bit of colourful language, we remember the colourful life of Babs’. Framing the drama in this way foregrounds the theme of memory present throughout, suited to its new function as a memorial. Windsor had been living with Alzheimer’s disease since 2014, though this was not made public until 2018. She worked with charities to raise awareness of the condition, a neurodegenerative disease which causes a range of cognitive dysfunctions, including short-term memory loss. While Babs was made before Windsor’s diagnosis was made public, its theme of memory—its subjectivity, fragility and centrality to identity—was lent additional poignancy after her death. This example provides a vivid demonstration of how biographical drama can perform the cultural role of situating biographees in popular memory and play an important role in constructing or consolidating their public legacy.

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3.6   Conclusion This chapter has discussed the ways in which truth, value and the public/ private dichotomy are inflected in the representational techniques adopted by the biographical drama. Verisimilar mise-en-scène and performative impersonation are both strategies of authentication that use surface appearance to trigger cultural memories associated with the biographee. This is intended to help viewers suspend their disbelief and accept this replication of a public persona for the duration of the drama. Mise-en-scène and performance can also express the private individual beneath the public mask, mutually reinforcing characterisations and supporting the interpretation of the biographee ‘behind the scenes’. In both cases, the ‘truth’ of the biographee is gestured at through techniques usually associated with realist televisual modes. The self-conscious biographical drama offers an alternative approach, highlighting the necessary illusions that are entailed in the process of biographical storytelling and drawing attention to the fictionalisation inherent in the drama. Acknowledging their own constructions, self-conscious biographical dramas are honest about their dishonesty. In each case, the dramas are making truth claims that are positioned in relation to authenticity, whether in its activation or its eschewal. Paratextual materials frequently invoke historical accuracy as a central selling point and key pleasure of the biographical drama, whether it is in the expense and trouble that has gone into an authentic replica of royal clothes and homes in The Crown or the use of a biographee’s genuine tools of the trade, as with Tommy Cooper. Authenticity offers immediacy, a traceable link or ‘iconic index’ between reality and its simulation. However, as Derek Paget argues, ‘ultimately this immediacy—this authenticity—is dependent on perception rather than inherent in a production’ (Paget 2011: 125). Authenticity in the biographical drama is most commonly recognisable by its absence. When analysing claims to verisimilitude or authenticity, we must also remember the highly produced nature of these representations, and the impact of multiple factors beyond authorial creativity or intention, on their aesthetics and storytelling. Regardless of the extent to which these texts are recognised as fiction, some relation to the ‘real’, some degree of surface accuracy, is a minimal expectation for biographical texts. Discourses of authenticity, accuracy and truth in the visual and aural style, performances and address of biographical dramas can only take us so far in terms of becoming biographical representation. To perform biography’s function of exploring a famous self, the connections between public and

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private lives and the contingency of a life’s ‘truths’, television must tell biographical stories. The next chapter will explore the convergence between modes of biographical storytelling and television drama’s narrative conventions.

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CHAPTER 4

Narratives

4.1   Introduction One of the most significant areas of contention in the study of biography concerns the place of narrative structuration in the telling of lives. Many of the fundamentals of narrativisation, such as the creation of consistent and coherent characters, patterns of cause and effect, and reliance on figurative tropes, are viewed as incompatible with the needs of biography. Human lives are complex, subject to both the repetitious, cyclical nature of everyday experience (which is routinely elided from narrative as redundancy), and the unpredictable vicissitudes that are anathema to tightly structured storytelling. Moreover, with devices borrowed from discourses of fiction, the unwelcome spectre of invention, of dishonesty, is raised. As Paula Backscheider notes: The best biographers know that they are inventing through their selection and arrangement of materials; they are establishing cause-effect and other relationships, and they are determining what was most formative and important for someone else, someone they do not know. They must choose what to include, leave out, emphasize and subordinate, and when they do, they have constructed a narrative that, whether they are aware of it or not, partakes of cultural stories with expectations for resolutions and interpretations built in (1999: 119)

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Like Backscheider, most biography scholars accept that lives need to be shaped, explained and understood through narrative. It is therefore important to consider how the underlying grammar of narratives affects the ways in which lives are told. This chapter addresses the question of how biographical stories are told for television. I begin with a discussion of biography and (television) narratology, considering the ways in which biographical storytelling may be analysed using the tools of narrative theory. I proceed by exploring the ways in which biographical stories are translated into the narrative formats specific to the television medium. The dominant form for biographical television drama is the single drama, the television play or film. The shaping of the biography into a discrete story will be explored, with attention to the importance of structure and the necessary manipulations of chronology that this entails. The second format is the serial (sometimes also called the miniseries). Serial storytelling involves structural choices that are not relevant to cinematic form. But television storytelling also requires attention to framing in broadcast contexts, particularly the arrangements for commercial television of advertising breaks. Finally, I will examine the telling of life stories in series formats, though attention will be paid to the convergence between serial and series and the impact that this has on the arrangement of life stories for television presentation. The chapter incorporates the perspectives of screenwriters of biographical television dramas, who discuss the process of crafting lives for television. It concludes with a case study that compares the structuring of the life of nineteenth-century industrialist, landowner, flaneuse and diarist Anne Lister into single drama and series formats in The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister (BBC Two, 2010) and Gentleman Jack (BBC One/HBO, 2019–).

4.2   Narrative Structure and Biographical Drama Milly Buonanno observes that ‘narrative structuring is the indispensable tool for giving order and meaning to the flow of events that would otherwise be chaotic, and cognitively and emotionally out of control’ (2008: 72). While this is true of drama broadly, it is particularly crucial for biographical storytelling. As Victoria (ITV, 2016–) showrunner Daisy Goodwin (2017) notes ‘it’s not a totally conventional narrative because things happen in it that are totally from left field…things that happen that you weren’t expecting, that have no arc. That’s the randomness of it’. While it may be intuitive to assume that the processes for making sense of

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a life will depend on the circumstances and events of that life, this is not the case for moving-image biographies. As George Custen notes of Hollywood biopics: The conventions of film storytelling are among the strongest determinants of how historical characters are embedded in specific plot lines developed as film biographies. Every text is composed of conventions from related texts; each particular film narrative can be said to combine and recombine particular textual permutations in novel or familiar combinations, orders and emphases. (1992: 178)

Custen is making a case for the generic status of the biopic in Hollywood history, but his description of the combination of the conventional with the specific should be familiar to analysts of media adaptation as well (further discussed in Chap. 5). Custen’s sense that the established conditions for storytelling in film are a stronger influence over the plotting of lives than the specifics of that life is also relevant to television fact-fiction hybrids. Though structuralist narratological approaches have been critiqued for their ‘ill-considered positivism’ (Dicecco 2015: 162), they remain a helpful tool for the analysis of the workings of television storytelling. Seymour Chatman (1978) has been an influential figure in the structuralist analysis of television, having constructed a useful model for analysing the underlying grammar of narrative (see Porter et al. 2010; Mittell 2015). He breaks down narrative into two groups: ‘events’, actions that take place in a narrative that are horizontal in nature and have to do with the linear construction of story; and ‘existents’, which are vertical and provide information about character (names, occupations, family situation, physical appearance, etc.) and setting (locations, national contexts, etc.) that is not directly related to the progression of the story. ‘Events’ can be further subdivided into ‘kernels’, which are happenings that directly affect the cause-and-effect chain of a story, such that if they are removed or altered, they will have a material impact on the progression of narratives, and ‘satellites’, events that do not alter the narrative progression but provide important context, background or texture. Storytelling in biographical drama entails the careful selection or artificial creation of kernels in the life story of the biographee. Assessments of accuracy in the televised life story tend to centre on the perceived adequacy of the transfer of these narrative elements, much as the reception of adaptations is often grounded in

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discourses of ‘fidelity’ (see Chap. 5). More specific to the biographical drama is the centrality of existents in constructing an adapted version of a person. Put simply, a biographical drama depends for comprehension and recognition on the maintenance of certain existents, especially a biographee’s name, occupation and physical appearance. When biography is adapted for television, events that take on the status of kernels are very often ones that are common to human lives in general rather than this specific biographee, and therefore are frequently occurring dramatic material in televisual storytelling more broadly: marriage, birth, divorce, illness, death. By contrast, the parts of the biographee’s story that make them unique and suitable as a biographee—usually their career activities—often appear as satellites and existents alongside the personal life. A good example of this is Hattie (BBC Four, 2011). The first kernel in Hattie is the meeting between actress Hattie Jacques (Ruth Jones) and John Schofield (Aiden Turner), a driver who will later become her lover. Other kernels include her husband John Le Mesurier’s (Robert Bathurst) discovery of the affair, John moving into the marital home and, the climactic scene, the Le Mesuriers’ divorce. Hattie’s working life, though visualised for example in re-enactments of scenes from Carry on Cabby (Gerald Thomas, 1963), recedes into the background of the story. In one scene, Hattie casually rattles off her weekly schedule, including filming scenes for Carry on… and recording an episode of Sykes and a… (BBC, 1960–1965). Such performances are the foundation on which Hattie Jacques’ fame was built, generating the public persona that sparks the nostalgic memories and curiosity that might warrant a television film about her. But in narrative terms, in Hattie, they are everyday, non-­ descript occurrences in her life. Because it is a discrete narrative—a single drama lasting one hundred minutes—Hattie makes regular and focused use of kernels. The more expansive story time of the series affords even greater attention to the details of the life, and a more sporadic use of kernels over the course of a season. As Goodwin puts it (discussing Victoria): ‘it works better as you slow it down, because they’re real people. And actually you want to see them fall in love, have babies, deal with all the issues. You don’t really want to whizz through, you want to feel for them as characters’. Here, she speaks to the propensity for television in long-form storytelling mode to create significant character development. As Porter et al. argue, it is ‘this very emphasis on character that is a defining quality of television narratives’ (2010: 24). So, while Goodwin concedes that she is looking for ‘key

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moments’ which might form kernels, she also notes that she seeks to ‘weave a dramatic story’ around real events, prioritising story over history without necessarily sacrificing respect for historical fact. Goodwin here describes the strategic selection of story elements from the biography to suit the structural requirements of the television text. As Derek Paget argues, the priority here is the ‘economy needed for a good narrative dynamic’, and therefore events are organised into ‘convenient dramatic units’ (2011: 114). However, as this chapter will establish, what constitutes a ‘good narrative dynamic’, and the shape of the ‘dramatic unit’ differs depending on which televisual form the story has been organised into. Life narratives are shaped on television as much by the storytelling conventions of single drama, miniseries, serial and series as they are by the life itself.

4.3   Single Drama I have used ‘single drama’ as a catch-all term for the broadcast of a text written for television that is a one-off, discrete dramatic unit. Single biographical dramas often follow conventions of dramatic storytelling for the screen that are also observed by biopics (Custen 1992). This parallels the processes of dramatic structuring and selection that Derek Paget saw as typical for the television docudrama: Moments of dramatic tension and/or dramatic irony, the moments of disclosure, recognition and catharsis of classical drama, are part of docudrama plot construction… The need to conform to the dominant structures of fiction film increases the temptation to invent dramatic tension and irony in docudramatic plotting if it does not already exist. (2011: 115)

Biographical single dramas do not often innovate around plotting or attempt to replicate the complexity of lives in narrative structure. This is not to say that they routinely reduce their subject to one-dimensional simplicity, but that the multiplicity of the self is contained within a coherent structure which enables the cultural meaning of the biographee to be communicated to an unfamiliar audience. The key issue is how to construct a story from the events of a life. The distinction between chronicle and portrait discussed in Chap. 1 also applies to dramatised biography. As biographical screenwriter Brian Fillis observed, ‘I have read scripts that suffer from the “and then this happened, and then that happened, and

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then it ended” … that’s dramatizing incidents in somebody’s life, but it’s not creating story’ (2017). Careful selection and elaboration of narrative kernels is a means to avoid this tendency towards chronology. Constructing story in a manner that is dramatically satisfying, structurally coherent and abides by television’s fairly inflexible temporal structures is a specialised skill for screenwriters (Powell 2016; Andrews 2018). As Amanda Coe (2017) points out, balancing the unique life of the individual with the requirements of dramatic shape is a process with a degree of extreme artificiality [to] it. Of finding, in the flux of individual lives, the things that are, that most fit that dramatic shape, the sort of three act structure. The conflict, the dilemma, the resolution. It’s funny really, because it’s like, you’re trying to do both. You’re both trying to do justice to the reality of the situation, but you’re also slightly bending it to your will. And it can be frustrating, because you can slightly feel…if I was just making this up, this would happen at this point.

Similarly, Gwyneth Hughes (2017) observed that there were often events that she had encountered in her research on a life that she wanted to include in the drama but found that they could not be satisfactorily shaped. Coe’s invocation of the ‘three-act’ structure alludes to typical advice on plotting a feature film that can be found in texts of screenwriting praxis such as Syd Field (2005) or Robert McKee (1998), which advocate rigid formulae for narrative structure that are supposedly universal. This framework structures a screenplay in three parts, with two ‘turning points’ at the end of each ‘act’, that is, important narrative kernels that prompt a new situation. Designed for Hollywood screenplays, these manuals have nevertheless been influential internationally and outside of the feature film context. Interviewed screenwriters differed in the extent to which they found the strictures of conventional structure useful and appropriate for biographical storytelling. Fillis observed that he finds imposing a three-act structure can be ‘helpful to tailor a person’s life into dramatic shape’ (2017), but Hughes bristled against the formulaic approach, arguing that ‘the simple way of putting this is that some people say that every scene has to advance plot and advance character, but that’s the crudest possible way of describing this. It’s not really like that at all’. Coe observed that the time constraints of the ninety-minute dramatic structure can result in an unintentionally ‘heroic’ narrative, suggesting that even when dramatists

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take care to attend to the complexity of the biographee, the limitations of time can militate against a more nuanced portrait. One of the most common structural tropes in the biographical single drama is the use of flashbacks. Flashbacks are a mechanism for coping with the retrospective nature of biographical narrative, the dilemma that while lives are understood backwards, they are lived forwards. There has been a consistent convention for biographical dramatic storytelling on television to structure the life story as a series of flashbacks told from the perspective of the protagonist who memorialises his or her own life either soon before death, or, occasionally, posthumously. Examples of this narrative structure in single drama include Dylan (BBC Two, 1978), a retrospective of Dylan Thomas; God Rot Tunbridge Wells! (Channel 4, 1985), a biographical exploration of George Frideric Handel; and The Secret Life of Mrs Beeton (BBC Four, 2006), though it is also used for serial and series forms in, for instance, Freud (BBC One, 1984) and Dickens of London (Yorkshire Television, 1976). Flashbacks are an economical means to incorporate important details of character or backstory into biographical storytelling and can be used to give depth and complexity to biographical characters. Implicit in the flashback is that the character of the biographee is shaped through previous experience, and that knowledge of their past is necessary to contextualise and understand their present attitudes and behaviour. Flashbacks are therefore a particularly important technique when the story focuses on a brief window in the biographee’s life, as they act metonymically, implying that the portrayed persona is illustrative of the whole subject. It is unusual for biographical single dramas to attempt to portray the entirety of a life from cradle to grave. Indeed, Hughes described an attempt to write a whole life in ninety minutes as likely to ‘get completely out of hand’. A more efficient approach to biographical storytelling within a single drama structure is to choose punctual moments from the life around which to build a story and, implicitly, an interpretation of the life. As Richard Cottan (2017) points out: ‘It’s often better to take a chunk of someone’s life, and hopefully in that chunk you’re encapsulating everything to do with that person, all the things you want to say about that person’. His television  film Margaret (BBC Two, 2009), for example, takes place over the ten-day period between Margaret Thatcher (Lindsay Duncan) becoming aware of a coup forming against her, orchestrated by her own cabinet ministers, and her resignation as prime minister in November 1990. Incorporated within this story of Thatcher’s downfall,

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via flashback and mnemonic dialogue, is a contrapuntal narrative of her ascendancy to power and her premiership. In the horizontal storyline, subtle and seemingly small incidents such as the expression of support from an MP become significant narrative events that are given further personal and political meaning through flashback events. The flashbacks trace Thatcher as she wrests control of the Conservative party from Ted Heath in the 1970s, a parallel process to the fate which befalls her. These events are not crucial to the unfolding of the primary plotline that concerns Thatcher’s removal from office, but important backstory which explains her character, how she initiated her grip on power in the party and her attitude to her ‘enemies’. Cottan described the ‘fall’ narrative as the ‘framework’ and the other sections as ‘reflecting something about her character’ that would be germane to the story of the decline. Dramatising a moment of rupture or crisis in the life of a biographee is an efficient way of creating a ‘character study’ as Cottan puts it, drawing on a cultural assumption that true personality is revealed under pressure. This is analogous to written biography in ‘portrait’ mode. The alternative to the ‘punctual moment’ approach is to incorporate more of the timeframe of a biographee’s life. This necessarily entails a greater level of selectivity and contraction, because a larger amount of macro-story information needs to be included in the same amount of dramatic time. Fillis (2017) noted that he preferred the ‘timeframe’ approach to writing biographical lives for two main reasons. The first is that it enables the dramatist to ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’ important elements of the character’s history. He argued that, in dramas with a short time span, the writer is obliged to have characters enunciate story information about their past in expository dialogue that can often become unnatural and forced: ‘in my view, as soon as you’ve got a character actually talking about this stuff you’ve lost’. This can also extend to moments of historical contextualisation, where details of the era in which the drama takes place are inserted into dialogue. Coe describes this as characters needing ‘to have these conversations that they were telling each other things they already knew to give context’. She notes that while it is preferable to include scenes in which these necessary events are shown rather than discussed, budget constraints can obstruct this dramatic choice, and expository dialogue becomes more vital. Fillis’s second reason for preferring a longer timescale is that it better enables the dramatist to portray the ‘journey’ the character goes on, but to do this ‘you have to look at some perspective’. Taking a longer view of the life therefore enables the dramatist to chart the

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changes that occur to a biographee through experience and maturity. The primacy of showing over telling and the importance of a character’s journey are also recurrent features of advice from screenwriting professionals (McKee 1998; Field 2005; Vogler 2007). Both the ‘character study’ and the ‘timeframe’ approaches to the construction of the single dramas are answers to the problem of how to organise the chaos of a life story within the limits of a ninety-minute to two-hour story length. Both require compromise: in ‘timeframe’, the story is likely to become more impressionistic and the causal links between sequences less pronounced; within the ‘punctual moment’, contextualising information may need to be ‘told’ rather than ‘shown’, sometimes in expository dialogue that can be clumsy or ring untrue. A different solution to the problem of how to account for the complexity of a life using television storytelling is to present the story over the course of multiple episodes, in the format of the multi-episode mini-series or series.

4.4   Serial (Miniseries) By comparison to the single drama, the serial format, wherein a story is told over the course of two or more episodes, offers more room for narrative experimentation. One of the problematic aspects of analysing television drama structure is a lack of agreement on what constitutes a miniseries, series or serial. The term ‘serial’ in the UK is a near-synonym for the US term ‘miniseries’, used to describe a single, finite story told over the course of several episodes, but with a clear narrative end point. As Glen Creeber points out, this storytelling format ‘simply in terms of hours alone… can produce a breadth of vision, a narrative scope and can capture an audience’s involvement in a way equalled by few contemporary media’ (2001: 441). He suggests that there are two distinctive characteristics of the television serial/miniseries: ‘intimacy’, in the depth of knowledge that audiences develop about characters, and ‘continuity’, the strong level of narrative connection between episodes and sense of progression towards an ending. Both these features of the miniseries/serial format are apt for the telling of life stories, since the biographical drama seeks to dramatise the development of a self who the viewer comes to know intimately, and whose story is sustained throughout the drama. Serial storytelling for television has come to be associated with the genre that most prominently uses it, the soap opera, and has historically been viewed with some scepticism (Newman and Levine 2011). This has been one of the reasons that

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the suitability of the form for the representation of ‘serious’ historical subject matter has been critiqued. Creeber argues that the ability of this finite narrative structure to sustain ‘multi-narrative strands’ and ‘sub-plot digressions’ makes it more, not less, appropriate to the dramatisation of complex historical narratives: the television serial or mini-series can transform history so that it gradually becomes identifiable, empathetic and discursive to a mass audience. … The television drama serial inherently celebrates the ‘seriousness’ of our personal lives and in doing so continues to have a unique role to play in the contemporary portrayal and understanding of history and personal experience. (Creeber 2001: 453)

Creeber concludes that the mini-series is an ‘ideal vehicle’ for understanding history as memory and experience. In its enhanced ability to relate the personal to the political, the miniseries/serial format seems particularly appropriate to the biographical drama. In serial formats, the greater number of minutes elapsed in the telling of the story reduces the pressure to, as Coe puts it, present ‘someone’s life tied up for you with a bow’. Pacing and narrative structure can therefore be more exploratory and contemplative. As Coe noted, for her drama Life in Squares (BBC Two, 2015), a dramatisation of the lives of the Bloomsbury group, ‘it became much more a reflection about the passage of time really. In that sense, it was the antithesis of, you know, writing that three-act structure in 90 minutes’. The three-part episodic structure of the miniseries supports this meditation on time and memory, because it enables three distinctive interactions between the three periods portrayed in the drama. These eras represent the creative and intellectual development of Virginia (Lydia Leonard/Catherine McCormack) and Vanessa Stephen (Phoebe Fox/Eve Best) between 1905 and the end of World War One, the open marriages of the sisters to Clive Bell (Sam Hoare/Andrew Havill) and Leonard Woolf (Al Weaver / Guy Henry), their relationships with Duncan Grant (James Norton/Rupert Penry-Jones), and their attempt at creating an enclave in the countryside to retreat from political realities in the 1930s and 1940s. A flashforward device (moving between the first and third timeframes) is introduced at the end of episode one and maintained throughout episode two, whereas episode three, which is set largely in the third era, uses flashbacks to relate current events to the previous episodes. The use of a different set of actors to portray characters in the later era

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manage helps to manage visually the complex set of familial and sexual relationships and maintain a sense of temporal order. This narrative device allows the drama to chart the later repercussions of life choices made by the younger ‘selves’. The use of ana- and prolepsis enables an exploration how these personalities develop over time. The serial is able to represent in some depth the relationships that became central to Vanessa’s sense of self, and the tragic recurrence of mental illness that would claim Virginia’s life. This is supported by the three episode structure, since the first episode is used to establish the group dynamic, the second to explore the relationship between past and present and to develop recurrent themes, and the third to consider how events from earlier in the protagonists’ lives affected their choices and attitudes in later life. The serial needs to attend not only to the overarching meaning of the life story, but also to find within this life a series of events that fit the needs of television storytelling, especially the requirement of regular dramatic climaxes to sustain viewer engagement within and across multiple parts. One method for handling the life story within the narrative structure of the series is to divide up the story itself into episodic narrative units in a manner analogous to the use of chronological ‘chapters’ to divide up a life in written biography. This approach was commonly taken in biographical serials of the 1970s, such as Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill (Thames, 1974), Lillie (LWT, 1978) and Nancy Astor (BBC Two, 1982). The latter is an eight-part dramatisation of the life of the first female MP to sit in the House of Commons. Episode one traces Nancy’s (Lisa Harrow) adolescence in Virginia, in a family that is aristocratic but poor. Themes that will recur throughout the series are introduced in the opening episode, such as Nancy’s religiosity, strongly held (often unpopular) opinions and, in a common trope of the period drama, the need for her to marry into money and inherit her wealth and power from a man. Her first husband Bob Shaw (Pierce Brosnan) is introduced at the end of the episode, leaving a narrative aperture between episodes, and presenting an enigma: how will this relationship develop? Ending on ‘cliffhangers’, even mild ones, is a typical means of maintaining audience interest, and ending this episode here provides an artificial disjuncture between two chapters in Nancy’s life. The cliffhanger structure abides by the conventional preference in television storytelling for the ‘form of the dilemma rather than that of resolution and closure’ (Ellis 1992: 154). The next episode traces the courtship, wedding and early (unsuccessful) marriage of the couple, while episode three focuses on the collapse of their union due to Shaw’s

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drinking and adultery. The death of Nancy’s mother at the end of this episode is the transition to a new phase in the drama, as the next episode dramatises Nancy’s passage to England and a marriage proposal from aristocratic Waldorf Astor (James Fox). The first half of the series has been taken up with setting up Nancy’s personality traits—intelligence, flirtatiousness and determination—which are shown in subsequent episodes to be crucial to her later life in politics. John Ellis’s (1992) important contribution to the structural analysis of television storytelling is to note that television narrative works segmentally, dividing stories up into smaller, sequentially connected units that have an internal coherence of their own. An episode is the sum of a number of these sections, and a programme provides a loose level of unity between segments, enabling a sense of narrative progression. Within an episode, then, there is a reasonable expectation that a narrative will contain customary cause-and-effect, equilibrium-disruption structures associated with a larger narrative unit, even where it comprises of smaller segments. For drama broadcast on commercial stations, the placement of advertising breaks offers a useful tool for identifying these narrative units, since each break requires a moment of brief resolution as well as the opening of a new potential enigma for the return of the drama. For the biographical drama, this requires the organisation of life story information to have the greatest affective drive, especially at the closure of parts and of episodes. Cilla (ITV, 2014) provides a useful example for exploring this dynamic between the life story and the commercial drama structure. The first episode introduces Cilla Black (Sheridan Smith) as a working-class Liverpool girl with a musical talent, who becomes known for singing at various nightclubs. She begins a relationship with Bobby (Aneurin Barnard), who becomes her manager, and has an opportunity to meet with Brian Epstein (Tom Stoppard), who manages The Beatles, the band in which her friend Ringo (Tom Dunlea) plays the drums. In the climactic ending of the first episode, Cilla flunks an audition for Epstein, sobbing to her friends that she has ‘blown it’, and returning in resignation to secretarial work. In the second episode, Cilla picks herself back up and with Bobby’s encouragement begins to appear on stage again. By the end of the first part, she is approached by Epstein to become her manager. The concluding two parts of the episode are mirror images of one another. In part three, Cilla is captured in the process of recording a single. The recording is not successful, as she is nervous in the studio and hindered by criticisms of her strong

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accent. Cilla returns home, running to a payphone to receive a call in which she discovers that her single has flopped. When she discusses it with Epstein, she voices the overarching narrative theme of the segment, that her class status is impeding her success: ‘I’m not classy enough am I? Who wants to hear a girl with a funny nose from Scotty Road?’. The part ends with Brian finding a new song for her, against Bobby’s wishes. This raises a narrative enigma for the final section of this episode: will Cilla be more successful under Brian’s management than she has been thus far with Bobby? The concluding part of the episode begins with a repetition of the recording studio location. This time, however, the camera does not stay with Cilla, but with Bobby who paces nervously outside. The choice not to follow Cilla’s progress in the studio raises the question of what happened in this recording. Cilla then waits nervously at the same payphone portrayed earlier to learn about the success or failure of her second record. The re-iteration of these images from the earlier segment endows this gesture with greater emotional weight, as Cilla may or may not be disappointed as before. When she quietly tells Bobby that her record has gone to number one, her ballad ‘Anyone Who Had A Heart’ starts to play on the soundtrack. This initiates a flashback, in which Cilla flawlessly performs the song in the recording studio. Withholding this moment of performance enables this episode to finish with triumphal flourish, which is underpinned by the song’s gradual build to a stirring finish. This affective climax for the middle episode of the series provides a dramatic peak that coincides with the most successful moment of Cilla’s musical career. The concluding episode of Cilla is more downbeat than the others, tracing Epstein’s decline and eventual death by suicide. Ending on a moment of tragedy provides a familiar rise-and-fall structure adopted by many biographical dramas. In this case, since Cilla Black enjoyed a consistent level of success through her career, the ‘fall’ is displaced onto a secondary character rather than Cilla herself. Cilla’s episodic structure demonstrates how the life story is arranged to fit commercial television’s requirements of regular narrative climaxes, particularly at the end of episodes. The miniseries/serial form provides greater opportunity than the single drama for narrative experiment, meditation on time and memory, and thematic reiteration. The series format, which increases the number of episodes and thus the amount of story time, enhances these affordances, allowing for greater numbers of incidents from the life to be dramatised over the course of a series run.

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4.5   Series Distinguishing between series and serials has become more complicated over time because of changes in television’s industrial and technological infrastructures. This is especially true in the United States, where the influences of cable and satellite first, then streaming services second, have instituted more variety in narrative strategies for television drama (Jenner 2016, 2018; Kelly 2017). We should question teleological accounts of television history that posit earlier generations of dramatic storytelling as predictable and formulaic because of the medium’s need to generate mass appeal, and contemporary examples of the (seemingly endless) ‘golden age’ of television drama as intellectually rich and narratively complex thanks to the pursuit of elite or fan audiences. Especially in the British context, it is simply not the case that drama in the past was comfortable and undemanding, fitting neatly into narrative convention and industry-­ driven formulae. However, it is also true that where earlier analyses of television storytelling structures like Sarah Kozloff’s (1992) or John Ellis’s (1992) could confidently outline distinctions between different kinds of television narrative both within and between episodic structures, such classifications are no longer clear cut as storytelling strategies have changed and differences have eroded between series and serial. The series has historically been distinguished from a serial by the difference in strength of narrative continuity between episodes, with a serial assumed to develop ongoing story arcs and make strong links between episodes, where a series maintains a consistent storyworld and characters (existents, in Chatman’s terms) but prioritises the internal narrative coherence of individual episodes. As scholars such as Michael Z.  Newman (2006), Jason Mittell (2015) and Trisha Dunleavy (2017) have noted, there has been considerable hybridisation between these formats over the last thirty years, with many fiction series borrowing serialised narrative techniques as part of aesthetic experimentation and audience maintenance. Mittell describes a ‘serial’ as ‘a sustained narrative world, populated by a consistent set of characters who experience a chain of events over time’ (2015: 10 emphasis in original), which he later qualifies by adding the ‘ongoing accumulation of narrative events’ as a prerequisite for serial storytelling (23). For the purposes of this discussion, I use the term ‘series’ to refer to this kind of narrative, since this is the general term used in the UK.  However, it is important to point out that the biographical drama series discussed in this section uses many of the techniques of serial storytelling.

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Television series’ storytelling modes are apt to the dramatisation of biography for two reasons. First, the greater emphasis on character development than plot progression suits biography’s interest in the development of personality and the self. Second, the series format’s stronger tolerance for the cyclical or iterative approach to storytelling provides an answer to biographical theory’s suspicion of the imposition of narrative unity on the life course, since its more expansive narrative time can loosen these causal chains. However, as Kozloff points out, ‘television, like all narrative forms, takes advantage of the viewer’s almost unquenchable habit of inferring causality from succession’ (1992: 70). Biographical series then must balance the natural inclination of viewers towards deducing cause and effect from narrative progression, and the organisation of a life story suitable for the longer duration and re-iterative structure of episodic narrative form. John Ellis (1992) describes television storytelling as characteristically having a slighter stress on causal chains than narrative cinema, and a tendency for incidents to proliferate or be explored in greater detail. To put this in Chatman’s terms, though television storytelling does develop kernels, satellites take on a greater importance in series and serials than in short-form narratives. Kozloff (1992) describes this as displacing audience interest from the syntagmatic to the paradigmatic axis, from the flow of events to the revelation of ‘existents’. By contrast, Mittell suggests that one of the pleasures of the serialised narrative is to speculate about whether a given narrative event may turn out to be a ‘kernel’ or a ‘satellite’ (2015: 24). These seemingly contradictory impulses co-exist within series television. Television narrative pays greater attention to the paradigmatic axis (particularly the relationships between characters) than conventional ‘classical’ structures, yet it still depends on viewer supposition about the significance of events to maintain narrative interest. Indeed, in series television, events that are satellites in one episode may become kernels for later episodes. An example of this plays out in season two of The Crown (Netflix, 2016–). In the first episode of the series, Elizabeth (Claire Foy) finds a miniature portrait of a ballet dancer among the personal effects of her husband Philip (Matt Smith), which arouses her suspicions of his infidelity. This is an important moment for the underlying theme of this episode, as it prompts Elizabeth to doubt the stability of her marriage. It is a narrative satellite, though, inasmuch as it does not have any direct effect on the subsequent events in this episode. In episode ten, the portrait reappears, as Elizabeth presents it to Philip as evidence that she knows of his extra-marital affairs. The picture takes on additional

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narrative weight, and Elizabeth’s discovery of it retrospectively becomes a kernel event. Such reliance on viewer memory and attention is a core component of what Mittell calls ‘complex’ television drama—a form of dramatic storytelling that combines series structure with serial storytelling techniques1. These include the purposeful retardation of narrative information to construct narrative enigmas for audiences to deliberate over, the development of multiple synchronous plotlines with high levels of inter-episodic continuity, large casts and the creation of a deep and expansive diegesis. If this description sounds rather like the storytelling principles associated with serial narrative’s historically dominant form, the soap opera, that is because many of the narrative strategies borrowed by ‘golden age’ dramas are utilised by the older genre. Yet, as Michael  Z.  Newman and Elana Levine (2011) point out, a discursive critical distance is kept between ‘quality’ dramas and the soap operas for the purposes of ‘cultural legitimation’. Trisha Dunleavy (2017) uses the term ‘complex serial’ to refine Mittell’s definition and distinguish the storytelling strategies of ‘high-end’ drama from other dramatic formats, noting the importance of their conception as serials in limiting their ability to endure indefinitely. Similarly, however dense and complex they are, life stories are finite. The narrative approach taken by contemporary biographical series like Victoria and The Crown falls somewhere between the expansive world but loose continuity of the soap opera and narrative complexity in the form of the elliptical, enigmatic and achronological structures of the serials Mittell and Dunleavy analyse. In keeping with ‘complex’ television drama, these series display significant narrative freedom in varying the amount of story time elapsed within and between episodes, in opposition to the neat packaging of story events into consistent units associated with both classical storytelling models and traditional series form. Mittell observes that ‘the essential structure of serial form is a temporal system with story instalments parcelled out over time with gaps between entries through a strictly regimented use of screen time’ (2015: 27). He notes that there are three major temporal ‘streams’ within narratives: story time, which is the timeframe of the diegesis, how time has passed in the 1  Although Mittell’s analysis is focused on US television drama, many of his insights apply to contemporary drama from the UK as well. Indeed, as Nelson (1997) and Vidal (2014b) note, there has been considerable transatlantic convergence in storytelling forms in television drama.

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world of the story. For biographical dramas, ‘story time’ might include all the relevant events in the life of the biographee, but there is an additional underlying layer of ‘story time’ we might call ‘history time’, the unfolding of worldly events that coincide with the life of the biographee. There is then ‘discourse time’, which is the temporal structure of the story as told within the narrative. The necessity of ellipsis to remove redundancy, the use of devices like flashback and the deliberate retardation of story material mean that story time and discourse time are by necessity different. Some of the largest controversies about ‘unfaithful’ biographical storytelling have been related to disparities or alterations between ‘story time’ and discourse time (see Chap. 6). The final temporal stream is ‘narration time’, which is the framework involved in telling and receiving stories. Whereas in written storytelling forms, this can be variable and depends on the reader, in television it is controlled tightly, dictated by the schedule or format requirements of broadcasters/distributors. Mittell calls it ‘screen time’ to better capture the specificity of television as a medium as part of the narrative experience. For the biographical drama, the ‘screen time’ elapsed may be fixed, but apportioning the story time/history time between episodes is a dramatic choice. The history time covered in episodes of The Crown varies greatly between episodes, related to the internal logic of the episode and its strategic function within the series. While the driver of time covered is often the desire to represent historical events, there can also be character-driven motivation. For example, ‘Tywysog Cymru’ (S3, E6) depicts Prince Charles’s (Josh O’Connor) efforts to learn Welsh so he can deliver his address in the language at his investiture as the Prince of Wales. It begins with the Queen (Olivia Colman) being encouraged by Prime Minister Harold Wilson (Jason Watkins) to send Charles for a term at Aberystwyth University, and progresses through the roughly ten-week period in which he is tutored in the language. The length of a university term provides a clear logic for the choice of story time elapsed. Limiting the historical time covered in this episode allows for the ‘character study’ approach to Charles, observing how he begins to interact with a (sometimes hostile) public, to engage in self-improvement and to bristle at the requirements of duty, particularly that his own voice should be censored for the sake of his public role. This has a broader purpose in the series as a whole: to introduce the adult Charles, who will become a significant character in subsequent episodes. Other episodes take place over the course of several years, notably the introduction to the series ‘Wolferton Splash’, which covers the

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period from Elizabeth and Philip’s wedding in 1947 to just before the death of George VI (Jared Harris) in 1952. The more expansive time covered in this episode enables the series to set up the ‘world’ in which the events take place, to establish, for example, the arcane constitutional protocols which will recur throughout the series as a source both of conflict and, at times, humour. It also sets up some of the series’ key themes: a tension between desire and duty, the sacrifice of personal life to public office, and the strain that Elizabeth’s institutional power over her husband puts on their marriage, especially in the light of Philip’s regressive attitudes to gender roles. The restriction of time to several days is used strategically in ‘Aberfan’ (S3 E3), as narrative tension is constructed through Elizabeth’s slowness to react appropriately—in terms of the timeliness and sensitivity of her response—to an industrial disaster in which 116 children died. The number of days after the disaster is counted in onscreen titles, emphasising the passage of time as the cause of dramatic conflict throughout the episode. Each of these examples demonstrates that the apportioning of history time in the series is dictated as much by dramatic requirements as it is by the unfolding of the events that are represented in the series. Like The Crown, Victoria (ITV, 2016–) combines ongoing story arcs, usually focused on developing relationships between characters, with a weekly episodic story ‘theme’ usually borrowed from a specific historical event, such as the inadequate British response to the Irish potato famine in ‘Faith, Hope and Charity’ (S2, E6). Longer story arcs can take place over the course of a series, such as the (speculative) tragic romance between Lord Alfred Paget (Jordan Waller) and Drummond (Leo Suter) that develops during the second series. Borrowing a convention from television period dramas since the 1970s (Leggott and Taddeo 2015), the series portrays both ruling and working-class life by dramatising the events in the lives of the royal family and their servants. The romance between Victoria’s dresser Mrs Skerrett (Nell Hudson) and the palace chef Francatelli (Ferdinand Kingsley), for example, provides a multi-season arc and a point of strong narrative continuity as an important sub-plot. This culminates in the third series with Skerrett’s death from cholera as the result of drinking contaminated water in a tonic for her pregnancy (S3, E4). This climax to the longstanding plot of their romance, marriage and her pregnancy ties in with the thematic story covered in the episode, which follows the efforts of members of the medical profession to persuade the political establishment that infected water is the source of a cholera outbreak. Focusing on relations between servants endows the series with

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considerable creative freedom, as these are largely undocumented and therefore indisputable lives. As Virginia Woolf observed, the same could hardly be said of Victoria: Everything she did, almost everything she thought, was a matter of common knowledge. No one has ever been more closely verified and exactly authenticated than Queen Victoria. The biographer could not invent her, because at every moment some document was at hand to check his invention. (2008: 119)

Goodwin (2017) notes that Victoria is fiction rather than biography, and the product of her ‘imagination’ as much as the historical record. Fictionalising Victoria permits a level of character development that befits the series narrative structure. Both The Crown and Victoria are able to use the temporal generosity of a multi-series structure to attend to a feature of biographical stories usually elided from shorter narrative formats: the cyclical and repetitive nature of human lives. A good example of this is the recurring theme in both series of the emasculation felt by the husbands of queens. A narrative pattern develops: the consort expresses frustration at the limitations of his position, and dissatisfaction with the reversal of gender roles between himself and his wife. The Queen is then obliged to ameliorate the situation, either through endowing him with responsibilities or with an honorary role. In The Crown, this manifests itself in Philip’s attempt to co-ordinate his wife’s coronation in ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ (S1, E5); in Elizabeth’s decision to confer on him the titular duties of Prince to give him greater authority and respect in ‘Lisbon’ (S2, E3); and in his fascination with the achievements of American astronauts and feelings of inadequacy channelled into the passion project of developing a religious academy in the grounds of Windsor Castle in ‘Moondust’ (S3, E7). Victoria develops the idea in episodes such as ‘The Queen’s Husband’ (S1, E6), in which Albert (Tom Hughes) expresses the need for a ‘position’, and finds one in the political project of opposing slavery; in ‘Warp and Weft’ (S2, E2) as he modernises the running of Buckingham palace, placing him in conflict with the staff there; or in the ongoing plotline in Series 3 of his creation of the Great Exhibition, a project that puts him at risk of ridicule but ultimately is a success. These examples demonstrate how series narrative structures enable the establishment and reiteration of ongoing biographical themes. Such repetitions are helpful in constructing and deepening biographical characters. They also

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provide a response to a challenge of biographical storytelling identified by Hughes: ‘lives don’t make sense…you go round in circles, you make the same mistake over and over again….nobody’s life is a story’ (2017). Adapting biographical stories to the series format has obvious theoretical advantages: the expansion of time to enable subtleties of character to emerge, the ability to use re-iteration to indicate the cyclical nature of human lives and the lack of a coherent, unified structure to the life course, the ability to recall a longer narrative history, enabling resonances and atavisms from both the course of the series and a broader, exterior historical narrative. The messiness of biography suits the looser causality but maintained continuity associated with long form television. Multiple series also allow these programmes to mark changes in the life course, and, as is particularly explored in season three of The Crown, characters can mature and age. The depth and complexity of real human lives render them well-­ suited as subject matter for television series made in the industrial conditions of the age of ‘peak TV’ (see Chap. 1). A co-production between the BBC and HBO, Gentleman Jack exemplifies this trend for biographical drama as high-end transnational content. The following comparison between its translation of the biography over multiple episodes and the telling of the story in a single unit illustrates the impact of narrative format on biographical television drama’s reconstruction of the life course.

4.6   ‘The main topic of any given conversation’: Two Anne Listers Anne Lister was a local celebrity during her lifetime (1791–1840), a polymath autodidact, adventurer and entrepreneur. In 1826, she inherited Shibden Hall, a major estate on the outskirts of Halifax in the north of England. She successfully managed the estate and later took the commercial risk of having coal mines constructed on the site. She was a social climber and elitist, who described the nouveau riche in the West Riding of Yorkshire as ‘vulgar’ and opposed the enfranchisement of the working class. She fastidiously inscribed her experiences in a journal that came to over 4 million words, some of which was encrypted in a self-devised cipher. When the script was decoded, it was found to describe in scintillating detail Lister’s romantic and sexual experiences with various women, including Mariana Lawton, who agreed initially to a monogamous partnership with her but rescinded this offer and married a much older,

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wealthier man for security; Isabella ‘Tib’ Norcliffe, who, like Anne, refused to conform to the expectations of her gender, but was ill-disciplined and often drunk; and Ann Walker, a rich heiress with whom Lister would eventually settle into a marriage-like arrangement between 1834 and Anne’s death in 1840. Lister used the code in her diary to hide this socially unsanctioned part of her life from public view. The exposure of these activities, as is sometimes indicated in the diary, could be ruinous for her and for her lovers. Yet, safely removed from these events 150 years in the future, they were deciphered, edited and published by historian Helena Whitbread. The diaries then became, as Caroline Crampton (2013) puts it, ‘the lesbian Dead Sea Scrolls’. The depth of detail in the diaries, and the complexity of Lister as a figure, renders her, in writer Sally Wainwright’s words, ‘a gift to a dramatist’ (Wainwright in Choma 2019: 8). There have been two biographical dramas about Anne Lister on British television. The first to be broadcast was The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister, a television film starring Maxine Peake which explores Anne’s relationships with Mariana (Anna Madeley), Tib (Susan Lynch) and Ann (Christine Bottomley) from the 1820s until the mid-1830s. Secret Diaries writer Jane English noted the limitations of the television film format in creating a portrait of a personality as complex as Anne Lister: ‘with 90 minutes, our drama could only ever be an impression of Anne’s life’ (English 2010). Without the luxury of time to explore all the facets of Lister’s life, the drama must compress the Lister story, and thus focuses only on Anne’s romantic relationships, especially the ‘love triangle’ between Anne, Tib and Mariana. This broadly follows the shape of this relationship, which continues after Mariana’s marriage through intense (sometimes coded) correspondence and orchestrated trysts in hotel rooms. The story is constructed in a three-act structure. The two turning points that herald the opening of a new act are, first, Mariana’s marriage and, second, her brutal rejection of Anne during a fateful trip to Scarborough. The drama’s tonal register is romantic, drawing on generic conventions for period drama. For example, in an invented scene, Anne’s business rival and antagonist Christopher Rawson (Dean Lennox  Kelly) offers her a marriage of convenience to join their estates. She refuses him, exclaiming that she ‘couldn’t possibly marry without [love]’. Anne’s refusal of Rawson is framed as an illustration of her desire to settle with a woman and to construct a ‘marriage’ for herself in these circumstances, which is a genuine feature of the diaries.

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With great prescience, English suggested in 2010 that ‘to tell [Lister’s] story fully would take a 10-part returning drama series’. Nine years after Secret Diaries, the BBC broadcast Gentleman Jack, though it had only eight parts in its first series. Although it has more expansive screen time, the story time covered is less than that in Secret Diaries, roughly, the eighteen-­month period between Anne’s (Suranne Jones) re-introduction to Ann Walker (Sophie Rundle) and their ‘wedding’ ceremony. The greater screen time allows the series to attend to more of Anne Lister’s personality beyond her sexual life, and consequently it portrays her business dealings, the sinking of her own coal pits and her travels to Europe. In doing so, the series presents more of Lister’s complexity; her negative traits as well as her admirable qualities. In this sense, it shares with other ‘complex’ dramas the propensity to create three-dimensional, ethically ambivalent protagonists, sometimes described as ‘antiheroes’. Mittell (2015) describes variants of this kind of character as the selfish but ultimately redeemable hero and the arrogantly superior but moral figure. He highlights the importance of charisma to help the viewer overlook these characters’ negative qualities. These descriptions fit Gentleman Jack’s Anne precisely. Christopher Rawson (Vincent Franklin) is presented as an outright villain who is responsible for a carriage accident that costs a young boy his leg and for stealing coal from the Listers’ land. In him, the series invokes the trait from complex television of ‘relative morality’, in which Anne’s questionable attributes compare favourably to the more unsympathetic character of her nemesis. Wainwright’s original intention with Gentleman Jack was to dramatise the lives of the people who lived in and around Shibden Hall, which was the series’ working title. These ambitions are exposed in subplots in Gentleman Jack which, as in Victoria, explore the lives of the servants and tenants of Shibden Hall, but the focus of the series is clearly Anne Lister. In the first episode, her sister Marian (Gemma Whelan) observes that Anne ‘always manages to inveigle herself into becoming the main topic of any given conversation’. This appears to be a wry admission of the writing process for the series from Wainwright’s point of view: ‘as I continued to write it, it just always seemed to come back to her’ (Spencer 2019). The series therefore became biographical through Wainwright’s creative process, which included a collaboration with historian Anne Choma to decode the Lister diaries. As she observed, the process of writing is distinct from other forms of adaptation: ‘It’s not an adaptation of a novel that’s got a beginning a middle and an end and characters mapped out very clearly and

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bits of dialogue already suggested. …It’s from a journal which is a different kind of document altogether’ (Spencer 2019). The importance of the journal in the construction of Anne as a character is highlighted in the title sequences of both dramas. For Secret Diaries, the title is superimposed over a romantic extreme long-shot of Anne careening down a windy moor towards her lover. The words ‘Miss Anne Lister’ are shown initially, and very briefly, in code, before they evaporate to reveal the English translation. This suggests the centrality of the diary and its codes to Anne’s true identity. This concept is more elaborately visualised in the Gentleman Jack’s titles. The letters, numerals and other symbols of the code dissolve in and out of the background of quick, dynamically edited images of costumed body parts—a booted foot, a pantalooned waist, a ringed finger pulling black leather gloves through hands. The title sequence evokes Anne dressing herself for public effect, putting on her identity, while simultaneously her most private expressions are overlaid on screen through the diary entries. The sequence concludes with a close-up of Anne’s dark eye, looking defiantly to camera, while the skin on her face is tattooed with her own writings. This encapsulates the aim of the drama: to revivify Anne Lister via her own writing, to create a story from a life, and a character from her personality. In Secret Diaries, Anne is repeatedly shown writing in her journal, with her writing desk as an important recurring prop. The diary is reproduced in voiceover format, often in near-verbatim quotation. English argues that the use of Anne’s own words in this manner is an ethical gesture, a compensation for the publicisation of her private life that the drama engages in: The voiceover which runs through the drama is comprised from Anne’s own words. Anne wrote her most intimate thoughts in an elaborate code. As I was ransacking them and broadcasting them to the nation, I felt it only fair that Anne should tell her own story. (English 2010).

Featuring the composition of the diaries within the drama is a means of stylistically handing back some control of her story to Anne. Gentleman Jack features much less direct quotation from the diaries, and they appear on screen rarely. Like in Secret Diaries, voiceovers often reconstruct the diary’s function of emotional outlet, enabling Anne to voice her feelings about a situation. For instance, in the opening episode, as Anne surveys Shibden from a hill, captured in an extreme long shot, her voiceover states ‘I have been an Icarus, and now I must crash down to Earth… Shabby

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little Shibden, and my shabby little family’. Diary voiceovers also occasionally contain crucial plot information, like character goals: ‘Should I stay here at Shibden, and endeavour to make wealthy little Miss Walker my wife?’ The diary format is also remediated in a more ambitious way in the series, by having Anne speak directly to camera (see Chap. 3). The use of direct address reproduces the intimacy of the diary format, and its placement at the boundary of public and private. Addressing the viewer implicates them in an intimate bond with Anne, drawing them into her perceptions of the world. While Secret Diaries arranges its compressed narrative into a tightly plotted three-act structure, Gentleman Jack has the more complicated task of constructing a serial narrative out of a shorter story time. The series manages multiple levels of narrative continuity: within episodes, between episodes and across series arcs. There are also multiple plot lines. The two dominant plots concern Anne and Ann’s uncertain courtship, and Anne’s decision to sink a coal pit on her land, sparking a rivalry with the Rawsons. These are intertwined, because Anne is dependent on a loan from Ann to finance her business endeavours. At the end of episode five, roughly the halfway point of the series, Anne and Ann end their engagement. Ann reiterates her offer of a loan, which Anne rejects for fear of exploiting her ex-lover. Anne is then beaten as she strides home by a man who warns her to ‘leave Miss Walker alone’. This is a recreation of an event that befell Lister in November 1832 (Choma 2019: 174), though the warning is an invention made for narrative expediency. It is a crucial moment that provides a climax for two story arcs that have continued throughout the early part of the series, as well as tying these two major plot lines together. Anne’s ability to sink her pit is dependent on the outcome of her relationship with Ann. Constructing this storyline entailed a slight chronological re-ordering of the events of Lister’s life. The needs of story development here take precedence over the precise re-creation of the life. Another method of serialisation is the addition of fictional subplots concerning the lives of other residents of Shibden, as was Wainwright’s initial intention for the series. The two main subplots trace the story of Anne’s lady’s maid Eugenie (Albane Courtois), who arrives with her mistress from Paris secretly pregnant. With the help of housemaid Cordingley (Rosie Cavaliero), who translates for her in pidgin French, another servant Booth (Thomas Howes) offers to marry her and take responsibility for the baby. She agrees but calls off the engagement after a miscarriage. The second, more substantial subplot follows the story of Thomas Sowden

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(Tom Lewis), the hardworking, sober son of a problem tenant of the Shibden estate. Seeing that his family risks homelessness because his alcoholic father antagonises Anne (his landlord), Thomas kills him and pretends he has absconded to America. Thomas later falls in love with and marries Suzannah (Amy James-Kelly), the daughter of Samuel Washington (Joe Armstrong), steward for both Anne and Ann’s estates. A third micro-­ plot sees Marian Lister engage in an unsatisfactory courtship with brash businessman Mr Abbott (John Hollingworth), of whom Anne snobbishly disapproves because his wealth is sourced from trade rather than land. These subplots expand Gentleman Jack’s cast of characters, enabling the series to fill out the expanded story time of an episodic series. The subplots also provide narrative relief from the two dominant plotlines and are weaved carefully among them throughout the series. Subplots are not simply adjuncts to the overarching romance/business plotlines. Each one is thematically linked to the main storyline, because they represent different approaches and attitudes to marriage. Eugenie enters readily and carelessly into an engagement for self-protection. This parallels Mariana’s marriage of convenience, highlighted as such in episode one, when she suggests to Anne that she too should marry for a title and money. As with Rawson’s proposal in Secret Diaries, this prompts Anne to exclaim her intention to marry only for love. Eugenie shares with Anne her cold-hearted practicality (rejecting Booth once her pregnancy is over) but does not have the luxury of independent income to enable her to marry for love. Marian’s failed attempt to find a husband shows her desperation to engage in the rituals of polite society, but she also makes it clear in early episodes that her intention to marry is also a means of compensating for what she sees as Anne’s unjust sole inheritance of Shibden. Marian wields her ability to marry as a threat to her sister, since if she can produce an heir, Anne’s claim on the estate is no longer sound. Thomas Sowden’s ruthlessness and pragmatism mirror Anne’s, and she intervenes in his story because she sees him as having a ‘nobility of character that belies his lowly birth’. This patronising assessment gives a glimpse into Anne’s elitist sensibilities and social conservatism: Thomas is favoured because, unlike his father, he is abstemious, obedient and knows his place. His story acts as a narrative satellite which reveals crucial existents concerning Anne’s personality. Thomas’s courtship of Suzannah takes place over the course of the second part of the series, culminating in their marriage. In the final moments of the concluding episode of season one, scenes from this wedding are juxtaposed with the sequence in which Anne

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and Ann take the sacrament together, a religious observance that they have agreed marks the beginning of their marriage. Combining the two events together is a means of underlining the legitimacy of the same-sex wedding, co-opting the festive spirit and more traditional signifiers of marriage from the Sowden wedding for the more solemn ceremony undertaken by Anne and Ann. The Sowden marriage is a love-match, and its alignment with Anne and Ann’s wedding implies that, although this partnership is socially and financially advantageous, it is primarily one of romantic attachment. The life of Anne Lister is rich in story, to such an extent that many more than two treatments could be made of it. The differences in approach, particularly the divergent inventions and inaccuracies, between Secret Diaries and Gentleman Jack indicate that the needs of dramatic plotting are the primary drivers of story decisions in the writing of these series. The events of the life are secondary. Secret Diaries’ shorter screen time necessitates a greater compression of events, more selectivity and the shaping into a story which dramatically engineers ‘breaking points’ to construct acts. The drama addresses, and rejects, narrative avenues that derive from generic convention, especially around marriage as a pragmatic and romantic decision. Gentleman Jack’s longer screen time enables it to engage in the techniques associated with ‘complex’ television dramas, especially the tolerance for contradictory and negative personality traits in protagonists and the development of multiple plotlines in expansive casts. This allows a viewer to take a broader view of Anne’s world and her place in it, offering an opportunity for biographical storytelling to take the more nuanced, less contrived approach supported by most biography theorists. This is not to say that the series is devoid of story, since it is intricately plotted to incorporate dominant storylines and thematically linked subplots which support a view of the biographee from multiple angles.

4.7   Conclusion Television’s specific narrative formats require varied approaches to biographical storytelling which depend as much on the formula-driven economies of these forms as they do on the individual story told. A single drama has more in common with a feature film, from a narrational point of view, than it does with a serial or series presentation of the life. Serial formats demonstrate a greater tolerance for repetition and reiteration, which, when combined with their conventional focus on intimacy makes

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them an apt mode in which to tell biographical stories. Biographical series have made use of their more extensive discourse and screen time to expand the worlds of their biographical protagonists, and to incorporate more of the narrative ‘catalysers’ which deepen understanding of existents, especially the subjects’ personalities. As the case study of dramatisations of Anne Lister demonstrates, the longer screen time afforded to the biographical series also enables it to pursue supplementary storylines, moving beyond the intense focus on the individual towards a more expansive view of their milieu and the characters that populate it. As Gentleman Jack and Victoria both show, enlarging the biographee’s world often means creating characters that are either entirely fictional (like Thomas Sowden or Mrs Skerrett) or whose names may be real but whose stories are heavily fictionalised (like Christopher Rawson or Alfred Paget). Such constructed characters cannot be viewed straightforwardly as simply creative licence being taken with historical truth, because, as the analysis of Gentleman Jack demonstrates, they perform the narrative function of supplementing the characterisation of the biographee, providing existents that deepen the viewers’ understanding of their world. To speak of the importance of the television narrative format is to risk the unintentional evaluation of biographical dramas as formulaic. There is much variety within the biographical storytelling methods within each of the narrative structures generally available to the television drama. Biographical storytelling is a meeting of industrial narrative standards (and certain medial requirements, such as breaks for advertisements in commercial programming) with a story—or set of stories—that pre-exists its telling in this form. Biographical storytelling is therefore not only a matter of creating a compelling set of characters acting in believable ways in generically plausible situations, as is usual in television drama. It also entails processes and practices of adaptation that will be discussed in the next chapter.

References Andrews, H. (2018) ‘Real people’s lives rarely fall into a three-act structure’: Writing biographical drama for British television’ Journal of Screenwriting 9(1): 41—56. Backscheider, P.R. (1999) Reflections on Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Buonanno, M. (2008) The Age of Television. Bristol: Intellect.

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Chatman, S. (1978) Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Choma, A. (2019) Gentleman Jack: The real Anne Lister. London: BBC Books. Coe, A. (2017) Interview with author, conducted by telephone 13 February 2017. Cottan, R. (2017) Interview with author, conducted by telephone 22 February 2017. Crampton, C. (2013) ‘The lesbian Dead Sea Scrolls: Anne Lister’s diaries’ The New Statesman 5 December [online] available at https://www.newstatesman. com/culture/2013/11/lesbian-­dead-­sea-­scrolls accessed 2 December 2019 Creeber, G. (2001), ‘Taking our personal lives seriously: intimacy, continuity and memory in television drama serial’ Media Culture and Society 23(4): 439—455. Custen, G.F. (1992) Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Dicecco, N. (2015) ‘State of the Conversation: The Obscene Underside of Fidelity’ Adaptation 8(2): 161—175. Dunleavy, T. (2017) Complex Serial Drama and Multiplatform Television. London: Routledge. Ellis, J. (1992) Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video. London: Routledge English, J. (2010) ‘Anne Lister’s diaries: From page to screen’ BBC Blogs 31 May [online] available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/tv/2010/05/anne-­ listers-­diaries-­from-­page.shtml accessed 2 December 2019 Field, S. (2005) Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting. New York: Delta. Fillis, B. (2017) Interview with author, conducted by telephone 15 March 2017. Goodwin, D. (2017) Interview with author, conducted by telephone 20 March 2017. Hughes, G. (2017) Interview with author, conducted by telephone 24 February 2017. Jenner, M. (2016) ‘Is this TVIV? On Netflix, TVIII and binge-watching’ New Media and Society 18(2): 257—273. Jenner, M. (2018) Netflix and the Reinvention of Television. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Kelly, J.P. (2017) Time, Technology and Narrative Form in Contemporary US Television Drama: Pause, Rewind, Record. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Kozloff, S. (1992) ‘Narrative Theory and Television’ in Allen, R.C. (ed) Channels of Discourse Reassembled. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, pp. 67—100. Leggott, J. and Taddeo, J. (eds) (2015) Upstairs and downstairs: British costume drama television from The Forsyte saga to Downton Abbey. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. McKee, R. (1998) Story: substance, structure, style, and the principles of screenwriting. London: Methuen.

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Mittell, J. (2015) Complex TV: the poetics of contemporary television storytelling. New York: New York University Press. Nelson, R. (1997) TV Drama in Transition: Forms, Values and Cultural Change. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Newman, M.Z. (2006) ‘From Beats to Arcs: Towards a Poetics of Television Narrative, The Velvet Light Trap 58 (1): 16—28. Newman, M. Z. and Levine, E. (2011) Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status. London: Routledge. Paget, D. (2011) No Other Way to Tell It: Docudrama on Film and Television (Second Edition). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Porter, M.J., Larson, D.L.,Harthcock, A. and Nellis, K. (2010) ‘Re (de) fining Narrative Events Examining Television Narrative Structure.’ Journal of Popular Film and Television 30(1): 23—30. Powell, J. (2016) ‘Sculptors and Plumbers: the writer and television’ Journal of Screenwriting 7(3): 255 -269. Spencer, S. (2019) ‘Gentleman Jack: What major change did writer Sally Wainwright make to the series?’ The Express Online 11 June [online] https:// www.express.co.uk/showbiz/tv-­r adio/1150871/Gentleman-­j ack­bbc-­hbo-­series-­sally-­wainwright-­writer-­shibden-­hall-­anne-­lister accessed 2 December 2019. Vogler, C. (2007) The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers Third Edition. London: Pan. Woolf, V. (2008) Collected Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Adaptations

5.1   Introduction As Steven Lipkin (2011) and Thomas Leitch (2007) both point out, a text’s claim to be ‘based on a true story’ signals that it is an adaptation. Lipkin describes this as the ‘narrative of a narrative’ (128), an origin story that is crucial to both the ontology of the text and its reception. Looking on biographical drama as adaptation requires attention to the process of translation between precursor text and television text. That biographical dramas constitute adaptations is by no means a settled argument. The first part of this chapter will therefore examine the place of biography in the field of adaptation studies. The remainder will examine the process of biographical adaptation from source(s) to drama. It will consider the question: of  what are biographical dramas adaptations? Where novel to film adaptation is by no means a simple process of translation (if it were, the field of adaptation studies would be redundant), there is usually the presence of a named text of which an adaptation presents a re-versioning. This is not necessarily the case with the biographical drama, which can transform multiple sources or, apparently, none at all. What kinds of materials are utilised in the process of dramatising life stories, and how are they appealed to in the paratextual framing of these dramas? The promotion of biographical dramas frequently emphasises its derivation from various source materials, a means of paratextually re-asserting the truth claims of the texts. The chapter concludes with a case study of The Alan Clark © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Andrews, Biographical Television Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64678-3_5

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Diaries (BBC Four, 2004), a six-part serial that adapted the published journals of the controversial Tory MP into dramatic form. It will consider the ways in which the diaries—and other source materials—were translated stylistically and structurally for television drama presentation.

5.2   Adaptation and the Biographical Drama Márta Minier (2014) argues that the genre of the biopic may be viewed as adaptation par excellence. She notes that the concerns that have stimulated the debates of adaptation studies throughout its history also animate discussions of the biographical drama: concepts of fidelity (though this is more often described as ‘accuracy’ when applied to historical representation), authenticity, the relationship between text and ‘source’, and other ‘ontologically oriented debates’ (2013: 7). While the concerns that have centred adaptation studies as a field are relevant to the study of biographical drama, it does not follow that an individual text automatically constitutes an adaptation. As Minier points out, to treat the biopic as an adaptation raises the important question of what would constitute the ‘original’ or ‘source’ or, as Linda Hutcheon (2013) puts it with useful neutrality ‘adapted text’? With this in question, the biographical drama as adaptation warrants further investigation. The obvious starting point is to ask, ‘what is (an) adaptation?’ This is such a thorny question that it has generated multiple and conflicting responses over time. Sarah Cardwell begins her study, one of the few that focus exclusively on television adaptation, with this common-sense definition: ‘a film or television programme which is explicitly based on a book’ (2002: 2). This is the mainstream of tradition of adaptation studies: examinations of the transfer from page to screen of pre-existing cultural texts, usually adopting methodologies of comparative analysis which, often despite the analyst’s best efforts, prioritise ‘fidelity’ to either the letter or the ‘spirit’ of the original. As Thomas Leitch notes, much energy in adaptation theory has been devoted to studying adaptations as ‘translations and transformations, as selections and specifications, as reimaginings and imitations of literature’ (2007: 18). However, thanks to the pioneering work of scholars like Leitch and Robert Stam, there has been a broader embrace of intertextual relations in the field, including the transformation of ‘subliterary and paraliterary’ texts (Stam 2005: 45) and texts beyond film and television, including videogames, theme park rides and online video, as adaptations. This situates adaptation not as a monogamous (and

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dependent) relationship between source and adaptation but as a matrix of possible relations between texts. Dudley Andrew provides a neat encapsulation of the distinction between intertextual and fidelity-driven approaches, describing the latter as a search for the ‘vertical line that anchors a film to its literary substrate’, and postmodern approaches as concentrating on the ‘horizontal network of neighbouring texts’ (2011: 27-28). Capturing this broadening of the field, Hutcheon defines adaptations as ‘deliberate, announced, extended revisitations of prior works’ (2013: xvi). The opening of adaptation studies beyond literature raises the possibility for biographical dramas to be treated as adaptations. Cardwell (2018) describes both intertextuality and intermediality as necessary but not sufficient conditions for adaptation. She notes that adaptation is a ‘special case’ of each, arguing for intertextuality to be approached as a tool rather than an ideological position for the analysis of texts. In keeping with the ‘special case’ thesis, Hutcheon’s use of intertextuality is qualified by her insistence on maintaining a sense of the ‘adapted work’. Adaptation is an ‘extended intertextual engagement’ with this text (2013: 8), and therefore an adaptation is by nature a ‘double- or multilaminated work’ (2013: 6). To view adaptation as a mode of intertextuality has moved from the margins to the mainstream of adaptation studies, such that scholars like Nico Dicecco (2015) and Cardwell (2018) have questioned whether the openness of the field limits its ability to distinguish adaptation from other forms of intertextuality, like remaking, parody or sequels. It is possible to view the transfer to the screen of biographical stories as another example of intertextuality that stops short of being adaptation per se. The dominant textual relationship explored in adaptation studies has been the transfer to the cinema screen of the novel or play. Robert Stam (2005) notes that there is often an unspoken assumption that sources are ‘literary’, and Cardwell goes further to suggest that ‘a film is commonly understood to be an adaptation not because it adapts but because of what it adapts’ (2002: 17). This is not a promising start for the incorporation of biographical drama into adaptation theory. Much of Leitch’s discussion of films ‘based on a true story’ centres on the status of the ‘original’ upon which they are based, arguing that this constitutes a ‘master text’ or a ‘secularized, authorless Book of Life’ not coterminous with reality or the ‘truth’, yet the source of the adaptation’s ‘textual authority’ (2007: 285). He argues that the verb ‘based on’ is ambiguous, but it also suggests that there is a pre-existing story circulating about actual events that is also a

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‘true’ account of them, rather than acknowledging that story is extracted from or imposed upon events prior to their translation on screen. The ‘true story’ film falsely authenticates itself by appealing to ‘non-existent precursor texts’ and, in fact, ‘create[s] these texts through the very act of invoking them’ (2007: 302). If true story films are treated as adaptations, then the key question, rather unusual for the field, becomes ‘adaptations of what?’ Sara Brinch (2013) argues that if true story films appeal to non-existent precursor texts, either these films are not adaptations, or this argument is simply a means to evade the question of fidelity to the non-fiction text. However, in keeping with the idea of a biopic as adaptation par excellence, it could also be the case that the ‘based on a true story’ film works as a reminder of the potential multiplicity of sources for any adaptation. Biography provides a useful example of this, as there are many examples where multiple, contradictory accounts of a biographee have been published. Brinch also points out that the sources for historical film are always multiple, that there will never be a ‘single precursor text or one original’ and also that the ‘ontological status’ of the sources can differ (2013: 225). Elaine Indrusiak and Ana Iris Ramgrab describe the result of adapting multiple source texts as the composition of a ‘mosaic portrait of the character and his/her times’ (2018: 98), an account of the process that parallels the idea of portraiture as a metaphor for the work of biography discussed in Chap. 1. Biographical dramas are problematic cases for the application of adaptation theory, then, because of the mutability of the ‘adapted text(s)’. One of the defining features of adaptation analysis is to provide frameworks or taxonomies to account for the relationship between ‘original’ and adaptation. Hutcheon suggests that some knowledge of the adapted text is required for it to be understood as adaptation: To experience it as an adaptation, however, as we have seen, we need to recognise it is such and to know its adapted text, thus allowing the latter to oscillate in our memories with what we are experiencing. In the process, we inevitably fill in any gaps in the adaptation with information from the adapted text. (2013: 120—121)

While there is a clear logic to suggesting that adaptations can only make sense as adaptation with some awareness that there is an ‘original’ that is being referred to, Hutcheon’s framework implies that we consume

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adaptations in a vacuum, without the interpretive ‘airlock’ (Genette, q in Gray 2010: 25) of paratexts that signal to viewers to recognise the text as adaptation. These might include trailers, promotional videos and even reviews, each of which do serious work in situating the adaptation in relation to its precursor text(s). Viewers may come to the text with expectations about it as adaptation drawn not just from knowledge of the adapted text, but from the broader range of paratextual engagement that they may have had. Indeed, it is very common for film or television reviewers to do the comparative work between text and adapted text for us, so that deep knowledge is not a requirement. Biographical dramas are often broadcast not only with promotional fanfare, but also requisite contextualising or comparative non-fiction programming (Rolinson 2016; Andrews 2016, 2017). There are not just ‘knowing’ and ‘unknowing’ audiences, then, but degrees of knowingness, from total ignorance to scholarly appreciation. As Christine Geraghty (2008) points out, the emphasis on the ‘ceaseless whirl of references’ tends to underplay the role of genre promotion and the work of critics in providing a framework by which adaptations are recognised and understood. Hutcheon draws on hermeneutic theory, invoking the concept of a ‘horizon of expectation’, but she does not acknowledge that this horizon can be constructed through a more fleeting, less anchored relation to textual knowledge than first-hand experience of the ‘adapted text’. Indeed, biographical dramas tend to exploit the viewer’s lack of deep knowledge about the biographee, because one of the routine promises made by the genre is that it will dramatise their life ‘behind closed doors’. Like adaptations, biographical dramas must manage viewer expectations for both the familiar and the unexpected or innovative. As Imelda Whelehan notes, in adaptation this usually revolves around the interpretation of characters, which often takes precedence over other aspects of novels, such as their themes or settings (1999: 8). There is a subtle but important distinction to be made here between the adaptation of characters from pre-existing texts and the representation of biographees. In both cases, screenwriter, actor, director and production personnel collaborate to (re-)interpret their subject from a pre-existing model. As Dudley Andrew forcefully argues, the very term ‘representation’ suggests the existence of this model (2000: 29). However, whereas in the case of the adaptation it is ‘already textualized’, in Andrew’s words, this is not necessarily true of the biographical character. To see the biographical character as an ‘adaptation’ is to view human lives as texts. This is illogical. Lives leave

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traces of texts, palimpsests which leave open the endless possibility of new discoveries but are not texts themselves. There is always the possibility that a new representation of a biographee might be interpreted from undiscovered materials which reveal something of the secret of a life. This is one of the most common excuses for the publication of a new biographical text. New interpretations of characters in the adaptation are the form’s sine qua non, but these are delimited to some degree by the ‘vertical line’ between adaptation and adapted text. To discuss this link is to raise the spectre that haunts adaptation studies, fidelity. Though there have been determined efforts in the field to quash this bogeyman, the ‘axiomatic primacy and authority’ of the source text has never truly disappeared, such that the ‘rhetoric of comparison has most often been that of faithfulness and equivalence’ (Hutcheon 2013: 16). The valorisation of ‘fidelity’ to the ‘source text’ has been considered a retrograde prioritisation of word over image, replicating the culture’s suspicion of the semiotic capabilities of the moving image by comparison to the written word (Stam 2005). It is also becoming a fixture of works of academic theory to performatively disclaim fidelity as a methodology or criterion of value, which Dicecco describes as ‘fetishistic disavowal’ (2015: 165). Leitch suggests that fidelity as a primary criterion of value makes sense only when we accept that the ‘model is more valuable than the copy’(2007: 6), though this does assume that an adaptation is a ‘copy’, which would by no means be accepted in the mainstream of adaptation studies—as Hutcheon proposes, adaptation is ‘repetition without replication’ (2013: 173). Fidelity discourse, as Stam (2000), Hutcheon (2013) and Geraghty (2008) all note, is moralistic, containing an emotional component since ‘the dominant trope of faithfulness implies the possibility of betrayal and loss’ (Geraghty 2008: 11). Where many scholars have sought to avoid loaded rhetoric in their comparative analyses of adaptations, it is difficult to avoid the higher moral stakes of (in)fidelity in the case of the biographical drama. If changes to pre-existing written texts and fictional characters are considered examples of immoral tampering, it must surely be the case that unfaithful (or inaccurate) accounts of real people are a greater ethical breach (further discussed in Chap. 6). Yet, as Leitch points out, the lack of a definite precursor ‘text’ for films based on a true story means large scope for interpretation and creative licence. Here is a theoretical impasse. It seems impossible for a text to be ‘faithful’ to a story that does not pre-exist its telling in a specific form, yet there are real, and

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reasonable, public expectations for a faithful/accurate portrayal of a biographee in the biographical drama. Both Cardwell (2002, 2018) and Hutcheon suggest that a possible answer to some of the contradictions at play in the analysis of adaptations is to make a distinction between adaptation as noun—the product that we experience—and as verb, the process of transferring stories from one medial context to another: A doubled definition of adaptation as product (as extensive, particular transcoding) and as a process (as creative reinterpretation and palimpsestic intertextuality) is one way to address the various dimensions of the broader phenomenon of adaptation. (Hutcheon 2013: 22)

Whereas Hutcheon’s definition of adaptation as product seems to disqualify biographical drama, her description of the process seems apt for the genre. It is worth considering what an adapter does in relation to the biographical drama, even if we might stop short of defining a biographical drama as an adaptation. She goes on to describe the toolkit of the adapter, which she argues is the same as that of all storytellers: they actualise or concretise ideas; they make simplifying suggestions, but also amplify and extrapolate; they make analogies; they critique or show their respect (2013: 3). Each one of these activities, unsurprisingly, is undertaken by the biographer, since it is her role to construct meaning and coherence out of the complexity of a human life. One of the primary functions of the adapter is to condense a precursor text into a story form appropriate for time-based mediums like film or television, constructing what Andre Bazin calls ‘digests’ (2000: 21). Creating a story from a life necessarily entails selection and re-­interpretation along these lines, so the biographer in general, and certainly the writer of film or television biography, must undertake this task. The language of condensation implies a reduction, but many adaptation scholars are keen to point out that this is not the case: While film adaptations typically do cut and condense novels, they also add the semiotic richness of moving images, music, props, architecture, costumes, audible dialogue, and more. All of these signs are laden with cultural and symbolic resonances. (Elliott 2003: 144)

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For this reason, some adaptation scholars have suggested that the role of the adapter is one of translator between different communicative practices or ‘languages’ (Andrew 2000). Translation analogies, associated with the supposed ‘ill-considered positivism’ (Dicecco 2015: 162) of structuralism and the circular comparative analysis in fidelity criticism, are now unfashionable. But, as Cardwell (2018) points out, the abandonment of critical terminology that allows for comparisons between adapted text and adaptations risks throwing out the baby with the bathwater. There is no necessary conflict between recognising that a text may be read as an example of intertextuality and seeing that processes of intermedial translation have taken place. For the biographical drama, adaptation processes include transcoding, actualising ideas, re-interpreting, condensing and translating from a variety of sources. The text is dependent on intertextuality and will become an intertext for any future textual treatment of the biographee. But it is less clear that the biographical drama is an adaptation, because, even if we accept that adaptations have multiple potential intertexts, to be understood as an adaptation, there seems a logical requirement of a primary or dominant precursor text. This leaves an open question: what do biographical dramas adapt?

5.3   Adapting from What? Sources for Biographical Television Drama Much as the research materials on which biographies are based are varied and extensive so too are the sources from which biographical dramas adapt the stories of a life. As George Custen observes of the Hollywood biopic, ‘the kinds of source materials on which most biopics were based underscore the extent to which intertextuality in film and in print was the foundation for building a narrative of a life’ (1992: 179). One of the largest stumbling blocks in analysing these sources, though, is identifying them. Using a combination of the BBC Radio Times Genome and the BUFVC’s TV Times Archive, the Times and Guardian/Observer digital archives, and broadcaster websites, I attempted to discover the publicly named sources for each of the biographical dramatisations surveyed for this project (see Chap. 1). Nearly two thirds of these (161 of 260) had no clearly defined source specified in the listings, promotion or publicity material for their broadcast. In what remains, the ‘already textualised’ sources that can be found include plays (twenty-one), biography (twenty-two), published

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diaries (six), memoir or autobiography (nineteen), other non-fiction books (seven) and novels (five). Other named sources (twenty) are as diverse as specific interviews, ballets and even artistic works. Not having a named or publicised adapted text by no means signifies that a biographical drama is entirely fictionalised, or that sources have not been consulted. To the contrary, the publicity for many of the dramas with no specified source insists on the research that has been conducted to support the interpretation of the life that can be found in the drama. BBC press releases often foreground such claims of verification via source materials. The release for Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story (BBC Two, 2008) asserts that it is ‘based on first hand, documented accounts’, creating the sense that the film will be an intimate and accurate representation drawn from the testimony of those involved with the events portrayed, but stopping short of revealing what these accounts are (BBC Press Office 2007). In the case of Lennon Naked (BBC Four, 2010), the public availability of the research materials used by screenwriter Robert Jones is made into a virtue: ‘the material is already out there—most of the key players have written books, and Yoko and John did really live their lives in public in a strikingly unmediated way. There is a huge amount available in the public arena’ (BBC Press Office 2010a). We might dispute the oxymoronic claim that the public pronouncements and portrayals of John Lennon and Yoko Ono constitute ‘unmediated’ lives, but the underlying message of this press release is that this story is ‘out there’ for a motivated viewer to verify for him or herself. This statement points to the unauthored ‘book of life’ to assure of the fidelity of this text to it, in much the same way that Leitch (2007) argues of ‘based on true story’ films. Statements like these in publicity materials are an attempt to navigate a tricky terrain. Too much specificity about sources can leave the broadcaster open to claims of plagiarism or breach of copyright. But not naming sources means broadcasters can be (and have been) accused of transmitting fiction masquerading as fact, or as Times reviewer Leonard Buckley said of Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill (Thames, 1974) portraying ‘creatures of fiction whose factual allusions were all too obviously trimmings’ (1974: 7). Unsurprisingly, the task of discussing source materials and research with journalists and to promote dramas tends to fall to screenwriters. Equally predictably, there is often an emphasis on the thoroughness of the research, as a means of authenticating the version of the person dramatised in these texts. The press release for Worried about the Boy (BBC Four, 2010) typifies this approach, with writer Tony Basgallop noting that ‘the

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starting point is reading absolutely everything you can, talking to anyone you can, getting all the information and getting to know the person involved, finding an angle on them as well’ (BBC Press Office 2010b). One consistent point in discussions with screenwriters (including interviews I conducted for this project) on sources for biographical dramas is the desire to read widely around the subject, gaining insight from a range of published sources. In screenwriting praxis, this is known as ‘text research’ (Field 2005) and can be conducted, as Jones points out in the Lennon Naked press release, from the writer’s desk. The description of research processes is not only a matter of promotion and supporting claims to authenticity but can also be a clear marker of professional pride and ethics. In their interviews, Amanda Coe (2017), for example, expressed feeling a ‘real obligation to be as thorough as you can’, where Gwyneth Hughes (2017) noted her academic training as a historian and experience in a previous career as a journalist as influences on her research practices for writing drama. Text research is primarily a means of establishing the circumstances in which biographees lived. Daisy Goodwin described this process as ‘immersing myself in the world’ (2017), Richard Cottan (2017) called it ‘absorbing the world’ and Coe compared it to ‘metabolizing’. Conceiving a sense of the ‘narrative world’ is the starting point from which the drama flows, or as Coe poetically puts it ‘the facts are the soil from which the drama flowers’. Hughes explained that a major part of the research process for The Girl (BBC Two, 2012) was to conduct interviews with two important sources: Tippi Hedren herself, and James H. Brown, Hitchcock’s Assistant Director on The Birds. The latter she proposed as akin to a ‘journalistic exclusive’, since Brown had previously declined to speak on the record about his experiences. She explained that his account ‘stood up’ Hedren’s story. Here, she describes conducting the kinds of primary research that would be expected of the biographer. Interviews are a common practice among screenwriters, which Syd Field describes as ‘live research’ (2005: 37), but are especially valuable for biographical dramatists. Brian Fillis (2017) observed that interviewing helps the screenwriter to get a sense of a biographee’s personality, even though the materials gained from them need to be carefully managed, since accounts will necessarily be biased depending on the relationship between interviewee and subject. The screenwriter’s task, like that of a biographer, is to make judgements about how to balance conflicting versions of a biographee: ‘you try to write something that balances out the views of all parties’, Fillis argues. In conducting research

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on subjects in living memory, the decision not to interview is a significant one, with screenwriters occasionally opting against to avoid being unduly influenced by a specific point of view. For example, Vincent Tilsley, the author of television play The Death of Adolf Hitler (tx ITV/London Weekend Television, 7 January 1973), said that he had ‘deliberately avoided’ speaking to people who knew his subject because ‘what he was trying to achieve was creative historical drama, not a documentary’ (Crossman 1973: 14). This intriguingly suggests an inversion of the standard complaint of biographical drama that facts have been contaminated by fiction; here, Tilsley seeks not to complicate his dramatic vision by incorporating the interpretations of others. Cottan was offered the opportunity to meet with Gordon Brown during the research process for an unproduced biographical drama on the former prime minister, but declined: ‘because I knew that if I met him, I might feel some kind of obligation to tell the story from his point of view, which is what he would have given’ (2017). The participation of biographees and those close to them is often highlighted as part of the research process and specifically named in the publicity for programmes. ITV’s press material highlighted the close involvement of Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean in the single drama Torvill and Dean (ITV, 2018), working with both scriptwriter and actors to support the production (Bley Griffiths 2019). The smooth co-operation between drama and subjects is highlighted, expressed by actor Will Tudor as the biographees ‘giving their blessing to put our own artistic spin on it’. Of course this can equally be read as an attempt by the biographee to control the story told about them, and to restrict any negative aspects of the portrayal. Such contributors are frequently described in credits as ‘consultant’ or ‘adviser’, as in the case of Nicholas Llewelyn Davies who advised in the preparation of The Lost Boys (BBC One, 1978), a play about his family’s relationship with playwright J.M. Barrie; Nicholas Mosley, consultant on Mosley (Channel 4, 1998), a drama about his father, the prominent British Fascist; or Charmian Biggs, wife of train robber Ronnie Biggs, and the subject of Mrs Biggs (ITV, 2012). The participation of subjects or those close to them has two contradictory effects. On the one hand, it is a means of verification, an authority to which these texts can appeal for their veracity. On the other, it inevitably raises the question of whether stories have been refracted through the perspective of these participants, and therefore whether alternative points of view have been respected.

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Aside from ‘text research’ and ‘live research’, it is common for productions to appeal to the authority of the archive as a source for their version of a life. Goodwin, for example, described her delight at finding a log of the everyday activities of the royal family during her research for Victoria (ITV, 2016–): ‘it was gripping [because] it was so full of detail’ (2017). The most common kind of archival source mentioned in promotions is the letter. Letters are not only sources of information but are a valuable means of re-constructing the ‘voice’ of the biographee. For instance, two dramas about Vincent van Gogh, though made nearly forty years apart, take this approach, both ‘adapted from’ correspondence between Van Gogh and his brother Theo (Vincent the Dutchman, BBC One, 1972; Painted with Words, BBC One, 2010). Recitation from letters is a typical gesture in biographical drama as a means of capturing the essence of a personality and conveying narrative information. The use of this convention can be misleading: Carey Harrison, the writer of Freud (BBC One, 1984), admitted in a Guardian interview that, although the BBC had gone to the trouble of purchasing archive letters from the Freud estate to assist him in his three-year research process for the serial, he found them too ‘undramatic’ to use, and therefore invented the letters in the drama (Grant 1984). Coe noted that archival evidence may influence the writing of dialogue without necessitating direct quotation: ‘A lot of the lines are just slightly freestyling round writings, diary entries, letters, not because you’re like sitting there with the books open … but because you’ve really assimilated it so much’. As in the case of published biography, new archival evidence can be invoked as a justification for a new dramatic approach. For example, In Search of the Brontës (BBC Two, 2003) was described in its press release as ‘based on their letters and new research by acclaimed biographer Juliet Barker’ who also acted as a consultant (BBC Press Office 2003a). Using named historical consultants on programmes, often biographers, is another means of authenticating the drama. Other examples include Hallie Rubenhold, consultant on A Harlot’s Progress (Channel 4, 2006) and The Scandalous Lady W. (BBC Two, 2015), and Barbara Stoney, an Enid Blyton expert credited on Enid (BBC Four, 2009). Borrowing the expertise and credibility of the biographer by having them as consultants on programmes enables formal biography to be used without explicitly stating that the drama is an adaptation of this biography. Where biographies are cited as sources, it is unusual for a drama to claim that it is ‘adapted from’ a single published source. More common is the vaguer terminology of ‘based on’ or ‘inspired by’, as in Desperate Romantics

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(BBC Two, 2009) which is ‘inspired by’ Fanny Moyle’s 2009 book. The vagueness here is productive, a defensive move against accusations of infidelity and a common rhetorical strategy for adaptations in general. More specific to biographical drama, though, is the acknowledgement of multiple biographical sources for the same drama, or conversely citing the drama as ‘partly based’ on a single text. Mrs Wilson (BBC One, 2018) credits both Tim Crook’s The Secret Lives of a Secret Agent: The Mysterious Life and Times of Alexander Wilson (2010) and Alison Wilson’s memoir, later published as Before and After (2019), where Margot (BBC Four, 2009) is ‘partly based on’ Meredith Daneman’s biography of the ballerina (2005). The written biography is demonstrated at a paratextual level as a problematic type of source for an adaptation, one that needs to be qualified through vague verbal framing or through acknowledging the multiplicity of sources that can be used for the text. In short, it is rare for a biographical drama to be a ‘deliberate, announced, extended revisitation’ (Hutcheon 2013: xvi) of a named biography. There are many reasons for the reticence to directly acknowledge biography as a source. Undoubtedly the requirement to pay royalties to the author of a biography if a formal adaptation is made must be one consideration in this decision, considering the restricted budgets of many television biographical dramas. Citing multiple sources is also a means of affirming the authorship of the dramatist. Although A.N. Wilson’s biography of Queen Victoria (2014) is credited as Victoria’s ‘principal source’, Goodwin highlighted that the series represents her ‘vision of Victoria, which won’t be somebody else’s vision of Victoria’. As Carey Harrison (in Grant 1984) notes, the version of the biographee in the drama is originated by the interpretation of the writer, who is compelled to make biographical judgements: ‘there are so many differing accounts of Freud. …A biographer can weigh the evidence. A dramatist has to take sides’. ‘Taking sides’ or having a particular vision of the biographee can be the source of conflict between dramatist and the biographers, experts or surviving friends and relatives of the biographee. A case in point is the dispute between the producers of Portrait of a Marriage (BBC Two, 1990) and Nigel Nicolson, son of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson whose relationship, which included multiple, mutually agreed, bisexual extra-­ marital affairs, was the subject of the serial. The drama was based on Nicolson’s 1973 joint biography, itself partly drawn from Sackville-West’s memoirs of her affair with Violet Trefusis, which forms its core plotline. Nicolson published a double page article in The Times decrying the

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programme, and writer Penelope Mortimer, who he accused of being ‘determined to tell the story her way, not mine’ (Nicholson 1990). The executive producer, Colin Rogers, followed this up with a defence of the artistic integrity of the programme, which included assertions that Nicolson had assented to the production team having editorial control on matters of ‘taste and content’ (The Times 1990). This incident reveals the tug-of-war that can occur between multiple biographical interpretations, but it is also an example of a common issue, discussed at more length in Chap. 6: the perception of biographical drama as an assault on the reputation of the biographee. Autobiography or memoirs are also common sources for biographical dramas. Midge Gillies (2009) suggests that, though these terms are often used interchangeably, the difference is that a memoir tends to be more impressionistic, and often limited to a specific time in the life, whereas the autobiography tends to be more chronological and dependent on fact. The idea of memoirs as reflective of moments in time is borne out by their use for material for television drama, especially when these cover the childhood or young adulthood of the memoirist. Examples include The Flame Trees of Thika (Thames, 1981), a series exploring the colonial childhood of Elspeth Huxley, First Light (BBC Two, 2010), adapted from the account of Geoffrey Wellum, the youngest fighter pilot engaged in the Battle of Britain, or The Durrells (ITV, 2016–2019), adapted from Gerard Durrell’s Corfu Trilogy of memoirs about his childhood on the Greek island. Memoirs can be the source for biographical portraits of people aside from the memoirist, as in the case of Eric Fenby’s Delius as I knew Him (1936), a key source for Ken Russell’s Song of Summer (BBC One, 1968) or Joan Le Mesurier’s Lady Don’t Fall Backwards (1988), one of two main sources for the portrayal of Tony Hancock in Hancock and Joan, although in both of these cases, the memoirists also appear as characters in the drama. Dramas from autobiographical sources tend to pay greater attention to the interiority of their subject, with the point of view of the audience more firmly aligned with them. The Naked Civil Servant (ITV, 1975), Toast (BBC One, 2010), Christopher and his Kind (BBC Two, 2011) and Babs (BBC One, 2017) provide good examples of this. This tends to be signalled either by personal voiceover or, in the case of Babs, the self-conscious approach discussed in Chap. 3. Autobiographical sources tend to be translated using the syntactic shift associated with (and, in adaptation studies, often critiqued) the translation of first-person narrative to screen. In the case of both memoir and autobiography, though,

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television dramatisation provides an ontological shift from first-person recollection to a necessarily more external ‘showing’ mode (Hutcheon 2013). Diaries are named sources for a number of prominent biographical dramas, such as The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady (Central, 1984), Fantabulosa! (BBC Four, 2006) and Gentleman Jack (BBC One, 2019–). While they are a first-person form of life writing, unlike the memoir and the autobiography, diaries do not have a specifically shaped narrative structure, and by nature are, as Linda Anderson puts it, ‘unchronological and unprogressive’ (2001: 34). Diaries therefore require a dramatist to shape them not only into a narrative structure that is suitable for televisual presentation, but also to attend to familiar problems in adaptation (how to translate first-person ‘told’ narrative to supposedly objective ‘showing’ mode of cinema and television, for example). The translation of the diary from personal reflection to drama raises interrelated ontological and ethical questions. When a dramatist adapts the diary form into the drama, as with autobiography, they are creating a ‘character’ from an asserted, first-­ person ‘self’. This is a qualitative shift that requires the appropriation of voice by the writer and the performative interpretation by the actor. It also entails a series of decisions which, to a degree, ‘fix’ the multiple self from the diary into a more coherent, narrative form. According to eighteenth-­ century biographer James Boswell (via Linda Anderson), this is an inversion of the project of the diary: The journal was the private repository for those errant selves which proved inconsistent with the public character, and which must be labelled ‘out of character’ in order to maintain the ‘truth’ of the public self. Public character could be ‘fixed’ because the journal could contain and restrain any problematic ‘looseness’. (2001: 37)

The dramatisation of a diary re-publicises the private individual contained within its pages. The case study below of The Alan Clark Diaries (BBC Four, 2004) will further discuss how the diary form is shaped into televisual narrative. Biographical dramas based on novels or plays are better cases for the adaptation of ‘already textualised’ representations than most biographical dramas in the survey. Examples include I Claudius (BBC Two, 1974) based on Robert Graves’ fictionalisation of the life of the Roman emperor, Wolf Hall (BBC One, 2015), a critically acclaimed dramatisation of Hilary

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Mantel’s novels about Thomas Cromwell’s relationship with Henry VIII, or Arthur and George (ITV, 2015) adapted from Julian Barnes’s 2005 novel about Arthur Conan Doyle’s involvement in the case of George Edalji, a British-Asian man wrongly convicted of animal cruelty. Promotional materials and paratexts for these shows tended to emphasise the adapted texts prominently, suggesting that these programmes should be read as adaptations. Yet paratextual materials also draw attention to the relation between the represented figures and their real-life counterparts, in a manner that would be expected in a biographical representation. A good example is Wolf Hall, where the comparative impulse manifested itself in complaints about the historical accuracy, including the relative attractiveness of the actor to their subject, and even the size of Henry VIII’s (Damian Lewis) codpiece (Lawson 2015; Webb 2017). These cases then suggest further layers of interpretation between biographee and viewer, a good case for the palimpsestic, intertextual understanding of relations between text and adapted text. While the most usual sources for the interpretation of biographical character are written, non-verbal texts can also form part of the adaptation process. This can extend to the use of image texts—portraits, paintings, film and television clips—as sources of visual information to be adapted for the drama. Worried about the Boy provides numerous examples: imitation versions of real-life artefacts from the time such as the zines in which George (Douglas Booth) and his friends are pictured, an album cover from George’s brief stint in pop group Bow Wow Wow, and Top of the Pops studio which is reproduced faithfully, including the costumes worn by George and the other members of Culture Club. Brinch describes this kind of re-construction as a ‘visual mashup’, wherein reference to real-life cultural artefacts affirms the truth claims of the biographical dramatic text. Intertextual approaches to adaptation provide greater scope for visual referents like these to be seen as significant adaptive material, even where they complicate the idea that adaptation is not merely a transfer or copy from one medium to another. In the closeness of their facsimile of the originals on which they are evidently modelled, they reopen the question of fidelity which stubbornly refuses to dissipate. Goodwin notes that, while sources may be rigorously checked, ultimately the version of the historical figure on screen will be an interpretation, her ‘vision’ of the biographee. Dramatists’ interpretations of biographical figures may be drawn from the historical record, but they may also be influenced by a wide range of other factors—their own

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interests and preoccupations (Coe 2017), the views of the people they have spoken with as research (Cottan 2017) and their observations of other people in analogous situations (Goodwin talked of her experience as the mother of a teenage daughter as a factor in how she shaped Victoria in early episodes of the series, for example). As other screenwriters (Coe 2017; Hughes 2017) pointed out, this may begin with the script, but other contributions from actor, director, costume and set designer, make­up and hair, even legal, consultants will be brought to bear on the adaptation process. Between the multiple sources and the final ‘adaptation’ are sedimentary layers of interpretation, complicating the relationship between biographical drama and the ‘adapted text’ of a life story.

5.4   ‘A flaunting of the ego’: The Alan Clark Diaries The publication of the diaries of former Conservative minister Alan Clark in 1993 was a cultural and political sensation. Written in caustic but elegant prose, peppered with poetic and historical allusions and recklessly candid, the diaries provided an insider’s view of the machinations of government and the Conservative party, especially the events in late 1990 that precipitated the end of Margaret Thatcher’s leadership. Clark’s deeply personal account contained unflattering portraits of his colleagues, but was also unexpectedly open about his own flaws, including a proclivity for overindulgence, sexual peccadilloes past and present, and a proneness for embarrassing gaffes. Clark emerges from his diaries a complex figure: a man of the hard right who is also sentimental about wildlife and an advocate for animal welfare; a philanderer who is devoted to his wife and to ‘The Lady’ (Thatcher), and proclaims belief in women’s equality in the workplace; an inveterate elitist who recognises the inadequacy of his government’s attitude to members of the working class. There was interest in adapting Clark’s diaries for both theatre and television in the 1990s, but these attempts were stymied by Clark’s dissatisfaction with the adaptation, and return to Westminster in 1997 (Hall 1999; Clark 2002: 237). It was only four years after his death in 1999, and with the permission of his widow Jane, that the diaries were dramatised for the BBC’s young digital channel, BBC Four. Made on a sparse budget (Deans 2003), the six-part series capitalised on the skill of character actor John Hurt to humanise eccentric characters. In its dialogue and narrative trajectory, the series stays

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remarkably close to the diary, though making the necessary abridgements for the television presentation over the course of only three hours’ programming. This programme represents an example of what Thomas Leitch (2007) calls ‘exceptional fidelity’. Leitch points out that highly faithful adaptations are special cases, since the bulk of literary translations are altered significantly for their screen versions. He suggests, in such instances, that the analyst should question why this adaptation aims to be faithful. In the case of The Alan Clark Diaries, there are two primary reasons for the closeness to the adapted text. The first is common to adaptation in general: the diary itself had been a popular hit, widely read by people interested in politics who would be addressed by the BBC Four adaptation. The programme thus came with the baggage of expectations, a close approximation to the events and, particularly, the specific interpretation of these events filtered through Alan Clark’s perspective. Meeting viewer expectations is particularly important for a series, as audiences need to be maintained between episodes. Alienating this ‘knowing’ audience with an unfaithful adaptation is not a good strategy for audience retention or maximisation. This is along the same lines as Leitch’s suggestion that the primary motive for fidelity in film adaptation is financial, since well-known properties are pre-sold to expectant audiences. Even in the case of a niche channel of a public service broadcaster, fidelity is a strategy for audience maintenance. The second reason for the series’ ‘exceptional fidelity’ is related more to its status as biographical text. There are many extant figures who appear in the diaries who may object to the way in which they are portrayed in the adaptation. Staying close to the diaries is a means to forestall such criticism, since the portrayal can legitimately be described as derived from Clark’s interpretation, rather than the point of view of the writer, producers or broadcaster. The most important person to appease was undoubtedly Jane Clark, who gave permission for the drama, as well as allowing the crew to film at Saltwood, the family estate. The press release for the series included this telling statement from her: ‘I was a bit worried when they said they needed a writer. I remember saying, ‘It’s been written!’ I thought they were going to change everything’ (BBC Press Office 2003b). The assumption that the diary ‘had been written’ suggests that she sees television adaptation not as a re-interpretation but as a direct translation. This implies that too much deviation from the diaries would have jeopardised the trust built between the producers and Jane Clark, which would

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undermine the chances of the programme making it to air. Theoretical concerns about fidelity must be balanced with a recognition of the practicalities of making and distributing television and film. The ‘exceptional fidelity’ of the series is as much a strategic choice as it is a textual one. Like the diaries, the series traces Clark’s progress in parliament in the 1980s, through his retirement, resurgence and failing health in the 1990s. The series stays very close to the diaries in replicating narrative events, character descriptions and in its substantial use of direct quotation from the text in the dialogue and voice over. A typical example can be found in the first episode, as Alan appears at the election count for his Plymouth constituency. The images portray the politician smiling nervously as he awaits the result, but the voiceover says that he is ‘madly in love’ with his Labour opponent, Frances Holland, speculating ‘perhaps I can distract her after the count and kiss her in one of those janitor’s cupboards’. This is taken almost verbatim from the diary (1993: 8), using the standard technique in adaptation of translating first-person reflection into voiceover dialogue. Voiceover is a contentious tactic in adaptation, often considered ‘uncinematic’ because it engages principally in the ‘telling’ rather than ‘showing’ mode which is supposedly more suited to moving image storytelling. Though this perspective is critiqued by a number of adaptation theorists, especially Hutcheon (2013) and Elliott (2003), it is also widely accepted in screenwriting praxis (Seger 1992; Howard and Mabley 1993; McKee 1998; Field 2005). In this case, however, voiceover performs the crucial function of remediating the diary format. This text is not only interested in the incidents that occurred in Clark’s life and the characters that populated it, but also in Clark’s thoughts and feelings on these events and people. While the voiceover occasionally acts as exposition or explanation, more often its purpose is to channel Alan’s emotions and reactions, especially recriminations for himself—as in ‘Fool, Clark, fool, fool!’, as he appears drunk in the chamber (E1, taken from diary [1993: 28])—and for others such as a civil servant described as ‘exactly the kind of mole who is working away eighteen hours a day to extinguish the British national identity’ (E3, from diary [1993: 161]). Hurt’s vocalisation of these passages from the diary invests them with emotional content interpreted from the written text, so the work of adaptation is a matter of performance as much as translation. Far from the voiceover representing a narrative ‘redundancy’ that it is typically charged with in theory, here it is a crucial part of the rhetoric of the programme, situating it as a first-person perspective of the events that are being dramatised.

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The series not only translates Alan’s private thoughts via voiceover, it also dramatises his ideations. These are not always marked stylistically, so there is a slippage between events that happen in Alan’s imagination and those that occur in his reality. For example, in episode three, Alan travels over South America in a decrepit aeroplane. His voiceover recounts his speculations about the age and fitness of the craft and discusses a friend who refused to sleep on planes for fear of them crashing (a translation of 1993: 176–177). The images shift to helicopter shots showing mountainous landscape, indicating that we are now seeing Alan’s half-conscious visions of Eriboll, his Scottish estate. A medium close-up reveals Alan dozing off, and then the plane seemingly going into crisis mode. The viewer is aligned with Alan’s consciousness, impaired by tiredness and losing grip on reality, causing confusion between what is his perspective and what really is taking place. The implied provenance of these images in Alan’s imagination provides a televisual equivalent for the interiority of the diary’s prose. Although the bulk of the series translates the diaries’ events, peoples and tone directly, there are moments where the text subtly undermines its subject through a discrepancy between the images on screen and the voiceover. In episode one, for example, Alan, newly made a junior minister in the Department for Employment, arrives by car to his constituency, to the sight of protesters shouting ‘jobs not dole’. The voiceover provides an ironic juxtaposition with these images, as Alan patronisingly comments ‘They’re sweet things really. They’re just bewildered and put upon’. Humour is found in the absurd contrast between the intense anger of these protesters and Alan’s blasé attitude to their circumstances. This offers the potential for the viewer to detach their sympathies from the protagonist and opens a brief space for critique. This is a rare moment where the diary isn’t translated directly, but dialogue from one context is appropriated for another. In the diary, it is his constituents that Clark describes as ‘sweet things’, not protesters. The dialogue is recontextualised in such a way as to make ironic commentary on its subject. There are also moments where the voiceover and image directly contradict one another, creating the potential for Alan to be viewed as an unreliable narrator. In episode four, he discovers that his secretary has been drinking on the job, borrowing from his MP’s drinks budget. In voiceover, Alan claims in reference to the budget ‘I never touch it’, immediately followed by a brief shot showing clinking champagne glasses. The juxtaposition of these images suggests that Alan’s claims about his drinks budget are untruthful.

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Though Alan’s point of view, actions and relationships are the naturally dominant ones in the series, there are brief moments that privilege his wife’s perspective. A poignant one recreates a letter sent by Jane as she struggles to come to terms with Alan’s infidelity, reproduced by Clark in his diary (2002: 310), though appropriated from a little further on in the chronology than it appears in the series, as the denouement of episode five. It reads ‘What are you doing in London today? … Well I’ve gone too. Don’t know when I’ll be back—to feed the dogs, water things, iron things, cook things, the ‘things’ wives do’. This is performed by Jenny Agutter on the soundtrack with intense frustration, allowing a rare glimpse into the effects of Clark’s behaviour on those around him. Using Jane’s words rather than Alan’s enables a relief from total absorption in his story. Jane has a thematic function of reminding the viewer of the personal toll that a career in politics can have, but is also a character in her own right, imbued with more personality and agency than she has in the diary. Several prominent politicians mentioned regularly in the diary are portrayed in the series, such as Employment Secretary and Clark’s nemesis Tom King (Peter Blythe), or his close associate Ian Gow (Paul Brooke). In some cases, reported speech from the diary is translated into dialogue between these characters, such as the scenario in episode four in which Alan is given a ‘dressing down’ by King in fairly precise detail: ‘Tom was seated at his desk in I’m-in-charge mode. And the chair stood directly in front, ready for a pre-caning homily’ (1993: 265). The set and props are arranged as described here, while the latter part is reproduced in voiceover dialogue, allowing for the comic term ‘pre-caning homily’ to register. King is filmed from a low angle, and Clark from an exaggeratedly high angle, reproducing the uneven power dynamic between them, as well as Clark’s feeling that he is being treated as a naughty schoolboy. This reproduces in vignette form a fractious relationship that is more developed in the diary. The scene performs a metonymic function of demonstrating not only the animosity between these two men, but Clark’s general hostility to authority figures like King. Doing so via a representation of the ‘pre-­ caning homily’ also hints at the influence of public school in Clark’s worldview and self-image. This is an example of how the representation of incidents from diary, memoir or autobiography can become biographical. Events are used as part of an interpretation and reflection of the personality. The most powerful and influential figure to appear in the diary, ‘The Lady’, is never seen directly on screen. This helps to retain the aura of

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mystique around Thatcher, remediating the diary’s tone of reverence towards her. Throughout the series, the diegetic Thatcher is seen only in silhouette, from a distance or from behind. In her first appearance, in episode two, Alan is shown reclining in a chair from behind. His voiceover states ‘one can feel the presence of greatness even when one cannot see it. Something like a disturbance in the field’. This sentiment is supported by the image, in which a soft focus provides a hazy sheen as a blue-suited figure floats past Alan and settles in the background. The back of her head is shown as a medium long shot, as Alan speculates about whether she is wearing a chignon, a question raised in the diary (1993: 69). In both diary and series, Thatcher is presented as a romanticised figure, with her professional relationships couched in discourses of love. According to Clark, her favour is fickle: la donna è mobile, in Alan’s words from episode three. Her voice is occasionally heard, in a close impersonation, but she is a spectral presence in the drama. Thatcher is portrayed more directly as the subject of the archive footage that is interspersed with the dramatic recreations. The frequent use of television news footage (alongside images of newspaper headlines) helps to situate the events that are portrayed in the drama in historical context, providing a real-world framework for events in Clark’s life outside of his own interpretations. This is a standard strategy in docudrama (see Chap. 2) to provide an index of the historically real world. Although these images are appropriated from the archive for the purpose of storytelling here in a manner analogous to the translation of pre-existing materials into new formats, the use of footage in this manner is rarely considered to be ‘adaptation’. Indeed, it is analogous to certain cultural forms included by Hutcheon (2013) in her list of excluded intertextual practices, such as allusions, musical sampling or plagiarism. However, the inclusion of the news footage in this series is an important objective (if selective) relief to the highly motivated and personalised recollection in the diary, adapted from the archive to suit the storytelling needs of this text. These media artefacts are being re-edited and re-interpreted, placed within a liminal space between fact and fiction, but as part of a dramatisation. They are therefore candidates, alongside the diaries, for being ‘sources’ of adaptation integrated into the adaptation itself. These contextualising materials are important to the series, because it compresses a long time period into only six thirty-minute episodes. The series presents stories from Clark’s life and his observations on them without the usual sense of coherence and causation associated with

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contemporary television storytelling. They are loosely connected vignettes from a life, presented chronologically with helpful contextualisation from the archive material. In relation to the adapted text, the series is also variable in the volume of material used for each episode. Episode one, which deals with Alan’s difficult induction into ministerial work, follows the events of the first fifty pages of the diary, dealing with May to October of 1983. Episode six, by contrast, begins in February 1991, and concludes with Clark’s implied death in September 1999, contracting several years’ worth of political and personal activity into the same screen time. This means that the chronology, and the connections between events, becomes looser, the account even more impressionistic than earlier episodes. This variability demonstrates the extent to which narrative structure must be imposed upon the diary source to suit the dramatic needs of the specific narrative ‘unit’. The final years of Alan Clark’s life were filled with incidents—his reintroduction into parliament, the decline of his health, marriage troubles—but the cut and thrust of a life in politics is the key theme of the series, and therefore suits the events told in the earlier diaries. The Alan Clark Diaries is not a stylistically ambitious programme, restricted by a small budget and limited filming schedule. Nor does it innovate widely around the diary form; only in certain punctual moments does it deliberately prompt the viewer to recall the specific perspective from which it is drawn, and the potential for its narrator to be self-serving and mendacious. It does not attempt the kind of sustained self-reflexive approach of other biographical dramas, which embed a consciousness of the constructed nature of life writing into their discursive structure. However, the series does manage the difficult task of enabling simultaneous empathy and distance with this controversial figure, and the translation of a comedic persona in the pages of the diary into a rounded character. It translates to the intimate medium of television the interiority of a public figure constructed through his published diaries, converting the private thoughts of a politician into the stuff of drama. If the publication of the diary was, as Clark himself puts it, a ‘flaunting of the ego’, then the television drama is a reification of this ego, a convergence of the private and public persona and a transformation back to quasi-flesh and blood of the character on the page.

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5.5   Conclusion This chapter has considered the process of adapting life stories for television from several angles. Beginning with the place of the biographical drama within the field of adaptation studies, it found that the importance of the named source text to the identification of adaptation made the biographical drama an awkward fit with the definition of an adaptation. However, analogous processes of selection, condensing, re-interpretation and ‘transcoding’ take place in the dramatisation of biography, such that we can argue that the activity of adaptation has taken place. This raises the important question of adaptation from what? To answer this question, the named sources from a wide range of adaptations from across televisual history were surveyed and categorised. ‘Adapted texts’ for biographical television drama include already codified cultural texts like novels, plays and biographies, as well as less regularised forms like the diary and memoir and even non-verbal texts such as photographs or video. Diary formats in particular offer challenges for dramatists in constructing narrative out of the stuff of everyday life. They also demonstrate the much broader effect of television biography of making public entertainment out of the private experience. Conceiving of biographical dramatisation as adaptation (even where we might want to reject the description of biographical dramas as adaptations) helps us to understand the specificity of television as a medium of biographical expression. Drawing not only on the specific textual form but also on paratexts for these series helps to show the extent to which televisual biography is an intertextual affair. Promotional material for biographical drama has conventionally constructed a hermeneutic frame, a series of references of various degrees of complexity against which the audience can check the drama. Such paratexts also invite the viewer to engage with the question that has been repressed by adaptation studies: how faithful is this television version to the events of the life that are depicted? Fidelity has rightly been critiqued as a limiting discourse in the study of literary adaptation, as has the undercurrent of moralising that can be detected in criticism of ‘unfaithful’ adaptations. In the case of the biographical drama, as with other films and television programmes ‘based on a true story’, there is no single text to be ‘faithful’ to, which leaves such stories in the unenviable position of being faithful to ‘truth’ itself. In the case of the biographical drama, in other words, questions of fidelity are also ones of ethics, of the justifiability of making public the private experiences of individuals. As,

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in the UK, television is a cultural form steeped in ideas of public service, conventions and restrictions have been put in place to ensure the responsibility of broadcasters to the private individuals that are thus represented. This will be explored further in the next chapter, which considers the relationship between biographical drama and reputation.

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CHAPTER 6

Reputations

6.1   Introduction Reputation is more than simply a narcissistic concern for how we are viewed by other people. Reputation is a personal property, a publicly exchanged sense of self. This is the logic underpinning defamation law, the legal protection for personal reputation. Tim Crook sees such laws as ‘remedy for the body emotional’ which, when applied to media content, can ‘serve to make truth a casualty’ (2010: 105) by concealing facts for the sake of an individual’s ego. This recalls a similar argument in biography studies around the tension between the privacy rights of a biographee— even a deceased one—and the responsibility of the biographer to tell the truth, a ‘battle between discretion and candour’ as Miranda Seymour puts it (2002: 258). When the highly visible public medium of television is involved, the dilemma of revelation versus concealment becomes more acute. Television portrayals have a propensity to become fixed in popular memory, regardless of their overtly fictionalised status (Anderson 2001). Television institutions and the bodies that regulate them have developed systems of accountability for such effects, acknowledging the impact that the public medium may have on private individuals’ reputations. While such codes may provide a measure of protection for individual and institution alike, the relationship between the biographical drama and reputation prompts moral questions beyond these legalistic frameworks. How can we justify revealing truths about a person that they have chosen to conceal? © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Andrews, Biographical Television Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64678-3_6

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Do audiences have the ‘right’ to know about the private lives of famous individuals? Can we defend the biographical drama’s revelations of private stories for the purpose of re-visiting and revising hidden histories? This chapter will explore three kinds of reputation, that of the biographee, of the ‘author’ and of the television institution. The biographee’s reputation is discussed in relation to questions of ethics, especially the matter of privacy and the place of ‘truth’. In many cases, the biographee is no longer alive to be concerned by the effect on their reputation. Indeed, since it is not possible to libel the dead, legal consultants have historically advised docudrama makers to focus on subjects who are deceased (Paget 2011). In such cases, however, there are often people who view themselves as caretakers of a biographee’s legacy. These ‘keepers of the flame’ (Hamilton 1992), who frequently do have legal rights over, for example, copyrights, estates or archived personal effects, can be a substantial impediment to the production of biographical drama. Interventions from such individuals, especially where they claim that programmes are maliciously untruthful, can impact negatively on the reputations of both the production personnel responsible for the drama, and, ultimately, that of the producing institution. For this reason, institutions have developed a series of conventions for how to handle biographical material, which will be discussed here. These are upheld by regulatory organs like Ofcom and the BBC Trust, which are responsible for adjudicating in disputes over reputation and representation. Two case studies explore an historical and more recent example of how the BBC has managed the potential damage to its own reputation from complaints regarding biographical drama. In the case of Ken Russell, emphasising the authorial status of a filmmaker who had developed a reputation as an enfant terrible was a convenient way of distancing the views presented in the programme from those of the institution. For The Curse of Steptoe, such a rhetorical move was not available, and complaints on the grounds of unfairness and inaccuracy caused considerable unwanted controversy for the institution, eventually resulting in a change of policy.

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6.2   Trashing Reputations? The Ethics of Televisual Biography The biographical drama’s compromise of literal ‘fact’ in the name of ‘dramatic’ or ‘essential’ truth is a moral matter. It is the result of decisions made by writers and producers, to be adjudicated by viewers and in the arena of public opinion. In biography, there are also inevitably secrets that the biographee and his/her extant relations and friends may wish to contain. A fundamental dilemma for the biographer is how much of the private life, particularly the secrets therein, to reveal. As Judy Long argues, ‘scenarios of power, rights and responsibilities are played out in conjunction with stratagems for wresting information from an unwilling source’ (1999: 102). It is not always the case that the source is unwilling; there is such a thing as an authorised biography. Edward Mendelson (1978) notes that even here there can be a clash of motivation between those who have given permission, usually the estate of the biographee, and the biographer’s quest for truth. Mendelson argues that the biographer has a simple obligation to the feelings of the living, and publishing facts that may be harmful is therefore morally unsound. Biographers largely concede to the legal maxim that it is not possible to libel the dead. Nevertheless, the fact that the reputation of the biographee can be changed for posterity by any new biography weighs heavily on the conscience of some biographers (Lee 2009; Hamilton 2007). The revelation of such facts may be perceived as an egregious breach of privacy; their suppression as censorship, a betrayal of the public’s right to know the truth. These are questions of value that will vary depending on context, since different emphasis is placed on privacy versus openness depending on prevailing cultural conditions. Such arguments are not specific to biography studies. The delicate balancing acts between an individual’s right to privacy and the public’s right to information are dominant themes in journalistic ethics (Crook 2010; Ward 2011). In his discussion of privacy and the public interest, David Archard (2002) argues that there are three common justifications proffered for media intrusion into an individual’s privacy. First, that when someone becomes a public person, it is at the cost of their right to privacy; second, that disclosing private information about public individuals can be provably in the public interest; and finally, that the public is interested in the knowledge of what is private. The first two reasons for privacy violation are commonly accepted, whereas the third is seen as a weak excuse motivated by prurience rather than genuine public interest. Archard argues

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the inverse. To claim that public figures are not entitled to privacy, he posits, is unfair, especially since there are many examples of people who are made famous through no deliberate action of their own, and therefore have little agency in the exchange of publicity for personal gain. In relation to revelation of private misdemeanours of those in public office as ‘serving the public interest’, Archard argues that, while the standards of those in public roles should be set high, they should not be set unreasonably so, to require public figures to be ‘angels’. Archard argues that, contrary to common belief, the interest of the public in private lives, even at the level of gossip, might be a sound justification for revelations. He offers three reasons. First, that gossip plays a role in defining communities and maintaining unity. Second, it provides an evaluable yardstick for testing shared values by exposing the behaviour that is proscribed. Third, we generally view intimate behaviour as more revealing of a person’s true character than their public behaviour. Gossip, in other words, serves a ‘socially regulative purpose’ by reminding the public of the humanity and commonality shared between public individuals and their communities. Archard’s counterintuitive argument about the publicisation of private affairs provides a strong justification for biographical drama’s primary project of exploring the private self rather than the public persona. The ‘socially regulative purpose’ of gossip, that is, to model the kinds of lifestyle that are socially advocated (or, more usually, disapproved of), parallels the ethical function of biography in providing frameworks of self or modelling ‘idealized’ lives theorised by biography scholars (see Chap. 1). Given that intrusion on their privacy is a common feature in the life of a public figure, it is unsurprising that this features as a recurrent plotline in many biographical dramas, especially those set in the era of mass media. Some dramas demonstrate how the biographee carefully manages his or her public reputation, often through concealment or dishonesty. For example, a primary source of dramatic tension in Frankie Howerd: Rather You than Me (BBC Four, 2008) is Frankie’s (David Walliams) perceived need to hide his partner Dennis (Rafe Spall) from public view, because he fears that the revelation of his homosexuality would end his career in the entertainment industry. In these cases, biographees successfully prevent their private lives from becoming public, but the fear of exposure and degradation remains. Other dramas portray their protagonists engaging in deliberate media management. Enid (BBC Four, 2009) emphasises Enid Blyton’s (Helena Bonham Carter) shrewd control of publicity to build a personal brand, including writing to fans, appearing on radio interviews

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and posing for photographs with her family. Her ability to stage-manage her private life for the purposes of publicity suggests that the public persona is a cynically deployed fabrication, and the ‘private’ self dramatised in the television film is the ‘real’ Enid (Andrews 2017). These celebrity biographees acknowledge and, to some extent, consent to the interest in their private life as a necessary condition of success. Their attempts to control their public image suggest that it is of mutual benefit both to public figure and press, which seems to support Archard’s first supposition. Here are examples of the ‘metabiographical’ quality of the biographical drama, demonstrating the biographee’s process of constructing their public reputation, or persona. P. David Marshall and Kim Barbour (2015) describe persona as a ‘strategic public identity’. They argue that ‘persona helps us understand the construction, constitution and production of the self through identity play and performance by the individual in social settings’ (Marshall and Barbour 2015: 1–2). The biographical drama adopts, adapts and exploits the biographee’s persona while claiming also to portray the person, the private self beneath. This is a significant feature of the mode dramatically, since narratives often feature biographical characters in perpetual struggle with their personae, whose private selves are in tension with their public responsibilities. It is also important to weighing up the morality of the biographical drama. To what extent is it ethical to portray the ‘person’, the private self which was not the publicly sanctioned persona, the ‘strategic communication’ made by the biographee about their identity? To portray the person rather than the persona is to make a clear choice regarding empowerment: the biographer (whether this is a writer or a broader term incorporating the collaborative efforts of the production team who bring the story to broadcast) is empowered at the expense of the biographee. A strong irony in the tendency of biographical dramas to portray the person more dominantly than the persona is that this entails a degree of fictionalisation that mirrors the fabrication involved in creating persona in the first place. Less is known for certain about the biographee in private, unless there is evidence which can be interpreted (as in the case of diaries). More speculation and invention are required in sequences that deal with the private life than those which reproduce the known public activities of the celebrity. A persona has a ‘fictive quality’ of its own: ‘it is a fabrication comprised from an interpretation of one’s identity and how that identity is made into a public entity’ (Marshall et al. 2015: 292). This means it is more imitable than the private personality. In portraying the

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person, a new public ‘persona’, a fictional character, is constructed by the drama. For biographical dramas to be ethically tolerable, there must be a shared disposition towards these protagonists that they are, broadly fictional. However, the fact that they align with a ‘real’ person, whose persona was generally known (and which is usually imitated by actors in the drama, as discussed in Chap. 3), can cause significant confusion between the fiction of the biographical character and the factual person. From this overlap, most of the controversies surrounding biographical dramas emerge. Though the concept of ‘truth’ has come under considerable theoretical and cultural strain in recent years (Williams 2002), it is still recognised and generally respected as central to media ethics, particularly pertaining to journalistic enterprise and rhetoric (Christians et al. 2016). Ward (2011) draws an important distinction between ‘truth seeking’ and ‘truth telling’. The former is the gathering of information, sifting through conflicting claims and weighing of evidence in the effort to get to the truth of a story. Ward suggests that there are two kinds of virtue implicated in this practice: the intellectual skill of disinterestedly following facts to find truths, and the moral character of honesty, sincerity and transparency that enables objective truth seeking. In my discussions with biographical drama screenwriters, the respect for these virtues was routinely asserted. Daisy Goodwin (2017) noted her commitment to historical accuracy, though with the caveat that it is authored and filtered through her interpretation. Gwyneth Hughes (2017) invoked her previous career as a journalist and demonstrated how her research process included interviewing multiple people to substantiate the stories of others. Brian Fillis (2017) highlighted research as essential both in formulating and ‘defending the veracity’ of the piece. Truth seeking is an important enterprise in the creation of biographical drama. The divergence between journalistic standards and dramatic standards comes at the point of ‘truth telling’. For Ward, this entails factually accurate, objective reporting: ‘truth is about real things whose truth is independent of anyone’s perspective; a truth that can be approached by other inquirers using objective methods’ (2011: 137). There are two ways in which biographical drama’s ‘truth telling’ does not meet Ward’s standards. First, the version of the biographee that is delivered in the drama is subjective, the result of multiple readings filtered through the interpretations of the writer, producers, director and actor. Amanda Coe (2017) noted that divergences from the precise details of a biographical story in its dramatic

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telling can be deliberate decisions by the dramatist, based on the needs of storytelling: ‘you’ve got to be so across the material that when you change things, you are aware that you’re making the change, and that you’re changing it for a reason. So it’s a decision and not a mistake’. Second, biographical dramas are produced, broadcast and largely received, on the understanding that some inaccuracy in the telling of the story is an inevitable consequence of the process of dramatisation. As Steven Lipkin argues of docudrama, these problems are ‘heightened by the ways [it] re-creates known material within the narrative arc and the terms of reception audiences expect from fiction feature films’ (2002: 48), though we may also apply this to narrative television. Cottan (2017) argued ‘in order to get the thing made, you have to make compromises’. He suggested that, guided by a sense of principle, there was a limit to the concessions he is willing to make to storytelling or dramatic pragmatism, not wishing to ‘take liberties’ with people’s lives, ‘because it just seems like a lie’. Most biographical dramas do not proceed with deceitful intentions. Hughes spoke of her strong desire in writing fact-based drama to be accurate, not to misrepresent things and to tell the truth. Fillis similarly notes that ‘one doesn’t set out to deceive’, though he accepts that ‘biopics by definition are misleading in one form or another’, since to tell a life story in the limited timeframe offered by television storytelling (even in its more generous serial or series modes) is to apply dramatic economy. Television narratives about real lives require elision, rationalisation and streamlining to create a manageable story and, paradoxically, believable drama. While it is tempting to see fiction itself as the cause of the malaise, it is important to remember that non-fiction treatments of biography must make similar selection, simplification and narrativisation (as discussed in Chap. 7). From an ethical perspective, then, dramatic licence appears to be a significant factor in the permissibility of minor factual inaccuracy in biographical drama. Christians et al. argue of docudrama: The crucial variable is the judgment of the subject. If a docudrama wins the approval of those closest to the real-life drama, viewers are ensured that a truthful perspective on events survives the dramatic process. … Morally sensitive producers of docudrama will incorporate fictional elements without padding history or violating the pain of those whose stories they tell. (2016: 282)

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The approval of the biographee and her/his close family members is by no means a guarantee of truth. Even when they are engaged as witnesses in the research, as Fillis and Cottan both emphasised, memories are subjective and testimony is guided by personal agenda. The dramatist’s job is to filter between multiple conflicting accounts of a biographee and attempt to find a coherent and compelling version. Fillis called this ‘trying to sail between two poles’, the positive and negative versions of individuals that are presented in statements of their supporters and detractors. While the approval of ‘keepers of the flame’ is no guarantee of the truthfulness of the story, there are ethical and practical reasons for biographical dramas to satisfy the expectations or demands of extant close family members or friends. As Hughes argued, the writer and producers of biographical dramas have a responsibility to those implicated in the events portrayed in the drama: ‘mostly you want the people who took part in it, who gave interviews, to feel like they have been done justice’. The disapproval of extant family members, especially on matters of factual accuracy, can significantly detract from the broadcast of the drama in terms of negative publicity and, potentially, legal action.

6.3   Ken Russell and ‘Keepers of the Flame’ Ian Hamilton (1992) titles his historical study of the impact of literary estates on the practice of biography Keepers of the Flame. The book discusses the (often tense) relationships between biographers and people who are responsible for the reputational management of artists after their death. In his foreword, Hamilton observes that there are broadly two approaches to the management of public reputation via the estate: ‘there are revealers and there are concealers’ (1992: vii). These attitudes to biography are entirely at odds with one another. Whereas revealers believe in the public’s right to know, concealers defend the sanctity of privacy. Literary estates control the publication of biography through restrictions to personal effects, archive materials and, crucially, copyright. Copyright protections for ‘works’ continue for seventy years after the death of the author, which means that the inheritors of an estate wield considerable power over the ongoing reputation of the subject (Bainbridge 2018). Hamilton notes brashly that the introduction of copyright protections from the Copyright Act 1911 endowed keepers with a ‘double duty’ to ‘respect the dead and maximise the takings’ (1992: 291) and that these may occasionally be at odds with one another, since strict adherence to the

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wishes of the deceased may not be ‘good for business’. Ultimately, whatever their motivations, the inheritors of a biographee’s affairs wield both legal and moral leverage which can affect the production of biography. To explore this process in action, I examine three cases from the career of Ken Russell at the BBC. Paul Sutton suggests that the ‘thirty-four films [made at the BBC] were the foundation on which Ken Russell built his career and forged his style. They helped the BBC to secure an international reputation for excellence, and they stand as perhaps the finest body of work by a British filmmaker’ (Sutton 2009: 3). This description summarises the web of relations between Russell’s auteur status, which grew partly as a result of his work for the BBC, the institution’s own international reputation and the cultural memories associated with Russell’s subjects. His first feature-length biography for the BBC, Elgar (BBC, 1962) represents a relatively rare case of co-operation between family and unauthorised biographer. The Debussy Film (BBC One, 1965) saw Russell and the BBC fall foul of the estate despite the efforts to distinguish the portrayed ‘Debussy’ from the real biographee. Dance of the Seven Veils (BBC One, 1970) is Russell’s most notorious BBC biography. An outright attack on its subject, Richard Strauss, it was deliberately presented both as a satirical portrait and as the personal view of its author, but this did not convince the Strauss family whose interventions ultimately led to an unofficial but functional ban on the programme being repeated or released on non-televisual formats while the copyright endured.1 Although these are historical cases which require some attention to the institutional conventions of the era, themes arise from these three examples which apply beyond this immediate context, as will be apparent from the final case study in this chapter on The Curse of Steptoe. Russell’s paean to Edward Elgar, broadcast in November 1962, remains his most straightforwardly acclaimed work for television. Elgar marked a watershed in Russell’s career at the BBC, his first feature presentation. Some scholars also point to it as an important moment in the history of the broadcaster, where Russell’s creative expression triumphed over the prosaic conventions that the institution had developed to inhibit the portrayal of real individuals by actors (Gardiner 2003; Tibbetts 2005b; Lanza 2007). According to this view, Elgar was made in spite of the BBC, not because of it. The reality is more complex. There was no formal ‘ban’ on actors portraying real people, as is sometimes argued. If this were the case, 1

 That is, until the film was projected at the Keswick Film Festival in February 2020.

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the BBC would not have broadcast biographical adaptations such as Victoria Regina (BBC, 1952) in the 1950s. There is ample evidence that important individuals within the BBC disliked the idea of actors portraying real people in documentaries, such as Monitor (BBC, 1958–1965) editor Huw Wheldon, Assistant Head of Films (and Russell champion) Norman Swallow, and Head of Music Production Lionel Salter. A letter from Swallow to Salter, for example, noted his opinion ‘that this kind of thing would be much more effective if the people concerned were suggested rather than literally seen’.2 As John Hill argues, the discomfort centred on the presentation of documentary subject matter using dramatic materials: This expectation of a clearly identifiable differentiation between the two categories derived from a belief that the mixing of drama and documentary not only possessed the potential to mislead audiences but also to undermine the integrity of factual programmes and, with it, the reputation and standing of the BBC itself. (2015: 455)

This fear of the loss of reputational capital that ensues from revelations of bias or inaccuracy endures within the BBC, and is written into the institution’s contemporary editorial policy, as discussed below. However, as Kay Dickinson (2007) observes, one of the paradoxical qualities of the BBC is that its conservative stance on certain cultural matters can also provide experimental opportunities for programme makers. The restrictions and conventions developed for storytelling for the medium can be manipulated for the purpose of creative expression. In the case of Elgar, this resulted in a biographical portrait that was clearly as much Russell’s ‘subjective engagement’ with the man and his music as it was a biography (Gardiner 2003: 205). Elgar was developed over a four-year period, and the ‘keepers of the flame’ had been engaged with the project at an early stage. Monitor editor and presenter Huw Wheldon entered discussions with the Elgar Birthplace Trust as early as July 1958. The Trust assured their co-operation, and that of Elgar’s daughter Carice Elgar Blake, for a segment on the birthplace for the magazine programme. At this stage, no one anticipated a film of the 2  Memo from Norman Swallow (Assistant Head of Films) to Lionel Salter (Head of Music Productions, Television) 1 June 1959, in File T32/1033/2 at Written Archives Centre, Reading, UK. All subsequent materials referenced are from this archive.

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length or ambition of Elgar, but the correspondence between the Elgar heirs and Wheldon demonstrates their recognition of the television arts programme as an appropriate vessel for memorialising the composer.3 Elgar Blake continued to take an interest in the project, even writing to Russell in July 1961 to indicate her enthusiasm for, willingness to cooperate with and even contribute to a profile of her father. At this stage, she clearly expected a conventional documentary treatment. Even when it was apparent that this was not the direction the programme would take, she continued her support, in the hope that the programme may help to revive her father’s reputation. In a letter to producer Humphrey Burton in November 1962, prior to the broadcast, she said: I feel so strongly that anything that can be done to make this generation interested in my father and make them realise a little of what he stood for in his time is well worth while. It’s no use being a square and groaning over the things of today. I am only grateful to you all for doing it.4

According to Michael Brooke, Elgar Blake’s wishes were fulfilled by the success of the programme which ‘significantly raised the public profile of its then-neglected subject’ (n.d.). In June 1966, four years after its initial broadcast, the marketing manager of EMI records wrote to Burton to indicate that a new LP of Elgar’s music was being released to coincide with a re-broadcast of the film.5 The advertisement for this LP featured a picture of Elgar perched over his bicycle looking out over the Malvern hills, one of the signature images of Russell’s film. The programme was a success for the BBC.  It enjoyed critical acclaim and favourable audience response, with a reaction index of 86, higher than any other Monitor programme since the beginning of the series.6 Undoubtedly, Elgar did more good than harm for the reputation of its subject, resurrecting a dormant cultural figure and enhancing his public status in the 1960s. By comparison to Elgar, The Debussy Film (tx BBC1, 18 May 1965) was a qualified success for the BBC.  A self-reflexive exploration of the  Correspondence between the Elgar Trust and Monitor producers, File T32/1033/2.  Letter from C. Elgar Blake to Huw Wheldon on 8 November 1962, file T32/1033/2. 5   Letter from J.K.R.  Whittle, Marketing Manager, EMI, to Humphrey Burton, 9 September 1964, File T32/1033/1. 6  Monitor: Elgar Audience Report, 3 December 1962  in file T32/1033/2. A Reaction Index is a measure of audience appreciation, an average of responses from small, selective sample of viewers. It was renamed ‘Appreciation Index’ in the early 1980s. 3 4

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nature of biographical representation (Tibbetts 2005a), it features Oliver Reed as an actor portraying Claude Debussy in a film, whose director (Vladek Sheybal) is a proxy for his biographer. Biographical information is delivered throughout the programme in a combination of the director delivering it as context and motivation for his actors on the diegetic set, voiceovers delivered by the director and also by Reed-as-Debussy-actor. Scenes from Debussy’s life are acted out on screen, and these sequences are not always overtly marked as belonging to the film-within-a-film. Russell wrote an article for the Radio Times which contains a justification for the approach he took to Debussy in this film: ‘A life as complex and enigmatic as that of Debussy seemed to call for a less dogmatic, less cut and dried type of approach’.7 The confusions that are fostered by the film-­ within-­a-film conceit are deliberate, creating purposeful overlaps between dramatic reconstruction, historical fact and images of film production. The choice to have the actors in the film portray directors and actors in the process of making a film about Debussy is also a strategy to prevent the television film from becoming an outright biopic. This was an attempt to assuage institutional anxiety around the blend of fact and fiction in dramatised biography. For Russell, it was also an opportunity to satirise ‘official’ biographical culture: ‘I wanted to dress people up in old clothes and do it in a totally unreal way, and thus make it more real than ever, and in the process send up this new civil service/academic way of doing films’ (quoted in Dickinson 2007: 73). The self-reflexive style of The Debussy Film was therefore a playful answer to the problem of producing a biographical reconstruction without implying that the actor before the audience is the biographee, an attempt to sidestep ethical critique. Such a distancing device did not help the film to evade the interventions of Debussy’s family, and its exhibition beyond British shores was stymied by the intervention of the composer’s stepdaughter Hélène de Tinan. She wrote in May 1965 of her alarm on hearing about the project, and noted her displeasure about having not been consulted prior to the transmission of The Debussy Film, indicating her status as the ‘representative in moral law for everything which concerns the work and memory of Debussy’.8 As is often the case with keepers of the flame, de Tinan objected to the private life being prioritised over the artistic output. Although she could not stop the broadcast of the programme, which had already 7 8

 Archived in file T32/1095/1 at the BBC Written Archives Centre, Reading, UK.  Letter from Mme De Tinan to Humphrey Burton, N.D. file T32/1095/1.

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happened by the time she became aware of it, her position as the executor of his estate, and possession of copyright for some of the photographs that appeared in the film made it imperative for the producers to curry favour with her in order to re-broadcast the programme or show it in foreign territories. To this end, Russell drafted a letter of appeasement in June 1965. In it he attempted to reassure her that he was motivated by the ‘great love I have for the composer and his music’, and to encourage her to drop her complaint. He appealed to his reputation as a serious and lauded biographical filmmaker, citing the Screenwriters Award he won for Elgar. He offered a pointed argument that neatly tied his own reputation, that of the BBC and of Debussy together: ‘I am sure that the BBC would not risk its reputation by entering a film for the Italia Prize which would bring discredit on the man it is about and therefore on the British Broadcasting Corporation itself as well’.9 The version of this letter that was finally sent to de Tinan, signed by the BBC’s Head of Copyright, R.G.  Walford, did not include this point of argument. It was, however, accompanied by a dossier of critical praise for The Debussy Film, intended to reassure her of its credentials. She was not convinced by this or by a trip by Humphrey Burton to her home in Paris to offer a private screening of the film. His aim was to gain her consent for the film to be entered from the Prix Italia. Her fears about the programme did not subside as Burton reported: She felt very strongly that the television public would inevitably confuse the historical figure of Debussy with the scenes involving the actor playing Debussy and that by and large the whole thing was a gross insult and injury to Debussy’s memory and reputation while failing to illuminate that which really matters in Debussy, namely his music.10

The Debussy Film was not entered for the prize, because de Tinan refused her consent. She capitulated to the arguments for re-broadcasting the programme in the UK, on the condition that extra material was included to contextualise the film and ensure viewer awareness of the artistic licence that had been applied to the Debussy story. She successfully wielded the leverage she had over the project as the Debussy ‘keeper of the flame’ through copyright restrictions and her moral rights over his work. 9

 Draft of letter from Ken Russell to Mme de Tinan, N.D. file T32/1095/2.  Memo from Humphrey Burton, 7 July 1965, file T35/1095/2.

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By the time Isadora Duncan: The Biggest Dancer in the World was broadcast in 1966, Russell’s televisual biographies were beginning to be described as ‘epics’, and his reputation was well enough established for it to be a significant part of their pre-broadcast publicity. The growth of Russell’s reputation also endowed him considerably greater licence within the BBC than he may have enjoyed had he been a more anonymous creative figure (Hill 2015). His talent bought him several champions within the institution willing to make ever-greater concessions in terms of creative freedom and budgets—though rarely without a fight. A memo regarding Dante’s Inferno from Stephen Hearst, Head of Arts Features, from 1966 was fulsome in its praise: We can be sure of controversy and a reception rather like that of the Debussy film.…Nevertheless, the narrative is accurate though from first to last frame we enter Ken Russell’s world and, if we think of Ken’s contribution to our output as distinctive and unique, that world is so individual, so interesting, so marvellous and unforgettable to look at that it is well worth while for us to get some knocks for allowing Russell his freedom.11

Russell’s reputation was a crucial factor in the production and presentation of his final and most controversial biography for the BBC, Dance of the Seven Veils (tx BBC1, 15 February 1970), which was formulated and explicitly promoted as a personal exploration of the composer Richard Strauss. Russell himself argued that it was a film that ‘could never be made outside the BBC, because the lawyers would be on to it in two seconds’. He conjectured that, without the BBC’s patronage, he would have been compelled to submit his project to the Strauss estate and publishers, but that ‘the great thing about the BBC is that the quickness of the hand deceives the eye. Before anyone can complain, the film is out’ (q in Lee-­ Wright 2010: 336). The downside for this scenario is that it limits the film to only a single broadcast, which is what happened in the case of Seven Veils. This account of the project downplays tensions between the BBC and Russell over Seven Veils that are palpable throughout the archived production files. For example, in a letter from January 1970, John Culshaw, Head of Music Programmes, Television, urges Russell not to interfere with the promotion for the programme, which he had threatened to do by

 Memo from Stephen Hearst to Head of BBC 2, 28 March 1966, file T53/99/2.

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preparing his own invitations for press reviews.12 In the letter, Culshaw requests of Russell, should he go ahead with his own publicity, that he indemnifies the BBC by clarifying that they are not responsible for these materials. Russell may have been frustrated by what he perceived as the BBC’s interference in his programme, and it is evident that the project caused considerable anxiety for the executives who commissioned it. There was also wrangling over the presentation of the film, both in the Radio Times and its continuity announcement.13 The latter carefully distinguished the film as a subjective account from Russell: Omnibus now presents a new film by Ken Russell: “Dance of the Seven Veils”. It’s been described as a “harsh and at times violent caricature of the life of the composer Richard Strauss”. This is a personal interpretation by Ken Russell of certain real and many imaginary events in the composer’s life. Among them are dramatized sequences about the War and the Nazi persecution of the Jews which include scenes of considerable violence and horror.

This statement epitomises the BBC’s effort to ensure the film was presented as Russell’s idiosyncratic vision of Strauss. This had two effects. First, it drew upon Russell’s by-now well-established auteur status as a means of defending his creative right to a view on the composer. Second, it set the programme at a remove from the BBC. The use of the term ‘caricature’ highlights that the programme is not a conventional biography, but a satire, using the distancing effect associated with satirical material as a further means of protection from criticism. An appeal to this auteur status and the legitimacy of caricature were devices intended to distance Russell’s attack on Strauss from the institution’s reputation. The critical and audience response suggests that this largely worked. The audience report for the film indicated that viewers’ censure for the programme was targeted at Russell rather than the BBC.14 The wording of the continuity announcement was the result of careful negotiation between the BBC, Russell and the Strauss estate. Culshaw wrote in January 1970: ‘I have been in somewhat delicate diplomacy with both Boosey & Hawkes [the music publisher which held the copyright to Strauss’s works] and Strauss’s close representative over the ethics of Ken  Letter from John Culshaw to Ken Russell, 26 January 1970, in file T53/99/1.  Documented in correspondence in file T53/159/1. 14  Audience Research Report for Dance of the Seven Veils, 3 March 1970, file T35/159/1. 12 13

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Russell’s very personal approach’.15 This representative was Dr Ernest Roth, who repeatedly attempted to warn the BBC about the likelihood of unpleasantness should Seven Veils be broadcast in the form that had been publicised. Roth suggested that Strauss’s family and publisher could effectively prevent the use of Strauss’s operatic music in the programme through their control of the copyright, either through refusing permission or demanding huge licence fees. The BBC responded to this intervention via a letter from Walford which argued that the BBC must not be hampered by attempts at censorship from ‘sensitive heirs exercised in good faith but having the effect of impeding fresh knowledge and criticism and discussion of famous people’.16 As with de Tinan, Walford invoked Russell’s auteur status in defence of the programme, arguing that the programme should be seen as an ‘artistic interpretations designed to express the truth of one artist as seen by another’. Culshaw also wrote to Roth in August 1969 to argue that the programme (which was yet to be completed) was ‘in no sense a biography’.17 It is here that the term ‘caricature’ is first used in defence of the project. Roth responded: ‘by all means let the truth be caricatured and poked as much fun at it as it will bear. But for God’s sake don’t caricature and exaggerate any untruth’.18 The notes of a meeting of the BBC board of governors from February 1970 suggest that the caricature defence had been discussed, and that it was decided that there was sufficient truth in the exaggerations of Seven Veils to justify their broadcast. There was also a concern that the programme might ‘open the floodgates’ to other extreme, controversial or violent material. The emphasis on Russell as auteur throughout the promotional material and within the institution helped to make this a ‘special case’ that did not set an unwelcome precedent. Although there was no formal restriction on the programme being shown again, unlike other Russell biographies, it was not re-broadcast. When Roth and the Strauss family finally saw Dance of the Seven Veils, they were, unsurprisingly, unhappy. He wrote to Culshaw to ask that the film be withdrawn, contending ‘nobody at the BBC can still believe that this sorry piece of blasphemy, obscenity and calumny could enhance BBC’s

 Memo from John Culshaw to the BBC Film Librarian, 28 January 1970, file T53/159/4.  Letter from R.G. Walford to Dr Ernest Roth, 29 July 1969, file T35/159/4. 17  Letter from John Culshaw to Dr Ernest Roth, 22 August 1969, file T35/159/4. 18  Letter from Dr Ernest Roth to John Culshaw, 29 August 1969, file T35/159/4. 15 16

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reputation?’19 As Russell’s reputation grew, his BBC projects were increasingly expected to bring prestige to the institution (Hill 2015). However, the creative licence afforded to Russell brought with it increased risk. His freedom to indulge his preoccupations and critique his biographees resulted in a provocative film that deliberately assaulted the reputation of its subject. Seven Veils would be Russell’s final composer biography for the BBC. Tensions between the filmmaker and the institution had escalated to a degree that impeded further collaboration. Russell caused the BBC too many legal and ethical headaches, and the BBC did not, for Russell, adequately defend his creative rights against the conservative forces of censorship. Russell’s self-image was not as a biographer, but as a ‘myth-maker’ aiming to portray ‘heroes’ rather than human beings (Adams 2009). When the materials required to represent such myths depend on the favour of ‘keepers of the flame’, the prosaic concerns of copyright law, moral rights and reputation management outstrip the creative freedom of even the most highly regarded and fiercely defended television biographer.

6.4   Regulation Most of the existing work on media ethics and law focuses on journalistic practices and restrictions. Little attention is paid to dramatic media, which are perceived as broadly protected by poetic licence. However, as Keith Beattie notes, when dramas are based substantially in fact, ‘producers are aware of the move toward litigation arising from slander and defamation and are, as a consequence, careful to check their facts’ (2004: 152–3). Paget (2011) outlines the laborious and costly procedure of ‘legalling’, the vetting of scripts for docudramas by production company lawyers prior to production to ensure legal compliance. This means attending both to the primary laws that concern defamation (especially the Defamation Act 2013 and its predecessors), and to ‘secondary media law’, the conventions and codes overseen by regulators like Ofcom and the BBC Trust (Crook 2013). Derek Paget (2011) expresses concern that such practices put a limit on creative expression that verges on self-censorship. Crook (2013) similarly argues that defamation and privacy law in the UK have brought about a ‘chilling effect’ in journalistic enquiry and advises caution for journalists when publishing private or sensitive information about public figures. Such caution has also become commonplace for producers of  Letter from Dr Ernest Roth to John Culshaw, 17 February 1970, file T35/159/4.

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docudrama and biographical drama. There are significant defences that can be brought against charges of defamation, including, most importantly for dramatic interpretation, that of ‘honest opinion’, which enables a view that any ‘honest person’ might have held about an individual on the basis of known facts to be published. A writer’s interpretation of facts into dramatic shape may be defended as their ‘honest opinion’ on a subject. However, the costliness of handling a legal dispute is a significant consideration when producing narratives about real people, delimiting the likelihood of defamatory material from being produced let alone broadcast. Legalling is a means for avoiding not only litigation but also the reputational damage that can be caused to broadcasters by negative publicity. Some institutions, such as the Spanish commercial broadcaster Telecinco, use controversy around biographical dramas strategically, ‘walk[ing] the thin line between legal and illegal… and welcoming—indeed utilising— any publicity arising from celebrities’ complaints’ (Pastor-González 2016: 151). This tends not to be the approach of British broadcasters, especially the BBC, which fiercely protects its institutional reputation and avoids negative publicity. The BBC editorial guidelines on ‘portrayal of real people in drama’ require producers to attempt to secure the co-operation of real people or their living relatives in advance of production (BBC 2020). While these procedures are motivated by ethics and the institution’s commitment to fairness, it is also expedient to involve ‘keepers of the flame’ who, while they may not have the ability to sue, can cause negative publicity by taking their story to the press. Much of the UK’s press, especially right-wing tabloids, is institutionally hostile to the BBC (Petley 2020). Opportunities to criticise the broadcaster are rarely missed, particularly on the grounds that are central to its reputation and public status: its impartiality, accuracy and trustworthiness (all of which have come under considerable strain in the divisive political climate of the late 2010s). The BBC’s editorial guidelines state that accuracy is ‘fundamental to our reputation and the trust of audiences’ (BBC 2020). Reports of inaccuracy—deliberate or otherwise—significantly undermine the apparent trustworthiness of the institution. The BBC editorial guidelines indicate that there is a close level of managerial scrutiny of programmes that involve the dramatic depiction of real people. Such projects must be authorised by the Director Editorial Policy and Standards before production can commence (described in the guidelines as a ‘Mandatory Referral’). Approval is subject to the project meeting three conditions:

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• The portrayal is fair • The portrayal is based on a substantial and well-sourced body of evidence whenever practicable • There is a public interest. (BBC 2020) The guidelines further stipulate that dramas that ‘realistically portray’ living people or those with living close relatives must not ‘unduly distort the known facts and thus become unfair’. Some of the guidelines are particularly inhospitable to the requirements of dramatic storytelling, for example, a prohibition on drama ‘distort[ing] the known facts, including chronology, unduly’. Alterations to the timeline of events are often important to televisual storytelling, enabling the elisions or retardations that are needed for narrative flow. There are also pragmatic motivations for minor distortions of fact. As a hypothetical example: the stringent requirements for the care of child actors can make the appearance of numerous children in television productions costly and impractical. The most efficient solution to this problem is to elide children from families in dramas, implying that biographees had fewer children than they really did. While there is an expediency to this narrative decision, it is understandable that the child of a biographee may take exception to being written out of their lives. Contingencies of location shooting and schedules can also mean that events take place in dramas in locations that they did not in reality. Small changes like this are generally more tolerable than alterations in chronology or implied causality, particularly where these impute morally questionable behaviour on the part of the biographee. Institutional memory can be read in the variations over time in these guidelines. For example, the 2005 guidelines do not include the specific prohibition against unduly distorting chronology (BBC 2005). The specification of chronology as a particularly problematic area occurred in response to the complaints about The Curse of Steptoe, outlined below. Editorial guidelines are an expression of institutional attitudes and protocols, but are also palimpsestic traces of institutional pasts, with scars from previous battles visible in their updates and alterations. Later iterations of the guidelines include the recommendation that people ‘in the public eye’ are more acceptable candidates for portrayal in drama, particularly if it is their public activities that are to be depicted. This suggests that in biographical drama, replications of the publicly constructed persona of the famous person are more tolerable than representations of their private self. The version of self that was created and, implicitly, sanctioned by the biographee is a preferable and safer subject for drama than an exploration of their personal relationships, attitudes or behaviour.

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One of the ways in which BBC productions have sought to evade controversy or dispute is by incorporating verbal and written disclaimers into broadcasts of biographical drama. Viewers can be forewarned about the combination of fact and fiction via continuity announcements, which emphasise the fiction status of the text. The continuity announcement before Mrs Mandela (BBC Four, 2010), for example, explicitly stated that the programme is a drama: ‘Brand new BBC Four Drama charts the twenty-seven-year incarceration that moulded a wide-eyed newlywed into a hardened political campaigner. An all-new documentary profiles the woman herself at 10.30, but now there’s strong language as Sophie Okonedo stars in Mrs Mandela’. Highlighting the broadcast of a documentary profile to follow, this announcement emphasises the fictionality of the programme that precedes it. Biographical dramas are commonly broadcast with a brief caption that emphasises the combination of fact and fiction (see also Chap. 3). The title broadcast before Enid (BBC Four, 2009) gives a typical, if elaborated, example: ‘the following drama is based on the lives of real people. Some scenes have been invented and events conflated for the purposes of the narrative’. Disclaimers of this kind have the obvious function of forestalling criticism and highlighting the permissible dramatic licence that has been applied to the programme. Fillis (2017) suggested that the caveats presented at the beginning of dramas are ‘about people being asked in a gentle and polite way to be a bit more media savvy about what they’re viewing’. The inclusion of disclaimers and emphasis on drama is a way to direct viewer attention to the fictionalised elements of the programme but can also have the adverse effect of drawing attention to the necessary distortions of fact that accompany dramatisation. In Ofcom’s Broadcast Code (Ofcom 2019), which regulates the activities of broadcasters outside the BBC, the regulations about portrayal of real people in drama are broader and less stringent than the BBC’s editorial guidelines.20 They state that programmes, including factually based dramas, should not portray facts, events, individuals and organisations in a way which is ‘unfair’, and that factual programmes should not ‘materially mislead’ audiences. These guidelines emphasise the rights of individuals to contribute to or to opt-out of involvement with programme making, as well as offering those involved in television representations an appropriate right to respond, especially if there are accusations of wrongdoing contained within a programme. The Ofcom guidelines focus more on the production of factual programmes and the impact that this will have on 20  While Ofcom became the overarching independent regulator for the BBC in April 2017, the BBC’s editorial policy and complaints are still handled in-house.

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the individuals or organisations concerned than on questions of fact, truth, impartiality and misleading viewers. The value of ‘fairness’ is emphasised above that of ‘truth’. This speaks to the pervasive tension in media law and ethics between the rights of individuals to privacy and freedom from harm and offence, and the freedom of expression of the media, which enables it to hold public officials and institutions to account and provide an important democratic check on power (Crook 2013). Primary and secondary media laws concerning defamation and privacy apply principally to journalistic enquiry, and to statements that are clearly proposed as factual. There are no documented cases where biographical dramas have been subject to successful defamation litigation. There are, though, a number of examples where the secondary laws guided by regulators have been invoked as part of disputes between biographees’ families and the producers of biographical drama. The ultimate defence in this case is that of ‘dramatic licence’, the armour of fiction’s creative freedom. However, where there is a claim that drama has some relation to reality, and where real people find themselves portrayed dramatically, and not in a positive light, the limitations of ‘dramatic licence’ become all too apparent. As the case of The Curse of Steptoe below demonstrates, dramatic licence is liable to fissure when stretched.

6.5   The Curse of The Curse of Steptoe Rarely has a television series been so aptly titled as the Curse of Comedy season, broadcast on BBC Four in March–April 2008. The season comprised four original dramas which explored the personal lives of comedians and light entertainers from the 1960s and 1970s. The press release for the season (BBC Press Office 2007) exhibits an ambivalent rhetoric, which straddles the line between serious justification for these re-examinations of popular cultural figures and the promise of titillation in the form of dramatised scandal. Exploiting discourses of celebrity gossip, it promises, for example, that Hughie Green: Most Sincerely will reveal an ‘explosive celebrity secret’, while simultaneously proposing the drama as a ‘parable about the destructive power of success’. There was significant pre-broadcast media interest in the season, driven by a combination of curiosity about the transformation of popular actors Jason Isaacs, Phil Davis, Trevor Eve, Ken Stott and David Walliams into their biographical counterparts, and the ongoing interest in the cultural figures depicted (Edge 2007; Holmwood 2007).

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Interventions by family members of the biographees featured in the season brought a great deal of negative publicity, usually centred on an implicit or explicit critique of the BBC. Tony Hancock’s ex-wife delivered a caustic verdict on Hancock and Joan, complaining that in producing more material about the comic, the BBC were ‘milking a cow that’s got nothing left’ (Tapper 2007). Rather unusually, the children of Hughie Green complained that he was portrayed in an unduly positive light in Most Sincerely. They gave interviews to the Evening Standard (2008) and Daily Telegraph (Hastings 2008) in which they complained of the drama’s depiction of their father as a gentle family man when he was, in their view, an absent father. Negative publicity for Frankie Howerd: Rather You than Me appeared as part of a longstanding feud between the entertainer’s sister and his partner of thirty-eight years, Dennis Heymer, interview material with whom formed the basis of the drama. Howerd’s sister complained that the television film focused too much on his sexual life, which he, as a private man who was conflicted about his homosexuality, would not have consented to were he still alive (Hoyle 2008). Heymer meanwhile was reportedly in talks with lawyers to sue the BBC because they did not air a documentary about Howerd on the same night as the drama, as he claimed they had promised to do (Daily Express 2008). His threat was not carried out before his death in May 2009. In these cases, the furore around the programmes did not endure for long after their initial broadcast. This was not the case for the first and most controversial drama of the season, The Curse of Steptoe. Written by Brian Fillis, Curse traces the working relationship between Harry H.  Corbett (Jason Isaacs) and Wilfrid Brambell (Phil Davis) on the popular sitcom Steptoe and Son (BBC, 1962–1974). It also dramatises the negative impact the series’ popularity had on its performers: Harry’s career is shown to suffer considerably from typecasting, while Wilfrid’s personal life is impeded by privacy violations by the press, and the constant threat that his homosexuality (which he keeps secret) will be revealed. Several reviewers highlighted the drama’s main theme of being trapped by circumstance in an antagonistic but co-­ dependent relationship (Suttcliffe 2008; Walton 2008; Lewis 2008). The similarity between these ideas and those portrayed in Steptoe and Son is, of course, deliberate. Rolinson (2016) notes that the re-enactment of episodes doubles the meaning of the docudrama’s contested interpretation of the actors’ lives, by paralleling actor and character. As critic Thomas Sutcliffe noted, this speaks to ‘the cruel genius of [Steptoe and Son]… the almost vampiric way in which [Galton and Simpson] moulded the comedy

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around the characters of their lead performers’ (Suttcliffe 2008). The confusions between actor and character for both Corbett and Brambell led to the development of public personae which had a basis in truth but was largely fictional. As such, they are apt figures for biographical dramatisation. For three years after Curse was transmitted, Corbett’s family pursued a series of complaints against the drama through the BBC’s institutional procedures. His daughter, Susannah Corbett, provides a detailed (and commendably balanced) account of this process from the family’s perspective in her biography of her father (2012). She describes an earlier broadcast, a Channel 4 documentary called When Steptoe Met Son (2002), that had represented Corbett, and his relationship with Brambell, in an extremely negative light. This had made her wary of Curse from the outset. She agreed to meet with Fillis during the writing process on the understanding that the drama would ‘redress the balance’, and because ‘this was the respectable Auntie Beeb’ (2012: 437). Clearly, the BBC’s reputation for impartiality and fairness was a factor in this decision. She delivers this assessment of the final programme: ‘If this were the BBC’s attempt to “redress the balance” one would have hated to see an attempt to malign’ (2012: 438). She outlines the factual inaccuracies with which the family was displeased, also highlighting the disappointment she felt that her account of her father had not been considered in the production of the programme. This view was apparently shared with Galton and Simpson, the latter of whom told her ‘what we were saying they weren’t really interested in, cause it wasn’t drama. There was no story… and as the years go by the myth becomes the truth, doesn’t it’ (2012: 439). Fillis (2017) suggested that his interview process had included testimony from other people who knew Corbett and Brambell that supported Curse’s interpretation of their characters. He noted that his intention was to create a ‘balanced and sympathetic’ piece, but this is clearly not the way the drama was viewed by the family. Subsequent to the drama’s broadcast, the family released an announcement to the official Steptoe and Son website.21 It outlined in some detail their dissatisfaction with the drama, on the grounds both of inaccuracy and offence to the memories of Brambell, Corbett and his second wife, 21  This site is now defunct, but the post has been copied (apparently unaltered) to the forum of another Steptoe fan site: http://albertandharold.co.uk/forum/viewtopic. php?f=11&t=430 accessed 16 January 2020.

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Maureen. The family’s statement acknowledged that some of the factual errors that they had detected were relatively minor, including that Jason Isaacs had been unnecessarily fitted with darkened contact lenses when Harold H.  Corbett’s eyes were, like his, blue. They argued such small inaccuracies accumulate to give a poor overall impression of the honesty of the drama. This story was picked up by The Daily Express a week after the original broadcast, providing unwelcome negative publicity just before the transmission of the next drama in the series, Hancock and Joan (Daily Express 2008). Maureen Corbett’s brother, Malcolm Blott, wrote to the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) on behalf of her family with a detailed list of inaccuracies, and an argument that the programme was unfair to Corbett, Brambell and Maureen because of the damage to their reputations the programme caused. There were four major points of contention: 1. The suggestion that Harry and Maureen’s relationship began while Harry was still married to Sheila Staefel (as opposed to undergoing a divorce, as was the case in reality); 2. The chronological shift which has the birth of Maureen and Harry’s first child coincide with the filming of the final series of Steptoe and Son. Corbett’s son was born in 1966, and the episode was filmed in 1974; 3. The implication that Maureen became pregnant with her first child before she and Harry were involved in a loving and committed relationship, and that the conception was instead the result of a casual fling; 4. The portrayal of a fractious relationship between Harry and Wilfrid Brambell. (BBC Editorial Standards Committee 2009) Susannah Corbett’s account makes clear that the focus on the first three specific inaccuracies was strategic: these were elements of the drama that could be factually disproved, unlike the fourth which is a matter of interpretation (2012: 441). The family were also aggrieved by the interventions of actors Jason Isaacs and Phil Davis in pre-broadcast publicity appearances on Breakfast News (BBC One, 19 March 2008) and The One Show (11 March 2008), because they believed these gave the false impression to viewers that the drama was ‘authentic in its portrayal of the personal lives of the main characters’ (BBC Editorial Standards Committee 2009: 22). The ECU disputed the substance of this claim, arguing that

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‘the item did not give an unambiguous impression that the Curse of Steptoe was entirely factual’ (24). It argued that the assertion that Brambell and Corbett had an acrimonious relationship was neither supported by first-hand evidence nor was it the impression delivered by the drama itself. Ben Evans, the programme’s executive producer, initially responded to the complaint in a letter which failed to placate the complainant. Indeed, according to Corbett, it made Blott ‘more determined to salvage their reputations’ (2012: 440). Evans defended the drama, stating that it ‘took care to create balanced and fair portrayals of the real people involved and that these were based on a number of sources, including witness accounts’ (BBC Editorial Standards Committee 2009: 22). He also pointed out that the drama included an element of interpretation, with the implication that this was permissible under the aegis of dramatic licence. Perhaps the most important line of argument from this response was ‘there was no intention to sully anyone’s reputation’ which appears to concede that reputations had been tarnished, even if accidentally, by the drama (BBC Editorial Standards Committee 2009: 23). The ECU’s first ruling on the case was that ‘departures from ascertainable fact were legitimate exercises of dramatic licence in the context of a drama featuring living or well-­remembered people’ (BBC Executive Complaints Unit 2008: 3). Nevertheless, the complaint was partially upheld on the grounds of unfairness to Maureen. The ECU ruled that it should have been clearly signalled to viewers that they were watching a ‘creative interpretation’ of the events rather than an accurate representation of them (BBC Editorial Standards Committee 2009: 25). The ECU recommended the action that the programme must only be re-broadcast in an edited version that also included content information that clarified the fictional status of the drama. Unsatisfied with this outcome, Blott wrote twice more on the family’s behalf to the ECU in April and May 2008. The matter was escalated to the Editorial Standards Committee (the next layer of scrutiny that deals with complex or extensive cases) who ruled in May 2009. The ongoing complaints were supported by letters from Susannah Corbett, Galton and Simpson. Galton and Simpson clarified that they had not discussed the private lives of the stars of Steptoe and Son during their meetings with the production team of Curse. In Corbett’s letter, she described her discussions with Fillis that had provided detail about her father. She interpreted the inaccuracies in the programme as the result of pressure put on him to ‘spice up’ the story. She also highlighted that ‘the drama had taken great pains to recreate scenes from Steptoe and Son’, which she argued would

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give the audience the false impression that ‘equal pains’ would be taken to be fair and honest about the private lives of the stars (BBC Editorial Standards Committee 2009: 23). This speaks to the powerful sense of reality that socio-cultural verisimilitude can bestow a text, suggesting that a seemingly accurate recreation in the mise-en-scène endows biographical drama with a sheen of authenticity from which it is too easy to derive a false sense of factual authority. The closeness of the verisimilitude, in this argument, detracts from the acceptability of the defence of dramatic licence. If creative licence has been eschewed for the production design in favour of a close approximation of reality, why not for the narrative? A further complaint was made following repeats of the drama in 2009, again regarding the presentation of the relationship between Harry and Maureen. The Editorial Standards committee upheld this complaint, and as a result withdrew from sale a DVD boxset called Legends of Comedy, which included the re-edited version of the drama. In February 2011, the story came to an end as the ESC handled a complaint by Maureen’s family about the DVD remaining on sale after it had been withdrawn and answered a demand for an on-air apology to the family (BBC Editorial Standards Committee 2011). The Committee gave an off-air apology for the original editorial issues, and the fact that remedial action for the breaches had been ineffective. The Curse of Steptoe is unlikely to be rebroadcast nor is it commercially available for purchase. The determination of Maureen Corbett’s family to see the complaints procedure through has meant that it has developed a bad reputation of its own. Fillis (2017) argued that the reputation of The Curse of Steptoe as the untruthful biographical drama is unfair, since all biographical drama must to some degree be misleading. The difficulties that arose in this case led to a revaluation of the biographical drama as a kind of BBC output. The ESC’s final action arising from this complaint was to request that the editorial guidelines should be revised to address dramatised biopics specifically regarding the presentation of fact and use of dramatic licence, which resulted in the guideline section ‘Portrayal of Real People in Drama’ discussed above. The committee argued that greater ‘journalistic rigour’ was needed in this case, a finding that is distinctly at odds with the defence of the project on the grounds of dramatic licence. It is worth quoting the ESC ruling in the Curse of Steptoe case at some length, as it is revealing in its ambivalence to the form:

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The Committee noted that once a decision had been taken to venture into such territory i.e. dramatised biopics, the BBC had a responsibility to fairness and accuracy to those concerned. However, this was not to deny writers and producers dramatic licence, this would always be their right. The Committee was clear that it was the right of dramatists to change things knowingly for good dramatic purposes—including dialogue, character and timelines. Nevertheless, the Committee was of the view that basic facts remain just that, and the “essential truth” being portrayed by the dramatist needs to be interpreted with those facts in mind. (BBC Editorial Standards Committee 2009: 31)

The ESC’s statement both robustly defends the rights of dramatists to invent even where their work is based on truth and insists on accuracy as a primary criterion of value for such dramas. This is a powerful evocation of the BBC’s contradictory status as an institution. Supporting the creative rights of the dramatists parallels the defence of the broadcaster’s own editorial independence, but the respect for—approaching fetishisation of— factual accuracy speaks to the institution’s dogged protection of its reputation as a trusted source of information. The complaint process around The Curse of Steptoe reveals a sophisticated argument about the rhetoric of the biographical drama. The Corbett/Blott family identified the role of contextual and paratextual material such as scheduling, pre-broadcast publicity, captions and continuity announcements in providing a hermeneutic frame through which programmes are presented by broadcast institutions (Ellis 2011). In complaining about the actors’ interventions in the publicity, they recognised that the programme cannot be read simply on its own terms and is part of a broader broadcast context for audience reception. The family’s complaint also incorporated an analysis of verisimilar mise-en-scène and its role in authenticating the fictions of the biographical drama which aligns with my own arguments, based on film and television theory (see Chap. 3). Rolinson argues, along these lines, that ‘the laborious re-enactment of visual details does not excuse the mistreatment of essential facts, such as chronological alterations’ (2016: 212). The BBC’s two-fold defence of Curse was an appeal to dramatic licence, and to the media literacy of audiences that enables them to distinguish between fact and fiction. In their complaint, the family addressed the issue of dramatic licence by arguing that this is a matter of degree, and that some errors are inexcusable for the damage they can cause to a subject’s reputation. Even where

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there is no legal recourse as it is not possible to libel the dead, there is a legitimate ethical case to be heard here. Their answer to the defence of the viewer’s putative ability to discriminate between fact and fiction was to demonstrate considerable media literacy of their own, by identifying the publicity materials as part of the textual experience of the programme, and by arguing that efforts towards accuracy in mise-en-scène can lead to a mistaken sense of authenticity for the programme as a whole. Despite, or perhaps because of, the controversies around The Curse of Comedy season, the dramas were a ratings success in relative terms for the niche multichannel broadcaster.22 The dramas in the season enjoyed critical favour, albeit somewhat muted, with the lead performances praised even where reviewers felt the season to be oppressively doom-laden (Flett 2008; Eyre 2008; Banks-Smith 2008). Isaacs, Ken Stott and Maxine Peake (Tony Hancock and Joan LeMesurier in Hancock and Joan) were each nominated for BAFTA television awards, and Hancock and Joan was nominated in the Single Drama Category. Then BBC Four controller, Janice Hadlow, released a statement on Curse which explicitly aligned it with the narrowcast channel’s brand values: ‘Following the channel’s strong tradition for high quality drama, The Curse of Steptoe was brilliantly acted and powerfully scripted and I’m absolutely thrilled that this all added up to making it our most watched programme ever’ (Tryhorn 2008). With the benefit of hindsight, this statement may appear naïve. Yet these dramas did deliver audiences and much-needed attention to BBC Four, a service whose viability was (and still is) regularly called into question. Biographical dramas provided BBC Four a flagship mode of drama which suited the channel’s remit of intelligent programming, its brand identity centred on providing enlightening entertainment and its audience which has always skewed older and educated to a higher level than other public service channels (Andrews 2016). The controversies surrounding the Curse of Comedy season did appear to precipitate a gradual cooling of biographical drama production for BBC Four. From a peak of six biographical dramas broadcast on the channel in 2008, in 2009 there were four, in 2010, three, then only one each in 2011 and 2012. The final biographical drama to be 22  The Curse of Steptoe: 1.625m for Wednesday and 343 000 for Friday repeat (Total: 1.97m); Hancock and Joan 709 000 (ND for repeats); Hughie Green 895 000 for Wednesday and 325 000 for repeat (total 1.22m); Frankie Howerd 669 000 and 257 000 for repeat (total 926 000). Broadcasters Audience Research Board, accessed 16 January 2020 BARB.co.uk.

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broadcast in the 2000s–early 2010s cycle was Burton and Taylor, in October 2013. The Curse of Comedy represents both the high watermark and the nadir of the channel’s biographical dramas. It was impactful in both the positive sense of generating interest, profile and audiences, and in the negative sense of creating unwelcome bad publicity. The most significant ongoing impact of the season has been the remaking of the institutional conventions for the portrayal of real people in drama prompted by the curse of The Curse of Steptoe.

6.6   Conclusion The public exposure of private lives intrinsic to the biographical drama renders it perpetually at risk of tarnishing the reputations of biographees. The power and authority invested in television institutions endows them with a responsibility to individuals that are represented in their output. Public service broadcasters are therefore held to high standards of accountability when it comes to representations of real events and have developed a series of editorial conventions that underpin this duty to both the public and the private individual. When the frameworks that have been put in place to protect the reputation of the institution and the individual are undermined, as in the case of The Curse of Comedy, the eventual outcome is a loss of trust in the broadcaster. For the BBC especially, this is problematic, because its public status is so profoundly based on a pact of faith between broadcaster and public that justifies its constitutional independence and economic basis in the licence fee. Any instance in which the truthfulness of programmes on the BBC comes under scrutiny provides a means to attack the institution on grounds that are core to its identity and reputation: its trustworthiness and impartiality. Even where creative licence is an acceptable defence of factual inaccuracy, as in the case of the biographical or fact-based drama, the institution remains uniquely vulnerable to accusations of unfairness caused by fictionalisation. Biographical dramas are examinations of the relationship between the private individual—the person—and the public façade—the persona. Because the persona is the publicly sanctioned ‘strategic identity’ (Marshall and Barbour 2015), it is the more recognisable and imitable aspect of the individual. Since these public presentations themselves have a fictive quality, for biographical drama to focus solely on the persona would be as much a fictionalisation as the speculative dramatisation of the private life is. While a focus on the public works, actions and image of the famous

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person may satisfy the desires of the ‘keepers of the flame’ and their protection of the reputation, it would not meet the generic promise of the biographical drama to reveal unknown truths about the individual, nor the requirements of drama for conflict and resolution. Legitimate ethical questions may be raised about the biographical drama and the appropriateness of its exploitation of human lives for the purpose of entertainment. To fully answer these, to avoid all personal injury or offence, though, would be to avoid engaging in biographical examination through drama at all. While sensitivity to the dignity of the person is paramount, the biographical drama’s examination of the person and persona and public figures remains a valuable televisual form that is worth preserving. Provided that television audiences are trusted with the media literacy to manage combinations of fact and fiction, there is no reason why the form cannot subsist with care for the rights of the individual to privacy and reputation, and the public for cultural re-examination of important figures from the past. Indeed, critical viewing practices are required not only for fictionalised representations of real people, but for factual treatments as well. The final chapter will consider how biographical material is produced for television across non-fiction formats, applying some of the conceptual frameworks that have been developed throughout the book for analysing the combination of biography and television.

References Adams, M. (2009) ‘Ken Russell: Musical Mythmaker’, Notes 66(1): 143–163 Anderson, S. (2001) ‘History TV and Popular Memory’ in Edgerton, G. and Rollins, P.C. (eds) Television Histories. Lexington, KY: University Press Kentucky, pp. 19–36. Andrews, H. (2016) ‘BBC Four Biopics: Lessons in Trashy Respectability’ Journal of British Cinema and Television, 13(3): 409–429. Andrews, H. (2017) ‘Women We Loved: Paradoxes of public and private in the biographical television drama’. Critical Studies in Television. 12(1): 63–78. Archard, D. (2002) ‘Privacy, The Public interest and a prurient public’ in Matthew, K. (ed) Media Ethics. London: Routledge, pp. 82–96. Bainbridge, D. I. (2018) Intellectual Property (Tenth Edition). Harlow: Pearson. Banks-Smith, N. (2008) ‘Last Night’s TV’ The Guardian 10 April [online] available at https://www.theguardian.com/culture/tvandradioblog/2008/ apr/10/lastnightstvratheryouthan accessed 14 January 2020.

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Edge, S. (2007) ‘The shame of Steptoe’ Daily Express, 26 July [online] available at https://web.archive.org/web/20180301230358/https://www.express. co.uk/expressyourself/14692/The-­shame-­of-­Steptoe accessed 7 April 2020. Ellis, J. (2011) “Interstitials: How the Bits in Between Define the Programmes” in Grainge, Paul (ed) Ephemeral Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 59–69. Evening Standard (2008) ‘As a new film exposes the truth behind TV legend Hughie Green, his son reveals the demons that led to his father’s behaviour’ Evening Standard [online] available at https://www.standard.co.uk/showbiz/ as-­a -­n ew-­f ilm-­e xposes-­t he-­t ruth-­b ehind-­t v-­l egend-­h ughie-­g reen-­h is-­s on-­ reveals-­the-­demons-­that-­led-­to-­7281344.html accessed 14 January 2020. Eyre, H. (2008) ‘Television Reviews’ The Independent 30 March [online] available at https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-­entertainment/tv/reviews/the-­ no-­1-­ladies-­detective-­agency-­bbc-­1he-­kills-­coppers-­itv-­1hancock-­and-­joan-­ bbc-­4-­802499.html accessed 7 April 2020. Fillis, B. (2017) Interview with author, conducted by telephone 15 March 2017. Flett, K. (2008) ‘Who Will give Celery some Stick?’ The Guardian 6 April [online] available at https://www.theguardian.com/media/2008/apr/06/television. tvandradioarts accessed 14 January 2020. Gardiner, J. (2003) ‘Variations on a Theme of Elgar: Ken Russell, the Great War and the television ‘life’ of a composer’ Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television 23(3): 195–209. Goodwin, D. (2017) Interview with author, conducted by telephone 20 March 2017. Hamilton, I. (1992) Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography. London: Faber. Hamilton, N. (2007) Biography: A Brief History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hastings, C. (2008) ‘The Life and Many Loves of Hughie Green’ Daily Telegraph 3 February [online] available at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ uknews/1577434/The-­life-­and-­many-­loves-­of-­Hughie-­Green.html accessed 14 January 2020. Hill, J. (2015), ‘Blurring the lines between fact and fiction: Ken Russell, The BBC, and ‘Television Biography’ Journal of British Cinema and Television 12(4): 452–478. Holmwood, L. (2007)’BB4 to Show Steptoe and Son Biopic’ The Guardian [online] available at https://www.theguardian.com/media/2007/nov/27/ bbc.television5 accessed 14 January 2020. Hoyle, A. (2008) Frankie Howerd’s sister rages at the gay lover behind David Walliam’s portrayal of her adored brother’ Daily Mail 30 March [online] available at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-­549349/Frankie-­ Howerds-­sister-­rages-­gay-­lover-­David-­Walliams-­portrayal-­adored-­brother. html accessed 14 January 2020.

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Hughes, G. (2017) Interview with author, conducted by telephone 24 February 2017. Lanza, J. (2007) Phallic Frenzy: Ken Russell and his Films. Chicago, Il: Chicago Review Press Lee, H. (2009) Biography: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lee-Wright, P. (2010) The Documentary Handbook. London: Routledge. Lewis, R. (2008) ‘No Tears of Laughter for BBC’s Steptoe’ Daily Telegraph 19 March [online] available at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3556324/No-­tears-­of-­laughter-­for-­BBCs-­Steptoe.html accessed 14 January 2020. Lipkin, S.N. (2002) Real Emotional Logic: Film and Television Docudrama as Persuasive Practice. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. Long, J. (1999) Telling Women’s Lives: Subject/Narrator/Reader/Text. New York and London: New York University Press. Marshall, P.D. and Barbour, K. (2015) ‘Making Intellectual Room for Persona Studies: A New Consciousness and a Shifted Perspective’ Persona Studies 1(1): 1–12. Marshall, P.D., Moore, C. & Barbour, K. (2015) ‘Persona as method: exploring celebrity and the public self through persona studies’ Celebrity Studies 6(3): 288–305. Mendelson, E. (1978) ‘Authorized Biography and its Discontents’ in Aaron, D. (ed) Studies in Biography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ofcom (2019) Ofcom Broadcasting Code [online] available at https://www. ofcom.org.uk/tv-­radio-­and-­on-­demand/broadcast-­codes/broadcast-­code accessed 7 April 2020. Paget, D. (2011) No Other Way to Tell It: Docudrama on Film and Television (Second Edition). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pastor-González, V. (2016) ‘Spanish Docudrama: Of Heroes and Celebrities’ in Ebbrecht, T. and Paget, D. (eds) Docudrama on European Television: A Selective Survey. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 135–166. Petley, J. (2020) ‘The War against the BBC, Part Two: Vox Populi or Voice of the Press?’ Edinburgh University Press Blog, 3 December [online] available at: https://euppublishingblog.com/2020/12/03/the-­w ar-­a gainst-­t he-­b bc-­ part-­two accessed 15 January 2021. Rolinson, D. (2016) ‘British Docudrama: New Directions in Reflexivity’, in Ebbrecht, T. and Paget, D. (eds) Docudrama on European Television: A Selective Survey. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 199–228. Seymour, M. (2002) ‘Shaping the Truth’ in France, P. and St. Clair, W. (eds) Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Sutcliffe, T. (2008) ‘Last Night’s TV’ The Independent 20 March [online] available at https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-­entertainment/tv/reviews/ last-­nights-­tv-­the-­curse-­of-­steptoe-­bbc4countdown-­to-­war-­bbc2-­798350. html accessed 14 January 2020. Sutton, P. (2009) ‘Ken Russell at the BBC, 1959–1970’ in Flanagan, K.M. (ed) Ken Russell: Re-Viewing England’s Last Mannerist. Toronto and Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press, pp. 3–23. Tapper, J. (2007) ‘Hancock’s widow’s fury as his affair is made into TV drama’ Daily Mail 15 September [online] available at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ tvshowbiz/article-­4 81961/Hancocks-­w idows-­f ury-­a ffair-­T V-­d rama.html accessed 14 January 2020. Tibbetts, J.C., (2005a) ‘Ken Russell’s The Debussy Film’ Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television 25(1), pp. 81 -99. Tibbetts, J. C. (2005b) Composers in the Movies: Studies in Musical Biography. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Tryhorn, C. (2008) ‘BBC4 Breaks Ratings Record’ The Guardian 20 March [online] available at https://www.theguardian.com/media/2008/mar/20/ bbc4.ratings accessed 7 April 2020. Walton, J. (2008) ‘Last Night on Television’ Daily Telegraph 20 March [online] available at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/3671969/ Last-­n ight-­o n-­t elevision-­T he-­C urse-­o f-­S teptoe-­B BC4-­1 0-­D ays-­t o-­War-­ BBC2.html accessed 14 January 2020. Ward, S.J. (2011) Ethics and the Media: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, B. (2002) Truth and Truthfulness. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 7

Biographical Television Beyond Drama

7.1   Introduction This book has explored the televisual reproduction of biographical stories in various dramatic formats. It has considered how the core features of biography—the exploration of self, the intimate examination of the cultural figure and the analysis of the life course—are translated to dramatic form via the aesthetic affordances of the television medium. Much biographical television, however, is not produced in dramatic form. Though the framing and rhetoric of such programmes diverge from biographical drama, underlying themes and concerns are shared. It is thus worth exploring how biographical concepts, themes or stories are represented in non-fiction formats. As this book has examined, when biography appears on television, it produces a potent combination of a medium through which the boundaries between fact and fiction are routinely blurred, and a cultural mode in which the shaping of lives into narrative complicates our understanding of personal and public ‘truth’. This chapter explores this process in relation to non-fiction programming. It explores two case studies of non-fiction programmes that take different approaches to the exploration of biographical themes. The Up Series demonstrates how an influential television documentary project has used actuality footage to narrativise the process of living a life and to critique the relation between social circumstance and life course. Who Do You Think You Are?, by contrast, dramatises the physical and psychological processes that biographers © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Andrews, Biographical Television Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64678-3_7

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undergo as they gather the materials through which they will narrate the life story. Neither programme is proposed by broadcasters as straightforward ‘biography’, but both demonstrate some of the ways in which biography operates through television, a medium that, as this book has explored, works through continuous renegotiation of boundaries between intimacy and objectivity, public and private, and fact and fiction.

7.2   Biography and Factual Television Documentary and non-fiction programming have formed a significant part of television biography throughout its history. This most often manifests in the biographical profile, also a significant radio genre in programmes such as Desert Island Discs (BBC Radio 4, 1967 - ) or Great Lives (BBC Radio 4, 2001–). There have been occasional examples of similar series on British television, such as Footprints (BBC 2, 1964–1966), Great Britons (BBC 1, 1978) or Secret Lives (Channel 4, 1994–1998), documentary strands in which a new life was explored each week. Biographical profiles have also been a prominent part of arts strands like Monitor (BBC1, 1958–1962), Omnibus (BBC1, 1967–2003) and The South Bank Show (ITV, 1978–2010/Sky Arts, 2012–). In contemporary television contexts, biographical documentaries are often used as supporting material for a broader themed season or evening of programming, adding background colour or contextual supporting information. It is difficult to account for the totality of biographical non-fiction television, since it is a regular, familiar part of the broadcast schedules. Biographical documentaries are typically one-off, singular events rather than regular programming. The US series Biography is a prominent transnational variant of the televisual biographical documentary. It began in 1962 as an independent production sold to syndication. In 1987, Arts and Entertainment (A&E) network, a cable channel founded in 1984, bought the broadcast rights to the series, and in 1990 acquired the trademark and archive. The programme expanded into a multi-media franchise in the 1990s, culminating in the 1999 founding of The Biography Channel (rebranded as FYI in 2014). The series consists of short profiles of famous people, including politicians, historical figures and entertainers. Biography combines voiceover, interview, archive footage and images of photographs and documentation with a storytelling voiceover. These programmes present a life in digest and are equivalent to journalistic or essayistic treatments of individual lives more than a book-length biography, though they draw on the

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same skills and sources. Gary R. Edgerton (2001) argues that the series is a typical example of history on television, which uses conventional and melodramatic framings to make historical stories marketable in commodity form. Mikita Brottman (2000) critiques the bowdlerisation of Biography profiles, which tend to suppress scandal in favour of producing simplistic, heroic portraits. She argues that they are depoliticised, simplified and made purely for entertainment. Julie Rak (2005) notes that the series appeals to the national sympathies of US viewers, comparing Biography’s collection of lives to the Dictionary of National Biography. She sees the technical roots of these programmes in documentary, but their ideological roots in biography, demonstrated formally in the programme through the absence of a speaking subject, the invisibility of the biographer and the presence of documents as apparent guarantor of historical accuracy. Televisual biographical profiles are not only produced in the documentary format. They are also a central part of the chat show. In these programmes, celebrity guests are, usually in the service of promoting their work, invited to share brief autobiographical fragments in the form of anecdotes. Philip Bell and Theo van Leeuwen (1994) note the role of the interviewer in eliciting apparently private details about the star’s life to construct a ‘behind the scenes’ character that is nevertheless compatible with their public image. They argue that ‘the talkshow involves the talker in a performance of his/her cultural role or status, albeit a performance marked as ‘real’ or revealing in ways that invite audience members to see the celebrity as like themselves’ (1994: 189). Jane Shattuc observes that the interactions between host and guest often have a ‘rehearsed’ quality, underlining the sense that the biographical storytelling that takes place on chat shows occupies a liminal place between fact and fiction. The presence of a studio audience enhances the sense of the chat show set as performance space, and, as Bell and van Leeuwen argue ‘create[] an atmosphere of community enclosing that event’ (1994: 195). This is literalised in the set of Piers Morgan’s Life Stories (ITV1, 2009–), in which the conversation between the journalist-host and his guest takes place on a darkened stage surrounded on three sides by the audience. Though fleeting overhead shots of the audience are edited into the image of the conversation, they are largely an acousmatic presence in the programme. The sounds of their reactions are incorporated into the programme to indicate their role as ‘inscribed viewers’, proxies for the viewing audience (Shattuc 2015: 195). Most of the biographical storytelling in Life Stories takes place via relatively long takes framed in medium close-up, focusing attention on the

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conversation, and especially the performance of the guest. Bell and van Leeuwen draw a distinction between the revelatory and the conversational interview, the difference between them residing in the levels of seriousness and intensity. Life Stories attempts to do both, varying in approach throughout the programme from the light-hearted to the confessional. The primary interview is occasionally interrupted by short edited montage that highlights crucial moments in the life of the guest, alongside talking head interviews with people from their lives. This allows a ‘third-person’ biographical view alongside the more autobiographical material generated by the interview with the guest themselves. These sequences are used intratextually as a prompt for further self-reflection or to herald a new phase in the interview. They also highlight the capacity of television to construct microbiographies through the well-established television practice of the clip package. Another common way in which biography and non-fiction television combine is in the use of biographical stories as a narrative hook for history documentaries. Television historians such as David Starkey or Lucy Worsley have presented multiple programmes which focus on individuals, often members of the Royal Family or eminent figures from British history and culture.1 These programmes capitalise on the recognition value of their well-known subjects to gather audience interest and make them competitive in a crowded schedule. The presenter-historian mounts a putatively new case about this historical figure, re-interpreting their life story as we would expect a biographer to do. In this sense, the representation that this style of documentary makes is different to the faithful depiction or informative profile. It is representation in the sense of advocacy, as Bill Nichols notes: ‘documentaries may represent the world in the same way a lawyer may represent a client’s interests: they make a case for a particular interpretation of the evidence before us’ (Nichols 2017: 30). Nichols suggests that this shaping of facts to become evidence to support a point of view is inherent to documentary form. Biography scholars similarly concede that facts are the raw materials that are shaped into the life 1  Starkey has presented Henry VIII (Channel 4, 1998), Elizabeth (Channel 4, 2000), The Six Wives of Henry VIII (Channel 4, 2001), Edward and Mary: The Unknown Tudors (Channel 4, 2002), Henry VIII: The Mind of a Tyrant (Channel 4, 2009) and The Churchills (Channel 4, 2012). Worsley has presented: Inside the World of Henry VIII (History Channel, 2012), The First Georgians: The German Kings Who Made Britain (BBC Four, 2014), Six Wives with Lucy Worsley (BBC One, 2016) and Jane Austen: Behind Closed Doors (BBC Two, 2017).

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story, its coherence is manufactured, or, as Schabert (1982) puts it, ‘imposed’ on the facts. This is a necessary illusion, wholly unlike the fragmented, variable and contingent quality of a life lived. Utilising television form to make biographical interpretations, historical documentaries blend traditional historical discourse with graphic, often dramatised, storytelling. Re-enactments are part of the historical documentary’s communicative techniques for bringing historical personages to life. This can be done with metahistorical élan, as in Six Wives with Lucy Worsley, where the historian, dressed in period costume, appears alongside actors performing as Henry VIII and his contemporaries. In this conceit, she acts as an investigator and witness to historical events, lending them a greater immediacy and poignancy than a description or still images can conjure. In the opening credits sequence, Worsley introduces the programme by telling the viewer (in a combination of direct address and voiceover) that she will take them ‘back in time and into the private lives of Henry’s six wives’. A match cut disguised by a figure briefly obscuring the camera as it swishes past appears to magically switch Worsley’s costume from contemporary everyday wear to a Tudor dress and cap, a punctual illustration of the seamless passage back in time. Like the use of direct address in self-reflexive biographical dramas discussed in Chap. 3, this uses television grammar to work against the logic of time, representing events from the past with a level of immediacy apt to the medium. She then claims she will ‘watch as events unfold’, briefly turning her head as though her attention is suddenly caught by ongoing drama. From here, the credits sequence consists of edited highlights of the series, where Worsley is inserted as onlooker into dramatised scenes of the six wives. In the first of these, the camera circles Henry (Scott Arthur) and Catherine of Aragon (Paola Bontempi) as they engage in intense conversation, followed by a close-up of Worsley in profile, peering round a door. The proximity of the camera to her face enables the viewer to register her performance of intrigue. This implies that she will be a proxy witness to historical events, an avatar for the viewer providing not only a point of view on events, but a suggestion for affective response. The voiceover then emphasises that, while the programme will focus on private moments in the lives of Henry’s court, all the dialogue is based on historical records. Like in the docudrama, this is an appeal to extra-textual evidence that provides a ‘warrant’ for the ‘indexical icons’ presented in the programme (Lipkin 2002). Jonathan Bignell argues that integration of dramatised scenes into documentary offers ‘immersive participation’, implying that this is ‘what it

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might have been like to witness events that are necessarily inaccessible to television’ (Bignell 2010: 202). This promise of authenticated, intimate access to the subject is the very heart of biography’s claims. These are here combined with television’s function as ‘witness’ (Ellis 2000) as a way of making historical figures present, urgent and human. Acknowledging the intermingling of reality and performance or narrative in the documentary form, Nichols describes it as a ‘fiction (un)like any other’ (Nichols 2017: xi), telling stories using methods like those of fiction, but crucially distinct from it. Where does this distinction come from? Documentary pioneer John Grierson famously called it the ‘creative treatment of actuality’, but as Nichols points out, considerable question marks still hover over both the key terms in this definition—what levels of ‘creativity’ can be tolerated, and what constitutes ‘actuality’? Nichols (2017) offers a careful and qualified definition of documentary which highlights its status as a text about reality, exploring actual events and people, featuring social actors in the real world who do not play or perform roles, but that are engaged in the rhetorical shaping of their raw materials. He emphasises that documentaries are not a reproduction, but a representation, and thus must be judged using the criteria that have been developed to evaluate representations: the nature of their pleasures, the value of their insight or the quality of their perspective. All of these can be applied equally to fiction and non-fiction. Attempts to define documentary share similar challenges to those definitions of biography highlighted throughout this book, because of the blending of factual elements in a medium and framework which are more culturally familiar in the fiction mode. As Thomas Waugh suggests, documentary film tends to be defined in relief against fiction film. It ‘implies the absence of elements of performance, acting, staging, directing and so forth, criteria that presumably distinguish the documentary form from the narrative fiction film’ (Waugh 2011: 75). However, as Nichols (2017), Bruzzi (2013) and others point out, performance is part of documentary’s capture of ‘social actors’ whether intentional or not. Elizabeth Marquis suggests that performance in documentary can be measured along a spectrum, with one end occupied by apparently spontaneous behaviour captured by an unacknowledged or hidden camera, and the other by documentary ‘acting’ where individuals consciously enact roles outside of their own identity to camera. She also suggests a three-tiered model for conceptualising documentary performance. The first tier, everyday performance, is the utilisation of ‘basic tools of self-presentation’ (Marquis

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2013: 49) such as language choice and non-verbal cues like facial expression, gesture and intonation that are routinely used as part of the communicative act of self-expression. Here she draws on the pioneering insights of Erving Goffman (1956), who applied dramaturgical principles to everyday lived experience, concluding that in all social interactions people make context-specific performances of self. The second tier is ‘filmic performance’, the recognition of the work of the filmmaking apparatus as a mediating presence in the capture of documentary subjects. Here, the levels of agency of actors in fiction and non-fiction forms are similar (though not equal): ‘editing, cinematography and sound choices—all of which are usually beyond the performers’ purview—themselves communicate in ways that may complement, complicate or contradict the screen performer’s work’ (Marquis 2013: 50). The final tier is ‘documentary performance’, the combination of a mediated performance of self with the generic language associated with documentary. Marquis notes that the self-presentation suggested by non-fiction performance is affected by the non-fiction conventions applied to the text in which it features. Marquis’s work helps to recognise both the specificities of the documentary performance and the areas of overlap with performance in fiction genres, therefore highlighting the commonalities between fiction and non-fiction treatment of material also often discussed in biography studies. Analysing documentary performance is a matter of assessing the presentation of self. These appearances are usually understood to be more ‘authentic’ than the carefully prepared and delivered performances of actors in drama (Paget 2011). However, the expressive tools of self-­ presentation (gesture, facial expression or articulation) available to documentary performers are also drawn upon by actors in constructing character and, as explored in Chap. 3, can be the basis of impersonations of biographical characters. The distinction in documentary is an underlying assumption that these expressive acts are spontaneous, unrehearsed and not necessarily intentional or conscious. This is problematic when Marquis’s ‘tiers’ are considered. Like professional actors, these non-fiction performances are mediated through the filmic apparatus and the conventions of genre, constructed in collaboration between actor and production team. Much as biography must be conceived as a combination of factual material with fictional modes of presentation, so too documentary is a constructed representation of actuality.

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7.3   The ‘Up’ Series: From Ethnography to Biography In May 1964, ITV broadcast a special edition of the Granada Television current affairs strand World in Action (1963–1998) focusing on the impact of social class on an individual’s life chances. It exemplified the main ambitions of World in Action: documenting the ‘changing face of British society’ but with an appeal to broad audience via an occasional focus on ‘soft’ subjects (Bruzzi 2007: 8). The programme was called Seven Up! It took the form of a series of interviews with seven-year-olds about their lives: family, school, leisure activities, relationships with members of the opposite sex, opinions of other social classes, and aspirations. This was intercut with vital, immediate documentary footage of the children in their everyday lives. The film was inspired by the Jesuit maxim, repeated in voiceover during the programme: ‘give me the child until he is seven, and I will show you the man’. One of the programme’s researchers, Michael Apted revisited the participants in the series seven years later in 1970. Seven Plus Seven marked the changes as the children grew into adolescents, offering them opportunities to discuss their lives from a position of greater knowledge and understanding. It used archive footage from the original documentary to compare the seven- and fourteen-year-old selves, marking the contrasts and continuities in these represented personae. Apted, and much of the same production team, has repeated the formula every seven years since, turning a one-off child-centred documentary film from the 1960s into an important televisual representation of the process of living a life.2 The Up series has developed over time, from an overtly political project, seeking to trace the impact of social conditions on ordinary people’s lives, to one that aligns far more with biography: the study of the life course. The Up Series has been discussed by scholars as an ethnographic project or ‘longitudinal study of social class’ (Burawoy 2009: 317) more than explicitly one of biography. The structure of the first three editions supports this argument. The programmes are arranged thematically and edited often so that the participants’ responses provide critical counterpoints to one another. Juxtapositions between the stories of people from different class backgrounds demonstrate the thesis at the series’ heart: that social class has a clear influence on one’s life choices. Joe Moran points out 2  The series has also been released internationally as feature films, usually edited down from the television footage to be suitable for theatrical distribution.

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that, ‘the project confronts theoretical models and representations of class with the messiness and randomness of experience’ (Moran 2002: 393). As Katherine Miller Skillander and Catherine Fowler note, however, the longitudinal documentary borrows from the sociological model of the ‘life course’, an analysis of lives as unfolding over time in complex patterns of continuity and change. They identify this practice as part of the ‘biographical turn’ in sociology (see Introduction), a recognition of the value of the life story as evidence alongside statistical and historical data. Longitudinal studies attempt to ‘encompass the “whole person” and understand the multiple layers and aspects that can occur in individual lives’ (Skillander and Fowler 2015: 132). Apted has resisted the idea of himself being a sociologist, claiming he has only ‘a kind of nosy interest in the human condition’ (Milkman and Burawoy 2009: 321). Perhaps this is a nosiness shared with Midge Gillies’ (2009) version of the biographer, driven by curiosity about the unfolding of lives and the creation of the self. According to Skillander and Fowler’s study, such a biographical approach complements the aims and effects of the ‘longitudinal’ documentary. By 28 Up (Granada, 1984), there was a significant structural change in the programme. It moved from one to two parts, lengthening its duration, and was now organised as profiles of each of the participants rather than topical segments. As Bruzzi (2007) notes, this change from thematic ideas to individual stories had both logistical and ideological origins. Pragmatically, there was now a generous archive of footage of each of the participants, such that the material was becoming too unwieldly to structure in the former way. Apted has admitted that the programme was becoming less political in its focus, that audiences and programme makers alike were becoming engrossed in the personal stories rather than socio-­ political subtext. The success of 28 Up in the United States, where Apted assumed the class agenda would ‘be perplexing’, revealed to him the extent to which the films were humanistic rather than political (Moran 2002). The alteration in structure augurs a shift in the programme from the sociological to the biographical. The title sequences for the programme illustrate the new focus on the individual and the change in structure from sociological exploration to biographical profile. Seven Up! begins with only a simple title card bearing the name of the programme alongside blocks of black, cutting straight to the beginning of the programme after a brief credit. Seven Plus Seven (Granada, 1970) uses archive footage of the zoo trip from Seven Up! while a voiceover by Apted explains the programme’s premise, describing the

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documentary an ‘interim report’ between childhood and adulthood. The titles for 21 Up (Granada, 1977) reuse the zoo footage, with an added self-reflexive twist that it is being viewed by the ‘children’, now young adults, in a cinema. Each of these sequences highlights the programme’s intentions to be a social document, through voiceover explanation and, visually, by framing the children as a group. By 28 Up, the titles consist of snippets from the talking head interviews rather than the collective activity of the zoo trip, demonstrating a new focus on the individual, the biographical. 63 Up’s (ITV1, 2019) title sequence presents a growing cacophony of voices over a mosaic of faces. Apted’s voice on the soundtrack explains the process of revisiting the participants every seven years, illustrated by images of Jackie, Tony and Symon from Seven Plus Seven, 21 Up and 28 Up moving from right to left on screen, an evocation of the passage of time. This is followed by intercutting various footages from the other editions in fast juxtaposition. Different pasts collide with one another, sometimes highlighting continuity, as with a match cut of Nick as a child and an adult hiking in the same spot, and sometimes bewilderingly divergent. This demonstrates the growing richness and complexity of the series’ biographical portraits, enabled by its longevity and its archive. It encapsulates a key feature of this series, which is to use television’s often undervalued capacity for long-term memory as part of its storytelling structure. The Up series relies upon two key features of television storytelling for its biographical effects to work: intimacy and repetition. The talking head interview style of the series borrows conventional television grammar used to submit the speaker to the scrutinising gaze of the camera, one that is assumed to elicit the truth from its subject. The close view of the human face that this style permits implies an illusory two-way interaction between participant and viewer, an intense visual intimacy. John Corner suggests that this ‘concentration on face and voice underscores the identity of the program as a biographic document’ because it provides the series with ‘sustained “interiority” as an exploration of subjectivity over time’ (2008: 167) In Seven Plus Seven, for instance, Suzy’s and Nick’s obvious discomfort with having their lives exposed on television is given powerful visual evidence in their unwillingness to directly meet the camera’s gaze, and their frequent (and futile) attempts to hide their faces away. Their defensive posture suggests an instinctive recognition of the intimacy of the relationship between themselves and the viewer, clearly unwelcome to these teenagers. Corner notes that the sense of intimacy with these participants

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also derives from our repeated encounters with them over time (2008: 168). The closeness between Apted and his participants is particularly noticeable when they call him by name. In 63 Up, for example, Apted asks Nick about grieving for his father. He responds: ‘You know me, Michael, I’m sure I haven’t dealt with it fully’, alluding to his by now well-­established tendency to repress painful thoughts and memories. Nick’s answer to Apted, who remains invisible but not anonymous, becomes an address to the camera, and to the implied audience. Apted is a proxy for the viewer, who has also come to know something of Nick’s personality over their repeated encounters with him. The growing Up Series archive also allows Apted to make biographical resonances through repetition. Certain clips are regularly reused such as Nick’s diffident responses at seven, fourteen and twenty-one to prurient questions about his love life; or seven-year-old John and Andrew precociously claiming to read the Observer and the Financial Times. This enables the series to ‘employ[] more extensive intercutting to create illuminating juxtapositions in individual life stories’ (Moran 2002: 396). A good example of this is Jackie’s story from 42 Up (BBC One, 1998). In previous editions, she defended her decision not to have children, citing her selfishness and desire for freedom as prevailing factors. These clips were reused in subsequent editions to build her character profile. In 35 Up (Granada, 1991), Jackie had a small child, Charlie, from a ‘brief but sweet’ relationship. At 42, the viewer is reminded again of Jackie’s earlier views on having children. The camera then watches Jackie in her kitchen, serving breakfast to an older Charlie. The camera pans, tilts and zooms out to a second, then a third son. This piece of camerawork, combined with the choice to withhold the revelation of Jackie’s other children until now, allows the sequence to work as a piece of punctual biographical storytelling unique to the screen medium. Apted’s ability to edit, make juxtapositions, provide ‘framing and linking commentary’ all work to ‘cue biographical ironies and contrasts that the primary materials themselves might not have generated so sharply’ (Corner 2008: 168). Apted is in a similar position to the biographer in the selectivity that enables him to shape an increasingly large vault of raw materials into a story. He noted in 2009 the similarities between his work as a fiction filmmaker and the shaping of these ‘characters’, in a way analogous to novelistic practices of some biographers, especially the ‘strong sense of structure in assembling the character portraits’ (Milkman and Burawoy 2009: 364). The way the programme has handled Symon’s story

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provides a good example. As a child, Symon lived in a children’s home and did not know his father. In his twenties, he proudly brought up five children with his first wife, but an acrimonious divorce left them estranged. With his second wife, he made the decision to foster children, and in 56 Up, he recounts that he has cared for over 130 young people. Short clips of a younger Symon discussing absent father from previous editions are edited together with the older Symon’s approach to childcare in 63 Up. This produces an interpretation of his life: that he has atoned for his father’s absence and his earlier paternal shortcomings by providing love and care in later life for children who need it. This is a redemption narrative which works only through excluding other stories available in Symon’s life, such as his career, his hobbies (he is shown to be artistically talented as a young man) or his religious or political views, all of which feature to varying degrees in the other participants’ profiles. While most biographers do not have the same level of control over their material and archive as Apted does, he is yet constrained by his participants’ power to withhold future participation. He explained to Milkman in 2009 that ‘one of the horrors of the longitudinal documentary is that you are completely at their mercy … there is nothing I can do if they don’t let me use stuff (Milkman and Burawoy 2009: 323). Apted here speaks to the practicalities involved in the production of television, which include legal and ethical requirements as well as social niceties and respect for participants. The ability to withhold consent endows these biographees with a rare amount of control over the biographer’s telling of their story. Duneier suggests that Apted displays ‘deference’ to his subjects which meant ‘surrendering his ethnographic authority and [giving] the subjects voice in expressing who they were on their own terms’ (Duneier 2009: 342). This is powerfully illustrated by Jackie’s angry confrontation with Apted in 49 Up (ITV, 2005). She berates him for asking her and her fellow working-class women ‘insulting’ and ‘mundane’ questions. Jackie accuses him of misrepresenting her story, fitting her (and other women) into simplistic, culturally mandated roles of wife and mother that do not suit her, and overemphasising her disability rather than her talents. Rarely is a biographical subject given voice to protest their representation as strikingly as this. Bruzzi (2007) reads Jackie as emboldened through her awareness of media manipulation due to the influence and popularity of reality television in the 2000s. As was the case with most of the editions for the last twenty years, reviewers of 63 Up have found the comparison with reality

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television irresistible (McKay 2019; Sweeting 2019; Connell 2019). The similarities between reality television and the Up Series are predicated on ordinary people involved in performances of the self, and a level of self-­ awareness of the constructedness of the ‘reality’ that is represented. The sense that selves on television are both real and performed is nicely encapsulated in 63 Up by the editing of Tony’s insistent claim that he has always tried to give a ‘credible, truthful opinion’ into a sequence of images of him taking acting lessons and appearing in character in a feature film. This brief sequence can be fruitfully read using Marquis’s tripartite schema (2013). Tony’s performance is formed first from his language choice and facial features, his widened eyes and easy, natural delivery communicating a desire to be believed to be authentic, which Marquis identifies as verbal and non-verbal cues of ‘everyday performance’; second, from the camera’s ‘representational’ capture of his acting lessons which are aspects of ‘filmic performance’ constructed through the ‘mediating presence’ of the camera apparatus; and third, the specific register of performance in documentary, the use of genre-specific techniques such as talking head interviews their meaningful juxtaposition with images that supposedly capture direct reality. Apted’s editing of Tony’s performance acknowledges the slippage between the everyday performance-as-self and the self-conscious display of self for film across the Up Series more broadly. It provides a momentary insight into the constructedness of personal identity that suits its project of examining the life course via the medium of television documentary. Reading the series in this way renders it akin to the self-reflexive, non-­ totalising and open biography desired by many critics of the genre (Backscheider 1999; Wagner-Martin 1994). The Up Series is not customarily discussed as biographical television, though it clearly contains many elements of biography: the use of archive material as visual evidence, the presentation of life stories and the life course in satisfying if problematic formulae, and the exploration of the development of self. Perhaps the reason that it has been perceived as sociological rather than biographical is because of the ordinariness of the lives that it documents, though Skillander and Fowler’s (2015) work presents a challenge to this view inasmuch as they suggest that longitudinal studies of the life course are profoundly biographical. In 56 Up (ITV1, 2012), Nick speculated that what viewers see in The Up Series is not ‘a picture of the essence of Nick or Suzy, it’s a picture of every man. It’s how a person—any person—how they change’. It is perhaps for this reason that the series has continued to be so compelling. Like the narcissistic biographer

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(Robb 2004), we see our own lives and experiences in those of the participants, a basis for empathy that the programme encourages. Though the participants may not see themselves or their lives as special—they could be ‘any person’—through the act of engaging with this longitudinal documentary, they have contributed to a valuable public demonstration of the process of biographising.

7.4   Biography and Reality Television Biography shares its modus operandi of the public presentation of the private self with the genre of popular factual or reality television. A glance at the shelves of a bookseller offers an indication of the influence of the genre on the biography industry, since memoirs, autobiographies or biographies (authorised or not) of its stars are widely available. Not only do reality television stars constitute a new celebrity class whose lives are subject to biographical scrutiny, but, as John Corner argues: articulations of “ordinary” selfhood as an area of cultural expression have clearly grown in scope and scale as a result of the design and styling of reality television across diverse models. … Such modifications and extensions to how the self is projected, audited and oriented toward others, including toward “society”, have shifted the context in which television versions of the biographical and the autobiographical now generate their meanings. (Corner 2008: 164–165)

Reality television prompted an explosion in scholarship on television’s relationship with and presentation of the self in various intellectual arenas of enquiry, including explorations of gender (Weber 2014), class (Skeggs and Wood 2012), performance (Hill 2014) and non-fiction television formats and global industries (Sender and Kraidy 2010). It is not customary to read reality television within the theoretical boundaries of biography, perhaps because the integration of real people’s lives with television form it engenders is temporary. We reside with the protagonists of reality television only for moments in time, not for the course of their lives. However, as with intimate biography, private lives are exposed for public consumption and its attendant praise, blame or censure. Television is a public forum on which, like in biography, the experience and meaning of selfhood can be represented, measured, compared and tested.

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Because the genre exposes its participants to intense public scrutiny, reality television has been viewed as an exploitative genre, much as biography is critiqued for its unethical disregard for the privacy of its subject (Gillies 2009; Gordon 2004; Lee 2009). Justifications for the invasion of the privacy of the (temporarily) famous tend to hinge on their value to the ‘public interest’ (van Zoonen 1998), as discussed in Chap. 6. Though this sacrifice of personal privacy for fame is (supposedly) voluntary in the case of reality television participants, it nevertheless is legitimated by discourses of the wider social and cultural value of publicisation which are remarkably like the arguments for the didactic value of biography (Edel 1984; Klein 2017). Reality television participants are rarely positioned as ethical models to emulate, but many scholars, including Hill (2005) and Skeggs and Wood (2012), have argued that reality television structure and presentation does encourage viewers to adopt moral judgements about its subjects. In this sense, their behaviours, attitudes and experiences have been treated as symptoms or representations of wider cultural trends or social change (Biressi and Nunn 2005). Like in biography, the social is refracted through the individual. As with fears of biography readers’ lack of criticality (Edel 1984), there have been doubts about the media literacy of viewers of reality television, with the assumption that audiences would not recognise that these personalities are formed in the editing suite as much as located in the person represented (Staiger 2000). Though research proved these fears to be largely unfounded (Hill 2005), there is a sense that the devices of fiction have invaded non-fiction television sufficient for John Corner, as early as 2002, to write of a ‘postdocumentary culture’. This anxiety about using the tools of fiction in the treatment of fact is, as this book has explored, a common feature in biography studies. While reality television may have heralded a new conception of what documentary or factuality means in television, it is worthwhile to remember, as Diane Myers argues, that ‘what constitutes reality in television terms … is created out of a compact between audience and programme-maker’ (Myers 2009: 236). Reception of factual television is a dialogue between viewer and producer, with the former equipped to greater or lesser degrees with pre-existing knowledge about the factual world the programme presents, and a sceptical eye which notices the framing, selection and rhetoric at play in the programme. Annette Hill (2014) describes this as a symbiotic relationship between performer, producer and audience.

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One of reality television’s core interventions has been to challenge the distinction in television between acting or performing a role and the disinterested capture of human behaviour. In a mode of programme making where contributors are described as ‘cast’, and where producers engineer ‘jeopardy’, lines between reality and performance must be blurred (Myers 2009). Like Marquis, Hill (2014) draws on Goffman’s work to explain the complexities involved in reality television participants’ ‘performance of self’. She applies Goffman’s concept of ‘impression management’, the construction of an favourable ‘front-stage’ version of the self for appearance in public, that conceals a hidden ‘back stage’ version of self limited to private scenarios. This distinction between public and private performance of self is central to the concept of persona discussed in Chaps. 3 and 6. Reality television audiences, Hill argues, seek the moments when the ‘front-stage’ self slips and reveals the private—and, it is assumed, more truthful—‘back-stage’ self. In Chap. 3, I argue that one of the key challenges for the actor in a biographical drama is to distinguish between these selves, since the conflict between public persona and private person is a central feature of most biographical storytelling. Hill (2014: 62) describes performance modes in reality television: ‘acting up’—as in, creating a good impression, keeping emotions in check, and ‘acting out’ or ‘playing up’, presenting a more ostensive, overt performance of the self, exteriorising emotion in spectacular display. These performance options are also available to actors in biographical drama and, indeed, tend to correspond to the depicted social context—‘acting up’ in scenes set in public, ‘acting out’ in moments of privacy or interiority (see Andrews 2017). She notes that viewer judgements on reality television participants involve on a ‘play off between authenticity and performance’: ‘an authentic moment can be a self-conscious performance of a “true self”. But it can also be an exaggerated or produced “moment” of authenticity by a knowing participant cast by reality television producers’ (Hill 2014: 70). David Rolinson’s (2016) analysis of textual reconstruction in biographical docudramas demonstrates the overlap with reality television in the performance of self in these terms: they also symbolize notions of performance and the authenticity of self. For example, many of these programmes have climactic sequences in which their subjects appear in television interviews in which there is a claim to reveal the private ‘real’ self, but in a (re)constructed public performance that draws its

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meaning from the hybrid discourses afforded by docudramatic address. (Rolinson 2016: 208)

Clearly there are distinctions in the performance-of-self by the non-­ professional participants of reality television and the actorly portrayals of biographical characters, not least in terms of agency, labour relations and power. Nevertheless, there are striking parallels between the ways in which individuals perform the self in reality television, and the reproduction of persona and person in biographical dramatisation. Much as biography borrows narrative tactics from the novel to shape reality, reality television utilises editing and narrative techniques familiar from drama to make compelling stories out of apparently factual raw material. Jonathan Bignell (2014) observes that the highly structured nature of reality television narrative format separates it from conventional observational documentary, making space for an intimately televisual exploration of character as opposed to action. This lends reality television’s narratives a strong focus on individual identity and biography. He notes that strongly formatted reality lifestyle programme, for example, works with a generic ‘script of a life’ (Bignell 2014: 109), and individual episodes work within or against generic narrative forms. This is analogous to the narrative construction of biographical lives according to the structural conventions of dramatic formats discussed in Chap. 4, where individual stories and the specific events therein are shaped into culturally inscribed patterns. Where reality television may impose more circumscribed narrative formats as part of its logic of formatting, the underlying application of pre-existing storytelling convention is similar. Richard Kilborn describes a critical anxiety about the application of narrative technique to factual material as ‘fears that in the desire to create maximum dramatic effect, producers will begin to distort the very reality they claim to be representing’ (Kilborn 2003: 71). He gives the example of programmes about the emergency services that draw on techniques from film and television drama, such as editing, mood music and ‘devices to build narrative tension’ (72). Such critiques are familiar from the field of biography studies, where an equivalent might be the application of novelistic devices like metonymy, metaphor and other tropological features (see Chap. 1). In both the application of narrative structure and the use of fictional devices, biography and reality television continue to challenge distinctions between fact and fiction. In ‘cloth[ing]itself in the garments of drama’ (Myers 2009: 237), factual television began to shift away from the overarching ‘discourses of

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sobriety’ that Nichols (2017: 26) has attributed to documentary form (see also Chap. 2). He defines these as the ‘ways we have of speaking directly about social and historical reality’, giving science, economics and educational policy as examples. Their ‘sobriety’ stems from their resistance to ‘whim or fantasy’, to imaginary characters or worlds. The dependence upon and faith in empirical facts as a locus of truth in traditional biography clearly render it a (compromised) subject of discourses of sobriety. Nichols points out that these discourses work within institutional frameworks, such that they are infused with power and responsibility. Documentary on television is highly dependent upon institutional frameworks as a means of identifying, validating and providing contextual cues for a programme to be read as factual. Reality television complicates these cues by borrowing the rhetoric or appearance of actuality programming, but introducing those qualities of whimsy, imagination or performance that ‘sobriety’ opposes. Discourses of sobriety are a useful way of identifying the factual claim of documentary but should not be confused with value judgements. Documentary can be made with all the accoutrements of ‘sober’ programming but with subject matter that is trivial, offensive or misleading. Reality television can powerfully illustrate truths about the self in society, or what it means to be human, much as biography attempts to do (Klein 2017).

7.5   Genealogy as Biography in Who Do You Think You Are? Since it was first broadcast in 2004, there have been 16 series and over 140 episodes of Who Do You Think You Are? The series has been a successful popular factual franchise, with both the British version sold overseas and the format localised in, for example, Canada, Sweden, South Africa and the United States. The programme combines intimate family history with explorations of broader social, political and cultural context. In each episode, a celebrity participant traces part of their ancestry, travelling to key locations in their family’s past and meeting with historians, archivists and other experts to help fill in the story, or to add background detail. WDYTYA is a dramatisation of historical and genealogical research methods, mediated through the curatorial figure of the featured celebrity. Claire Lynch (2011) coins the term ‘biogravision’ to describe the televised production of ancestral narratives. Her term also captures how the programme visualises the process of biographical research, particularly with its focus

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on, bordering on fetishisation of, the historical document. Census records, parish registers and certificates of birth, marriage and death are routinely shown on screen. These are usually recorded by a rostrum camera which carefully ranges around the document with close-up reframings to pause on the relevant information, as the celebrity (usually) reads the information aloud. This doubling of image and sound impresses on the viewer the importance of the document, highlighting its value as authentic record of historical evidence. This is a televisual equivalent of the footnote in written biography. Episodes usually begin with trip to visit relatives, who supply current knowledge and, often, photographs of family members. The camera lingers on these photographs with tilts, pans and zooms that imply a mirroring the eye of the celebrity and aligning the viewer’s point of view with theirs. This both visualises the psychological and intellectual processes entailed in genealogical enquiry, and invites the viewer to identify, via the celebrity, the emotional aspects of family research. The episode featuring actor Brian Blessed (S11, E2) provides a good example of the role of the celebrity in enlivening the practice of research, and, through verbal utterances and facial gestures, providing emotive commentary on their family member’s life story. Blessed accentuates the bald historical facts he is provided in documents with performative flourishes, framing the actions of his ancestors in the present tense to make them seem like an unfolding story rather than a sealed fate. He learns that his ancestor Jabez absconded from the workhouse in which he lived at the age of eleven. Around this simple fact, Blessed conjures an image of Jabez as ‘smart, resolute and crafty’, interpreting the historical evidence so as to impose a character upon him. He describes him subsequently as a ‘lad after my own heart—adventurous’. Blessed merges self-identity with the record of his ancestor, a fusion which is entertaining even if unverifiable. Lynch argues that the programme’s structure obliges it to ‘challenge the division between life writing and genealogy’, because it models the narration of past lives through its present-day subject (Lynch 2011: 117). The celebrity participant is therefore more than a simple narrative hook for the programme’s discussion of social history, making the programme as much an exploration of personal identity as it is of collective experience. Many of the programmes begin with the celebrity setting a goal, a story or family trait that they wish to investigate: actor Kate Winslet (S16, E4), for instance, seeks to explore a family myth that there is a Swedish connection in her lineage. This is a narrative mechanism, a way of structuring the process of research that provides it with momentum and meaning. It also

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imposes artificial narrative coherence onto the process of genealogy, eliding the frustrations of false turns or dead ends that occur as a matter of course in historical research. The illusion of continuous progress in the research manifests in the metaphor of the journey, where celebrities are pictured on buses, trains, cars or even aeroplanes going to a new location in the hope (or, given the production costs of sending a celebrity and a camera crew on any journey, the certainty) that it will reveal new information, solve a mystery or answer a question just raised. Amy Holdsworth notes that alongside the progressive trope of the ‘journey’, the programme also demonstrates ‘an insistence on affirmation and a stress on completion and closure is emphasized in the denouement of the various stories’ (Holdsworth 2010: 242). The arbitrary selection of a closing point for the story, often one which fulfils the celebrity’s stated aim, demonstrates the processes of fictionalisation which inevitably take place when the messy process of historical research is combined with the precision of a television formula. WDYTYA shapes the process of genealogical investigation into a narrative of discovery. At the heart of this narrative is a character, the celebrity participant. Because they enact this journey for the television camera, their presentation on screen requires the participants to perform as themselves. Stella Bruzzi argues that the self-conscious performance by documentary subjects is central to documentary: [it] is the enactment of the notion that a documentary comes into being as it is performed, that although its factual basis (or document) can pre-date any recording or representation of it, the film itself is necessarily performative because it is given meaning by the interaction between performance and reality. (Bruzzi 2013: 49)

This quality of documentary has been put under strain by popular factual modes on television, which blend different styles of performance. While Bruzzi’s concept of performativity pertains to all documentary subjects, self-conscious performance is particularly noticeable on WDYTYA when the celebrity subject is an actor. Winslet, for example, strongly performs emotive response to the historical record of her family, which found them facing dire poverty and multiple bereavements in nineteenth-century Sweden. She verbalises her emotions ‘God I’m angry now. I feel so angry now!’ and reacts to the revelations of the record as though they are freshly happening to her, not events from the annals of history: ‘No, no, no! … I

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can’t bear it’. Winslet’s performance here is ostensive, drawing out the affective content of historical stories. As Elke Weissmann argues, WDYTYA contains a number of these ‘pivotal moment[s] of cathartic emotionality which highlights the personal transformation of the speaking subject’ (Weissmann 2011: 200). This is visualised in the Winslet episode as she tearfully recounts her gratitude for her privilege compared to her ancestor. She stands on a small dock, and looks pensively onto a lake, a close-up of her intense gaze juxtaposed with a wide shot of the surrounding environment. Weissmann points to these as ‘contemplative images’, which do not have a narrative or referential function, but give the viewer pause to register the emotional content of the programme. These moments highlight the authenticity of a performing subject like Winslet, who exteriorise the emotional content of the process of biographising just as much as close-­ ups of names and dates on registers visualise the historical record. By contrast to the actorly performances of Winslet and Blessed, journalist Jeremy Paxman (S2, E1) maintains an air of scepticism about such affective responses to the process of discovery involved in the programme. He berates the off-screen director for the emotional content of the questions he is asked, such as whether he is excited about the prospect of researching his family, or if he is proud of his Scottish heritage. This is in line with Paxman’s persona as a tough and rational scrutiniser, with little patience for dissembling or embellishment. Yet, surprisingly, on learning of the harsh living conditions in which previous generations of his family existed, Paxman repeatedly responds emotionally. For instance, as he reads the death certificate for his great grandparents, the discovery that they died from tuberculosis and exhaustion brings him close to tears. The camera speedily zooms to a close-up of his face, to capture the wetness of his eyes, an index of his unexpected empathetic sorrow. His tears demonstrate the emotional content of his genealogical discovery. He notes that, although these same conditions applied to hundreds of thousands of people, and that he does not really know the family members he is investigating, he still feels a sense of possession over his ancestors. He speaks powerfully to the relationship between genealogy and the self. The rhetoric of the programme is to suggest that knowledge of family history can augment an individual’s sense of identity—indeed, it is suggested by its title—not ‘who were your ancestors?, but Who Do You Think You Are?’. As Weissmann argues: ‘the celebrities seem to experience the discovery of family history as a discovery of genetic make-up, and therefore as a revelation about their “true” self. In a reciprocal movement, their

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experience of emotional discovery grounds them as individuals and real people for the viewer’ (Weissmann 2011: 200). Paxman scoffs at the idea that the viewer might know him better, suggested by the off-camera director at the end of his programme. However, the very question indicates an expectation embedded in the programme that the private individual beneath the public persona may be revealed via his exploration of his family tree. This is part of the broader generic frame of popular factual television, that suggests that the exposure via television cannot help but reveal something of a person’s ‘true’ self. While this is qualified through formulaic narratives and overt performance, the assumption remains that in ‘biogravision’, something of the celebrity self, as well as their family history—which is, as Lynch (2011) reminds us, a matter of public record— is revealed. A complex dynamic emerges between public persona, exposure of private self and ghosts of selves past, both public and private. Blessed observes at the beginning of his episode that ‘on television, the greatest dramas are about ordinary people’. The pre-credits sequence of the Paxman episode shows him pontificating about the relevance and importance of the programme. His justification for doing it is that ‘most television is ‘complete and total rubbish’ but that this is an opportunity to explore social history something that makes us all what we are, ‘maybe that’s worth doing’. These statements testify to the contradictory underlying purposes of WDYTYA: to present a social history of ordinary people, but to create a narrative drama from it tied to the celebrity self. Paxman’s sense that the programme’s value is located in its revelations about social history speaks to its presence as a flagship programme of a public service broadcaster. Yet it is through the hook of the celebrity identity, and the promise that it reveals something of them, that the programme has maintained its popularity for more than fifteen years. As Amy Holdsworth argues, though the programme centres on questions of memory, one of its most affective resonances is nostalgia for ‘effective and relevant public service television’ (Holdsworth 2010: 244), television that is not always ‘complete and total rubbish’. The marriage of celebrity identity to social history can be perceived as a compromise of the intrinsic worth of historiographic enquiry. But for televisual presentation in a contemporary competitive environment, it provides narrative and drama to conform to audience expectations for a combination of information, education and entertainment. As ‘biogravision’ WDYTYA visualises the historical record, dramatises the stories that emerge from archives and enacts a performance of self-discovery which adds to, enriches and/or complicates a celebrity’s

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public persona. Each episode presents multiple lives in digest, the life histories that emerge from the historical record and the life story of the celebrity. It complicates discourses of fact and fiction through narrative selection, through ostensive performance of emotion and through celebrity figures as avatars through which social history might be discovered. It takes the ‘discourses of sobriety’ entailed in interpreting the dry historical record and makes them less sober but more human.

7.6   Conclusion Factual television encompasses vast swathes of broadcast material, taking in modes and genres of programme making as varied as news, talk shows, current affairs, consumer advice, ‘sober’ documentary and reality television. Biography figures as part of many of these genres. Short biographical profiles of political and social actors are a common feature of news broadcasts, usually to provide apparent context for their current actions. Talk shows, particularly celebrity ones, are predicated on providing biographical detail from the fleeting anecdote to the confessional mode. Stars are engaged on these shows in a performance of self that extends or complicates their life ‘text’. Reality television can provide a punctual insight into the self, even if it is an exaggerated or performative self encouraged by producers and selected by editors. The ‘sober’ documentary is where biographical profiling most akin to traditional written biography occurs, though, as I have shown, this contains the same issues of selectivity, interpretation and narrativisation as apply to other biographical forms, alongside issues of institution, convention and televisual form. Television has always blurred the lines between fact and fiction, and has depended on viewer discretion, media literacy and trust-pacts with broadcast institutions to determine (or sometimes ignore) the distinction between them.

References Andrews, H. (2017) ‘Women We Loved: Paradoxes of public and private in the biographical television drama’. Critical Studies in Television 12(1): 63–78. Backscheider, P.R. (1999) Reflections on Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bell, P. and van Leeuwen, T. (1994) The Media Interview: Confession, Contest, Conversation. Kensington: University of New South Wales Press. Bignell, J. (2010) ‘Docudramatizing the Real: Developments in British TV docudrama since 1990’. Studies in Documentary Film 4(3): 195–208.

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Bignell, J. (2014) ‘Realism and Reality Formats’ in Oullette, L. (ed) A Companion to Reality Television. London: Wiley Blackwell, pp. 97–115. Biressi, A. and Nunn, H. (2005) Reality TV: Realism and Revelation. New York: Columbia University Press. Brottman, M. (2000) ‘“Everybody Loves Somebody”: The A&E “Rat Pack” Biographies’ Biography 23(1): 160–175. Bruzzi, S. (2007) Seven Up. London: BFI. Bruzzi, S. (2013) ‘The Performing Film-maker and the Acting Subject’ in Winston, B. (ed) The Documentary Film Book, London: BFI, pp. 48–58. Burawoy, M. (2009) ‘Public ethnography as film: Michael Apted and the Up! Series’ Ethnography 10(3): 317–319. Connell, C. (2019) ‘63 Up and it’s a joy to catch up with some charming old chums’ Daily Mail 5 June [online] available at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ tvshowbiz/article-­7105735/CLAUDIA-­CONNELL-­reviews-­nights-­TV-­63-­ joy-­catch-­charming-­chums.html accessed 10 September 2019. Corner, J. (2002) ‘Performing the Real: Documentary Diversions’ Television and New Media 3(3): 255–269. Corner, J. (2008) ‘’49 Up: Television, “life-time” and the mediated self’, in Kackman, M. (ed) Flow TV: Television in the Age of Media Convergence, London: Routledge, pp. 164–179. Duneier, M. (2009) ‘Michael Apted’s Up! Series: Public sociology or folk psychology through film’ Ethnography 10(3): 341–345. Edel, L. (1984) Writing Lives: Principia Biographia. New  York/London: W.W. Norton & Company. Edgerton, G.  R. (2001) ‘Television as Historian: A Different Kind of History Altogether’ in Edgerton, G.R. and Rollins, P.C (eds) Television Histories. Lexington, KY: University Press Kentucky, pp. 1–18. Ellis, J. (2000) Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty. London: I.B.Tauris. Gillies, M. (2009) Writing Lives: Literary Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goffman, E. (1956) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre. Gordon, L. (2004) ‘The Death Mask’, in Bostridge, M. (ed) Lives for Sale: Biographers’ Tales. London: Continuum, pp. 1–6. Hill, A. (2005) Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television. London: Routledge Hill, A. (2014) Reality TV. London: Routledge. Holdsworth, A (2010) ‘Who Do You Think You Are? Family History and Memory on British Television’ in Bell, E. and Gray, A. (eds) Televising History: Mediating the Past in Postwar Europe, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 234–247.

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Kilborn, R. (2003) Staging the Real: Factual TV programing in the age of Big Brother. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Klein, C. (2017) ‘Biography as a Concept of Thought: On the premises of biographical research and narrative’ in Renders, H., De Haan, B. and Harmsma, J. (eds) The Biographical Turn: Lives in History. London and New  York: Routledge, pp. 79–87. Lee, H. (2009) Biography: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lipkin, S.N. (2002) Real Emotional Logic: Film and Television Docudrama as Persuasive Practice. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. Lynch, C. (2011) ‘ Who do you think you are? Intimate Pasts Made Public’ Biography 34(1): 108–118. Marquis, E. (2013) ‘Conceptualizing documentary performance’ Studies in Documentary Film 7(1): 45–60. McKay, A. (2019) ‘63 Up: Rich reality of the only TV documentary that’ll soon be in line for a free bus pass’ Evening Standard 4 June [online] available at https://www.standard.co.uk/stayingin/tvfilm/63-­up-­rich-­r eality-­of-­the-­ only-­tv-­documentary-­that-­ll-­soon-­be-­in-­line-­for-­a-­free-­bus-­pass-­a4159151. html accessed 10 September 2019. Milkman, R., and Burawoy, M. (2009) ‘Interview with Michael Apted’ Ethnography 10(3): 321–325. Moran, J. (2002) ‘Childhood class and memory in the Seven Up Films’ Screen 43(4): 387–402 Myers D. (2009) ‘Losing Grip on Reality: A Reflection on British Factual Television’ in Nagib, L. and Mello, C. (eds) Realism and the Audiovisual Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Nichols, B. (2017) Introduction to Documentary Third Edition. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Paget, D. (2011) No Other Way to Tell It: Docudrama on Film and Television (Second Edition). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Rak, J. (2005) ‘Bio-Power: CBC Television’s Life & Times and A&E Network’s Biography on A&E’ Life Writing, 2(2): 19–45. Robb, G. (2004) ‘A Narcissist’s Wedding’, in Bostridge, M. (ed) Lives for Sale: Biographers’ Tales. London: Continuum, pp. 11–14. Rolinson, D. (2016) ‘British Docudrama: New Directions in Reflexivity’, in Ebbrecht, T. and Paget, D. (eds) Docudrama on European Television: A Selective Survey. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 199–228. Schabert, I. (1982) ‘Fictional Biography, Factual Biography, and their Contaminations’ Biography 5(1): 1–16. Sender, K. and Kraidy, M. (eds) (2010) The Politics of Reality Television: Global Perspectives. London: Routledge.

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Shattuc, J. (2015) ‘The Celebrity Talk Show’ in Creeber, G. (ed) The Television Genre Book. London: BFI, pp. 194–196. Skeggs, B. and Wood, H. (2012) Reacting to reality television: performance, audience and value. London: Routledge. Skillander, K. M. and Fowler, C. (2015) ‘From longitudinal studies to longitudinal documentaries: revisiting infra-ordinary lives.’ Studies in Documentary Film 9(2): 127–142. Staiger, J. (2000) Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception. New York and London: New York University Press. Sweeting, A. (2019) ‘63 Up, ITV, review: this extraordinary series is the real reality TV’. INews 5 June [online] available at https://inews.co.uk/culture/ television/63-­up-­itv-­r eview-­this-­extraordinary-­series-­is-­the-­r eal-­r eality-­tv/ accessed 10 September 2019. van Zoonen, L. (1998) ‘The Ethics of Making Private Life Public’ in Brants, K. Hermes, J. and Van Zoonen, L. (eds) The Media in Question: Popular culture and public interests. London: Sage, pp. 113–123. Wagner-Martin, L. (1994) Telling Women’s Lives: The New Biography. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Waugh, T. (2011) The Right to Play Oneself: Looking Back on Documentary Film. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Weber, B.R. (ed.) (2014) Reality Gendervision: Sexuality and Gender on Transatlantic Reality Television. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Weissmann, E. (2011) ‘Conventionally beautiful: Contemplative images in the personal reflective narratives of Who Do You Think You Are?, The Monastery and The Convent’ European Journal of Cultural Studies 14(2): 195–211.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion

8.1   Introduction This book has explored the mutual concerns and internal contradictions shared by biography and television. Both forms operate in ambivalent relation to the realms of fact and fiction. Television has been conceived as an immediate form, whose rhetoric of realism delivers contemporary truths in an aesthetic format that enables viewers to become ‘witnesses’ (Ellis 2000). As Noel Carroll (2002) argues, this has historically generated critical anxieties about the potential for the medium to falsify reality, to present distortions as accurate representations. Biography has been critiqued for the manufacture of narratives from the chaos and contingency of lived experience, a process that involves the promotion of certain kinds of evidence and selective dismissal of others. The application of a novelist’s skills of characterisation and arrangement has been viewed with scepticism by some, though embraced by many biographers as a means of getting at the underlying truth of a biographee’s character and the cultural significance of their life. A search for meaning and value in the life story is one of the key purposes of the biography, but there has been disagreement about how this should be achieved. Should biographies be a warts-and-all revelation of the ‘real’ person, or a sanitised vision of a figure intended as a didactic tool for modelling ‘ideal’ selfhood? Interpretations of television’s value have been similarly entangled in questions of use: is television a purveyor of comforting fantasies, a distraction from the living of everyday life? © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Andrews, Biographical Television Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64678-3_8

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(Carroll 2002) Or should we see its embeddedness in quotidian experience as endowing it with responsibilities to educate and to provide a window on to reality? Questions of television’s value in this regard also demonstrate its liminal placement between public and private spheres: a medium of social address customarily consumed in the domesticated space of the home. This contradiction between the presentation of public figures and the discourses of the personal and the intimate is shared with biography, whose modus operandi is to turn a public figure into a private character, an act of (re-)publicising the life story. And, television’s capacity to engage long-term cultural memory (Holdsworth 2011), as well as its position as ‘cultural forum’ (Newcomb and Hirsch 1983), means that it is able both to draw upon and re-construct the public legacy of the biographee. This book has examined how these four key parallels between the medium of television and the mode of biography play out when life stories become televisual content. To conclude, I will synopsise my core arguments on the themes of truth, of value, of the publicisation of the private life and of legacy through biographical television drama.

8.2   Truth It is generally accepted that fiction uses figurative language and metonymy to present a ‘truthful’ account of the world refracted through manufactured characters and situations. The expectation of truth in the biography is at a much more literal level. Invocations of ‘evidence’ in text and footnote are generic gestures of verification which aim at persuading the reader of the honesty of this account of the biographee. Accuracy is a discursive guarantee of truth. Biographers wield evidence not only as proof of the events of the life told, but as a demonstration of their own credentials, as a rhetorical flourish that assures their trustworthiness as a teller of this life. Rather than being asked to suspend their disbelief in the reality that unfolds, readers are led to expect a level of corroboration that is seldom provided in other storytelling contexts, with the important exception of history (Caine 2010). Televisual biography, especially in its dramatised form, does not have the luxury of the footnote. There are some equivalent gestures available to the scheduler, television’s ‘supernarrator’ (Kozloff 1992), such as the broadcast of documentary programming alongside dramatised versions of the life told. This is a common way to reassure viewers of the trustworthiness of the broadcaster’s biographical account. It works either by

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demonstrating the drama’s fidelity to the biographee’s story or by providing an alternative ‘factual’ version as a form of balance. The underlying— and dubious—assumption that underpins this scheduling tactic is that non-fiction television forms have a relationship with truth superior to that of drama. As Chap. 7 contends, the creation of non-fiction television depends on processes of selection, structuration and performance that parallel those involved in drama. The primary distinction is one of rhetoric. Documentary works through appeals to rationality, evidence and ‘discourses of sobriety’ (Nichols 2017), rendering its approach to truth one of positivist empiricism. This contrasts with that of drama, which tends to replace literal fact with a search for affective truthfulness. This is not to say that documentaries are incapable of promoting empathetic identification; indeed, The Up Series constructs long-term affective portraits of its biographees. Whereas there is a repeated appeal in the documentary form to visual evidence, drama substitutes strict accuracy for plausibility, emotional rather than literal veracity. In this book, I have shown that in biographical television drama, authentication is replaced by signifiers of authenticity. The generic debt of biographical drama to docudrama and melodrama (explored in Chap. 2) means that it borrows simultaneously the modelling of truth through images that are ‘indexically iconic’ (Lipkin 2011)—that is, that have a motivated and direct relationship to the real events they portray—and the expression of underlying personal or social truths through mise-en-scène. The construction of historically accurate mise-en-­ scène is a generic feature of the biopic and the period drama, a convergence of generic and historical verisimilitude (Neale 2000) that acts as a visual indicator of authenticity. As discussed in Chap. 3, the paradox of surface authenticity in the biographical drama has ambivalent effects on the credibility of the representation. A close-but-not-quite-perfect approximation of the biographee in the reconstruction of their environments, reproduction of their personal grooming and in the actor’s imitation of their voice and bodily movement can have the unintended effect of emphasising the illusion. The more virtuosic the replication, the more overt the artifice. An alternative approach to authenticity is for the drama to self-consciously acknowledge its inaccuracies as an ironic signifier of honesty, or to use the drama to uncover the constructedness of biographical selves. Belén Vidal notes that after the postmodern moment, the cinematic biopic became a ‘metagenre’, one that reflects on its own forms of life-writing (2014: 15). I have demonstrated, through analysis of The Debussy Film (BBC, 1965) and ‘Daisy’ (The Edwardians, BBC Two, 1972–1973), that this kind of

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self-reflexive framing was present in British televisual biography from an early stage in its development. Aside from its paradoxical quality of emphasising the artificiality of the construction of the biographee and their world, the appeal of verisimilitude in the mise-en-scène of biopics has also been critiqued as the creation of ‘historically accurate Christmas decorations’ (Custen 1992: 128). In this view, the close reconstruction of environment, costume and other surface details is only superficially authentic, and used to distract from egregious departures from the historical record in the narrative. Theorisations from the study of melodrama have demonstrated the ways in which mise-en-scène can express ideas contrapuntal or contradictory to those overtly signalled in the narrative. However, in this case, the implication is that the mise-en-scène’s invocation of surface truths is a salve for the fabrication that takes place at the narrative level. In Chap. 6, I explained how the family of Harry H. Corbett invoked this line of argument in a complaint about the television film The Curse of Steptoe. His daughter Susannah Corbett argued that the high standard of the visual reproductions in the film, especially that of the set of Steptoe and Son, would be likely to mislead viewers into believing in the truth of the narrative, which the family insisted was inaccurate. Corbett was suggesting that the truth claims of the biographical drama should be viewed holistically, that verisimilar mise-en-scène is a powerful signifier of authenticity that extends beyond the surface and to the substance of the drama. In place of the usual suspension of disbelief that is part of the spectatorial pose expected for viewers of drama is a heightened appeal to belief through visual ‘evidence’. The argument about the distinction between the surface reality of the visual style and the untruthfulness of the narrative highlights a key discourse of biographical storytelling: that of fidelity. The evocation of ‘accuracy’ as a criterion of value implies a prioritisation of the unique contours of the individual biographical story over the requirements of narrative. Where this may be desirable (especially the biographee or their ‘keepers of the flame’), it is not practicable when translating the messy stuff of life into a coherent story, especially one that abides by the relatively strict medial conventions of television. In Chap. 4, I explored some of the ways in which life stories have been shaped by television form and argued that strategies vary depending on the specific narrative format into which the life story is shaped. Discipline is required to fit a story into the length of a ninety- or one-hundred-minute single drama, hence the appeal of the traditional ‘three-act’ structure that requires the  somewhat arbitrary

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selection of life events to become ‘turning points’. The limitations are such that screenwriters are generally obliged to choose either a ‘character study’ or ‘timeframe’ approach. Both of these options entail a great deal of elision, and the version of the biographee presented will depend greatly on the interpretation of the screenwriter, much as a biographer is obliged to be selective in their construction of a subject. Serial and series forms offer more scope for inclusion of events, but still require the shaping of lives into a form appropriate for television. This is visible in the creation of artificial moments of climax or narrative retardation to suit commercial requirement of regular advertising breaks, or in the use of invented subplots to add texture and relief to the biographee’s story in the long-­ form series. Strict ‘accuracy’ is no more possible in the television biography than it is desirable. Adaptation theory’s attempts to dislodge ‘fidelity’ as the central criterion of value for translations from literature to film are also applicable to the biographical story and its screen version, though, as Chap. 5 explores, the relation between ‘adapted text’ and adaptation is here complex. Rather than conceiving of truth as the evocation of literal fact, we may see biographical drama as an attempt to be ‘true to the spirit’ of the individual, much as the literary adaptation is sometimes claimed to have a ‘psychic’ connection to its adapted text (Elliott 2003; MacCabe et  al. 2011). The difficulty where biographical drama is concerned, though, is that the ‘spirit’ in question is that of a real human. The real subject haunts the biographical drama, imposing upon it a duty of care that tends not to be applied to creatures of fiction. I have argued that fidelity to the life story in the form of accuracy is not just a matter of fulfilling cultural expectations. It is also a moral concern.

8.3   Value Value, for this book, has two interlaced meanings. The first, already intimated, concerns the ethical values associated with biographical drama: those of truth, accuracy and respect for the humanity of the biographee. Biographical dramas can breach norms of ethical propriety, I argue, by reducing the uniqueness of individual lives via formulaic narrative approaches, by expressing repressed secrets or by emphasising the extremes rather than routines of human life in the manner expected of melodrama. The second sense of value is the matter of evaluation. Televisual biographical dramas have the dubious distinction of presenting a devalued form of

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historical enquiry in the biography, in a generic mode which hybridises devalued forms like the melodrama and period drama, borrowing a devalued form of performance in the impersonation (Vidal 2014). Biographical drama substitutes the ‘sober’ reliance on evidence dominant in much written biography and in the documentary form for an interpretation of the life and its meaning. In so doing, like in docudrama the supposedly rational, masculine values of verification and analysis are replaced with more feminine qualities of affect and subjectivity (Bignell 2000; Paget 2011). Yet the biographical drama is also rarely evaluated simply as drama; there are always extra-textual judgements brought to bear on the form which depend on the experience and understanding both at a cultural level and at the level of the individual viewer’s knowledge of the biographee. Biographical dramas have an uneasy ethical relationship to truth. Whereas these texts’ placement in the realm of drama endows their creators with an accepted amount of dramatic licence to invent or exaggerate, to re-order or re-emphasise, their replication of real people and scenarios also imbues a sense of duty upon these dramatists. Through interviews with screenwriters of biographical drama, I have shown that professionals in this field can be keenly aware of their responsibilities to their subjects, while at the same time holding the somewhat contradictory belief in their creative rights to shape biographee’s story into a format appropriate for the medium of delivery (as discussed in Chaps. 4 and 6). The pragmatics of delivering a biographical story for television requires the manipulation of the raw material of the ‘true story’. Biographical dramatists frequently appeal to the supremacy of general ‘truths’ over smaller ‘facts’ in defence of alterations made in the name of televisual storytelling. Here they align with biography theorists who defend the rights of the biographer to creativity but acknowledge the limitations of biography as a form with an emphasis on fact. Virginia Woolf, for example, argued: On the one hand there is truth, on the other, there is personality. And if we think of truth as something of granite-like solidity and of personality as something of rainbow-like intangibility and reflect that the aim of biography is to weld these two into one seamless whole, we shall admit that the problem is a stiff one and that we need not wonder if biographers have for the most part failed to solve it. (2008: 95)

Like biographers, screenwriters tend to operate using a personal code of ethics that enables them to make judgements about the limits of

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creative licence, one which will usually stop short of deliberately misleading viewers about a life. This book has demonstrated that the licence for biographical storytellers to manipulate facts in service of their interpretation of the biographee is not limitless. Constraints to the biographical drama on British television come in the form of legal restrictions on libel, regulatory guidelines from Ofcom and internal to broadcasters. The BBC’s editorial policies regarding the portrayal of real people, though generously and productively vague, also amply demonstrate the priorities of the institution. These are, first and foremost, that dramas that rely on convergences between fact and fiction do not compromise the institution’s core values of fairness, impartiality and accuracy. The rulings of the BBC Trust’s Editorial Complaints Unit in the case of The Curse of Steptoe (BBC Four, 2009) suggest that fairness is their primary criterion of value, but it is clear from other historic cases such as Dance of the Seven Veils (BBC One, 1970) that the BBC’s reputation for restraint, accuracy and good taste has also been a significant factor in institutional decision making around the biographical drama. Evaluative criteria such as good ‘taste’ are intertwined in the biographical drama with ethical ones such as respect for privacy, accuracy and fairness. Public service broadcasters rely on a careful calibration of public trust to justify their funding base and institutional remit. As discussed in Chap. 6, any circumstance in which the broadcaster is perceived to breach that trust provides fodder for its critics and undermines the institution. Biographical dramas represent an ambivalent mix for the public service broadcaster. They are a useful way of fulfilling the institution’s role of providing cultural edification, borrowing from the biography’s putative didactic function of showing ‘ideal’ lives or modelling versions of selfhood. They were used, for example, in the branding of BBC Four, the niche arts and culture channel, to cement its address to an educated and mature audience (Andrews 2016). However, the potential embarrassment or censure they can bring to the institution when they are perceived as exceeding the bounds of propriety makes  the biographical drama a format that carries significant risk. I have demonstrated in case studies on Ken Russell and The Curse of Steptoe that where institution has sanctioned a text that can be presented as an assault on the privacy or dignity of a biographee, the public trust in the institution upon which its functioning depends is jeopardised. Beyond the reputational damage to the institution that perceptions of unfair or inaccurate representation may cause, I have argued that there are legitimate questions about the ethical value of the biographical drama.

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These centre not simply on the matter of real lives and their uneasy placement in the realm of fiction, but also on the question of power and privacy. In biographical fictions about real lives, television’s power as an instrument of publicisation is writ large. Television institutions, writers, producers, performers and schedulers wrest the control over a biographee’s story from them, an act of (usually unintentional) disempowerment. As we have seen in various case studies, authors of biographical drama from Jane English, writer of The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister (BBC One, 2019) (Chap. 4), to Ken Russell, self-declared ‘myth maker’ (Chap. 6), have acknowledged their part in appropriating the subject’s story. Biographical storytelling transforms a subject’s lived experience into material, a process which entails a level of dehumanisation. Further, though, it does so by making public and visible that which biographees have kept hidden. Wielding the power to reveal the secrets of the biographee requires careful judgements about cultural acceptability that depend upon the social contexts in which the programme is broadcast. Where a culture may abhor censorship and endorse ‘warts-and-all’ revelation, there is still room for recrimination when it is felt that a private life is raided for reasons of prurient excess. An individual’s privacy, dignity and reputation are still valued and jealously protected, yet the biographical drama is constitutionally predicated on the publicisation of the private self.

8.4   Public/Private This book has examined several iterations of the dynamic between discourses of public and private: in the generic distinctions between documentary and drama, where one is conceived of as a rational, empiricist, ‘public service’ form of address, and the other as a privatised, affective domain; in the practice of exteriorising the interior, of expressing the self via mise-en-scène or performance style; in the privileging of the private life as the primary narrative strand through translating personal rather than public life events into narrative ‘kernels’; in applying the ‘objective’ camera to the adaptation of ‘subjective’ forms like the diary, memoir or autobiography; and in the recognition in legal and conventional restrictions on biographical dramas of their responsibility to individuals in publicising their private life. The biographical form and television as a medium share a liminal placement between public and private spheres, hence the multiple convergences between them in biographical television drama.

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This book has demonstrated how, in biographical drama, television’s capacity for presenting intimate relations between viewer and character is exploited to construct the private worlds of public individuals. The privatised worlds of the biographical characters are replicated in the mise-en-­ scène, sometimes, as in the case of Elizabeth David, with close proximity to the real environments in which they lived. In some cases, especially royal dramas, the central pleasure of the text is developing an intimate pseudo-relationship with a version of a cultural figure whose distance and mystique are central to their social function and the power of the institution. This is why The Crown (Netflix, 2016–) insistently explores the paradox of the institution of the royal family in the twentieth century: their duty is to remain public symbols denuded of individuality in a social context in which the rigid boundaries of tradition, and the acceptance of the family’s remoteness, are being challenged. The Crown struggles with the contradictory task of constructing private selves from public symbols, while simultaneously supporting the rationales of distance and mystique that help to maintain the edifice of royalty as a political institution. Actors are tasked with the representation of the character’s private self, utilising performance techniques that are suitable for a medium of small scale that privileges the human face as the central locus of drama. This is sometimes manifested in televisual gestures such as the use of direct address to remediate the diary’s personal mode of writing in Gentleman Jack. Eye contact between biographical characters and the camera/audience works against the logic of time to construct a personal relationship, transforming the historical figure into a human character. Television’s narrative structures, especially in serial and series form, can use their largesse in terms of time to imitate some of the cyclical and repetitive aspects of human private lives, as well as to construct narratives from signature events like births, marriages, divorces and deaths, that are profoundly personal yet also universally understood experiences. Like biography itself, the life stories of public figures both are drawn from and provide a model of the life course and its impact on the self. Because such emphasis is placed in the biographical television drama on the private experiences of public figures, they engage in the complex process of examining the celebrity persona. Actors in biographical dramas must both impersonate the public persona, reproducing the vocal cues, facial expressions and bodily expressions of the biographee as s/he exists in the communal consciousness, and utilise their research and performance strategies for portraying the private self. Some dramas, like Cilla (ITV,

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2014), Gracie! (BBC Four, 2009) and Tommy Cooper: Not Like This, Like That (ITV, 2014), make little distinction between the public persona and the private self, implying that the former is only an exaggerated iteration of the latter. In cases where the celebrity persona is strongly aligned with a well-known character or character type, like in The Curse of Steptoe, Cor Blimey! (ITV, 2000) and Hattie (BBC Four, 2011), biographical dramas capitalise on the viewer’s memory of these performances, imitating both the performer and her/his role. In many cases, such as Fantabulosa (BBC Four, 2006), Enid (BBC Four, 2009) and Frankie Howerd: Rather You Than Me (BBC Four, 2008), the private individual is portrayed as significantly at odds with their public persona. By making such a distinction, these dramas suggest that the version of the self portrayed in private scenarios is the ‘real’ one, and the public persona is a deliberately (and cynically) deployed performance, a fiction. This draws on a powerful pre-existing cultural association with our private selves as ‘real’, and our performances of self in public as constructed. This association impacts not only biographical representation but performance style on television in both drama and non-fiction, as Chap. 7 explores. I have shown that in television (and film) versions of biographical characters, this is contradictory, because the mimesis of the publicly performed self can be based on visual, auditory or other evidence—especially when the biographee lived in the age of recorded media—whereas the performance of the private individual is based on more contingent and certainly less public evidence which has to be interpreted rather than imitated. Television biographical drama produces fictionalised versions of private personalities that ironically draw on close impersonation of the constructed public persona to persuade the viewer of their veracity through appeals to the ‘popular memory’ associated with this historical figure.

8.5   Legacy Television biographical drama, alongside other forms of biographical representation, has the power to alter memories and perceptions of historical figures. ‘Popular memory’ is the concept that the public’s understanding of historical people and events is fashioned not only by formal historiography but through informal, communal remembering and through the interpretations offered by popular culture (Anderson 2001). It is a useful tool for assessing the broader meaning and value of the biographical drama. Televisual biographical drama matters, ultimately, because it

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contributes to the popular memory of significant public figures. In a manner analogous to the way in which each new adaptation of a classic work of literature borrows from and extends its intertextual world, each new biographical representation offers a refreshed perception of the biographical figure. When the version is mediated through television drama, the impact on popular memory is significant, because of the multiplicity of viewers exposed to the ideas proposed in the programme. A new version of the biographee is now created, inevitably altering, even if only slightly, their status in the collective consciousness. Television biography may alter the public perception of the biographee, but it does so in a system that also confers upon them special status. Dennis Bingham observed of the film biopic that ‘the genre’s charge … is to enter the biographical subject into the pantheon of cultural mythology, one way or another, and to show why he or she belongs there’ (Bingham 2011: 10). Television biography is a statement of affirmation: this person’s life mattered. Biographical television can perform the function of advocacy for their biographee, as in the case of Alan Turing dramas which used on-­ screen titles to establish themselves as part of the construction of his biographical legacy. They can be self-conscious about their own part in the cultural circulation and affirmation of their biographee, as in the case of To Walk Invisible’s coda. They can also function as memorials, confirming the cultural importance, meaning and value of the biographee, as in the posthumous broadcasts of Cilla after Cilla Black’s death in August 2015, or Babs in December 2020 as a televisual obituary to Barbara Windsor. Biographical dramas are—implicitly or explicitly—cultural artefacts that reflect social understandings of who is a ‘worthy’ subject for memorialisation. This is the primary reason that the ethnic, gender and cultural homogeneity of biographees represented in British biographical drama, highlighted briefly in Chap. 1, is unsustainable. A greater diversity of subjects for biographical television drama is a desirable change for the future of the form. The television biographical drama performs the valuable function of making the case for the biographee, even if the portrayal draws on the language and structures of fiction in a way that tests the bounds of ethical propriety, and even if the version exploits the private self of a public person in a way that can be dehumanising. I have shown how biographical television dramas transform the life of the public figure into the realm of story, of myth. Television occupies a liminal cultural position: somewhere between the immediate conveyor of fact and the manufacturer of illusions,

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somewhere between the devalued ‘bad object’ and the conferrer of public legitimacy, somewhere between the public forum and the private domicile, somewhere between an immediate distraction and a prompt for long-­ term cultural memory. These contradictions allow biographical television drama to conduct an impressive magic trick: to transform a biographee from public persona to private person, and back again, though inevitably changed for posterity.

References Anderson, S. (2001) ‘History TV and Popular Memory’ in Edgerton, G. and Rollins, P.C. (eds) Television Histories. Lexington, KY: University Press Kentucky, pp. 19–36. Andrews, H. (2016) ‘BBC Four Biopics: Lessons in Trashy Respectability’ Journal of British Cinema and Television, 13(3): 409–429. Bignell, J. (2000) ‘Docudrama as Melodrama: Representing Princess Diana and Margaret Thatcher’ in Carson, B. and Llewellyn-Jones, M. (eds) Frames and Fictions on Television: The politics of identity within drama. Exeter: Intellect, pp. 17–26. Bingham, D. (2011) Whose lives are they anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press. Caine, B. (2010) Biography and History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Carroll, N. (2002) ‘Is the medium a (moral) message?’ in Matthew, K. (ed) Media Ethics. London: Routledge, pp. 135–151. Custen, G.F. (1992) Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Elliott, K. (2003) Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ellis, J. (2000) Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty. London: I.B.Tauris. Holdsworth, A. (2011) Television, memory and nostalgia. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Kozloff, S. (1992) ‘Narrative Theory and Television’ in Allen, R.C. (ed) Channels of Discourse Reassembled. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, pp. 67–100. Lipkin, S.N. (2011) Docudrama Performs the Past: Arenas of Argument in Films based on True Stories. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. MacCabe, C., Murray, K. and Warner, R. (eds) (2011) True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity. Oxford: Oxford University Press Neale, S. (2000) Genre and Hollywood. London: Routledge. Newcomb, H., and Hirsch, P. (1983) ‘Television as Cultural Forum: Implications for Research’ Quarterly Review of Film and Video 8(3): 45–55.

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Nichols, B. (2017) Introduction to Documentary Third Edition. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Paget, D. (2011) No Other Way to Tell It: Docudrama on Film and Television (Second Edition). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Vidal, B. (2014) ‘Introduction: The biopic and its critical contexts’ in Brown, T. and Vidal, B. (eds) The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 1–32. Woolf, V. (2008) Collected Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Index1

A Accuracy, 5, 40, 62–64, 70, 75, 78, 88, 95, 124, 138, 156, 158, 168, 177, 178, 187 See also Fidelity Adaptation adaptation theory, 124–126, 215 of factual sources, 126–139 and fidelity, 96, 128, 140, 215 Against the Law, 13, 22 The Alan Clark Diaries, 15, 123, 137, 139–145 Amazon Prime, 23 An Englishman in New York, 13 Apple TV+, 23 Armchair Theatre, 17 Arthur and George, 138 ATV, 19 Audiences, 5, 9, 12, 16, 17, 19–22, 29, 30, 33, 34, 45, 46, 65, 67, 69, 71, 75, 77–81, 85–87, 97, 101–103, 106–108, 127, 136,

140, 146, 152, 157, 160–162, 161n6, 165, 168, 170, 176–180, 187, 188, 192, 193, 195, 199, 200, 206, 217, 219 Authenticity, 15, 53, 63–66, 75, 77, 80, 88, 124, 132, 176, 178, 200, 205, 213, 214 Autobiography, 82, 86, 87, 131, 136, 137, 143, 198, 218 B Babs, 15, 81–87, 136, 221 BBC BBC radio, 186 as broadcaster of drama, 15, 77, 130 editorial policy, 160, 170n20, 217 public trust in, 164–180 BBC Editorial Standards Committee, 174–177 BBC Executive Complaints Unit (ECU), 174, 175

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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INDEX

BBC Four, 13, 15, 21, 22, 64, 74–76, 80, 96, 99, 124, 131, 134, 135, 137, 139, 140, 154, 170, 171, 178, 217, 220 BBC One, 13, 15, 18, 36, 48, 79, 81, 87, 94, 99, 133–137, 159, 174, 195, 217, 218 BBC Press Office, 131, 132, 134, 140, 171 BBC Trust, 152, 167, 217 BBC Two, 13–15, 18, 19, 22, 23, 45, 62, 66, 67, 79, 81, 94, 99, 102, 103, 131, 132, 134–137, 213 BBC 2 Playhouse, 18 Behind the Candelabra, 22 Biographer agency, 3, 4 biographer-biographee relationship, 4, 8 ethical code, 216 relationship with subject’s family, 160–169, 174–181 subjectivity, 3–4, 7, 140, 167, 221 Biography and chronicle comparison, 61 and didacticism, 9, 18, 27, 199, 217 feminist approaches to, 10, 29 and history, 48 methodologies, 11 and novel comparison, 6 and portrait comparison, 61 and society, 1, 10, 202 sources, 135 storytelling, 4, 83, 87–89, 94, 98, 99, 109, 112, 118, 119, 187, 195, 200, 214, 218 turn, 11, 193 Biography (TV Series), 18, 186, 187 Biopic, 4, 11, 12, 14, 27–32, 36, 39, 40, 50, 54, 55, 64, 66, 68, 77, 95, 97, 124, 126, 130, 157, 162, 176, 177, 213, 214, 221

The Birds, 66, 132 Breaking the Code, 14, 36, 37, 39, 40 Brideshead Revisited, 45 Britain’s Greatest Codebreaker, 14, 36, 36n1, 38–40 The Brontës of Haworth, 15, 19, 50–54 C Captions, 77–79, 170, 177 Carry on… series, 73, 74, 81, 96 Catherine the Great, 23 Celebrity, 16, 30, 31, 69, 73, 74, 112, 155, 168, 171, 187, 198, 202–207, 219, 220 Censorship, 153, 166, 167, 218 Channel 4, 14, 23, 36, 99, 133, 134, 173, 186 Chariots of Fire, 45 Christopher and his Kind, 136 Cilla, 67, 104, 105, 219, 221 Close-up, 37–39, 43, 50, 52, 67, 115, 142, 187, 189, 203, 205 Coe, Amanda, 13, 62, 78, 98, 100, 102, 132, 134, 139, 156 Cor, Blimey!, 73, 74, 220 Costume, 48, 54, 62–68, 84, 129, 138, 139, 189, 214 Costume drama, see Period drama Cottan, Richard, 13, 99, 100, 132, 133, 139, 157, 158 Count Me In season, 36 The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, 137 Cradle to Grave, 23 The Crown, 22, 65, 88, 107–109, 111, 112, 219 The Curse of Comedy season, 15, 171, 178 The Curse of Steptoe, 15, 152, 159, 169, 171–179, 214, 217, 220

 INDEX 

D Dance of the Seven Veils, 159, 164–167, 217 Dante’s Inferno, 164 Dark Angel, 13 The Death of Adolf Hitler, 133 The Debussy Film, 159, 161–164, 213 Defamation, 151, 167, 168, 171 Desert Island Discs, 186 Desperate Romantics, 79, 134 The Devil’s Crown, 19 Diaries, 15, 113–116, 124, 131, 134, 137, 139–146, 155, 218, 219 Dickens of London, 19, 99 Dickinson, 23 Didacticism, 5, 9, 18, 29, 32, 40 Discourses of sobriety, 35, 201, 202, 207, 213 Disraeli: Portrait of a Romantic, 19 Docudrama, 4, 14, 21–23, 27, 31–35, 40, 43, 44, 46, 54, 55, 65, 68, 70, 72, 75–78, 82, 97, 144, 152, 157, 167, 168, 172, 189, 200, 213, 216 Documentary, 2, 8, 16, 18, 27, 33–36, 38–40, 55, 66, 71, 75, 133, 160, 161, 170, 172, 173, 185–194, 196–199, 201, 202, 204, 207, 212, 213, 216, 218 Dramatic licence, see Ethics The Durrells, 136 Dylan, 99 E Edward and Mrs Simpson, 19, 45 The Edwardians, 15, 18, 81, 213 Edwardians: The Birth of Now season, 22 Edward the Seventh, 19 Elgar, 159–161, 163

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Elizabeth David: A Life in Recipes, 13, 62, 63, 66, 219 Elizabeth R, 19 English, Jane, 113–115, 218 Enid, 74, 134, 154, 170, 220 Ethics, 10, 11, 20–23, 27, 29, 30, 35, 88, 128, 153, 154, 171, 177, 178, 188, 190, 193, 199, 202, 203, 206, 211, 212, 214–218, 220, 221 of biography, 8, 9, 15, 153–158, 217 (see also Fact; Privacy; Public interest; Truth) media, 156, 167 and truth, 43, 216 F Fact, 2, 3, 5–8, 10, 16, 27, 29, 31–33, 38, 40, 45, 46, 49, 51, 64, 67, 69, 71, 72, 75, 79, 81, 84, 97, 126, 127, 131–133, 136, 151, 153, 156, 157, 162, 167–171, 175–177, 180, 185, 186, 188–191, 198, 199, 202, 203, 213, 215–217, 220, 221 Factual television, 2, 8, 10, 16, 71, 75, 79, 126, 127, 131, 157, 180, 185–191, 198, 199, 201, 206, 207, 213, 220 Fantabulosa!, 64, 137 Fear of Fanny, 13 Fiction and fact, 3–5, 8, 32, 54, 55, 77, 81, 95, 144, 162, 170, 177, 178, 180, 185–187, 201, 207, 211, 217 truthfulness, 212 Fidelity, 77, 96, 124, 126, 128, 130, 131, 138, 140, 141, 146, 213–215 See also Accuracy

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Fillis, Brian, 13, 97, 98, 100, 132, 156–158, 170, 172, 173, 175, 176 Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story, 13, 131 The First Churchills, 19 First Light, 136 The Flame Trees of Thika, 136 Fleming, 20 Footprints, 186 Frankie Howerd: Rather You than Me, 154, 172, 220 Freud, 99, 134, 135 From Chekhov with Love, 18 G Gay Britannia Season, 22 Genre, 2–5, 8, 11, 14, 16, 21, 27–55, 64, 67, 69, 78, 101, 108, 124, 127, 129, 186, 191, 197–199, 207, 221 Gentleman Jack, 15, 20, 79, 94, 112, 114–119, 137, 219 Gilbert and Sullivan: Immortal Jestersfir, 18 The Girl, 13, 66, 67, 132 God Rot Tunbridge Wells!, 99 Goodwin, Daisy, 13, 94, 96, 97, 111, 132, 134, 135, 138, 139, 156 Goffman, Erving, 74, 191, 200 Gracie!, 75, 220 Granada, 16, 18, 45, 193–195 Great Lives, 186 H Hancock and Joan, 13, 136, 172, 174, 178 A Harlot’s Progress, 134 Hattie, 96, 220 Heritage film, 45, 46, 48 Historical film, 29, 45, 46, 72, 126

History and biography, 34, 48 (see also Historical film) (see also Popular memory) popular memory and, 47, 48 Hughes, Gwyneth, 13, 98, 99, 112, 132, 139, 156–158 Hughie Green: Most Sincerely, 171 I I, Claudius, 19 Identity, 4, 10, 14, 16, 20, 37, 40, 46, 49, 63, 73, 76, 77, 87, 115, 141, 155, 178, 179, 190, 194, 197, 201, 203, 206 The Imitation Game, 15, 36–40 Impersonation, 62, 68–77, 88, 144, 191, 216, 220 Indexicality, 33 indexical icons, 68, 189 In Search of the Brontës, 134 Intimacy, 3, 31, 34, 55, 80, 87, 101, 116, 118, 186, 194 Isadora Duncan: The Biggest Dancer in the World, 164 ITV, 13, 17, 19, 20, 45, 63, 67, 73, 94, 104, 110, 133, 134, 136, 138, 186, 192, 196, 219 J Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill, 19, 103, 131 The Jewel in the Crown, 45 John Adams, 22 L Legacy, 1–10, 23, 40, 48, 53, 87, 152, 212, 220–222 Lennon Naked, 131, 132

 INDEX 

Libel, 152, 153, 178, 217 Life course, 1, 2, 6, 107, 112, 185, 192, 193, 197, 219 Life in Squares, 13, 102 Life writing, 77, 137, 145, 203, 213 Lillie, 19, 103 The Lost Boys, 133 Love Again, 13 M Makeup, 52, 62, 67, 139 The Man Shakespeare, 18 Margaret, 13, 99 Margot, 13, 135 Mass media, 154 Masterpiece Theatre, 19, 20, 31 Media literacy, 177, 178, 180, 199, 207 Melodrama, 4, 23, 27, 35, 41–44, 49, 50, 52–55, 62, 65, 213–216 Memorialisation, 221 Memory, 4, 12, 32, 76, 81–88, 96, 102, 105, 108, 126, 133, 158, 159, 162, 163, 169, 173, 194, 195, 206, 212, 220, 222 Metabiography, 81–87 Metaphor and metonym, 54 Mise-en-scène, 6, 15, 28, 37, 44, 45, 48, 52, 54, 62–66, 68, 82–84, 88, 177, 178, 213, 214, 218, 219 Miss Austen Regrets, 13 Miss Marie Lloyd: Queen of the Music Hall, 22 Mixed Race Season, 14, 22 Monitor, 18, 160, 161 Morality, 155 Mosley, 133

229

Mrs Biggs, 133 Mrs Mandela, 170 Mrs Wilson, 135 N The Naked Civil Servant, 70, 71, 136 Nancy Astor, 19, 103 Napoleon and Love, 19 Narrative construction, 6, 201 Nation, 115 Netflix, 22, 23, 65, 107, 219 Non-fiction, see Fact; Factual television O Ofcom, 152, 167, 170, 170n20, 217 Omnibus, 18, 165, 186 P Painted with Words, 134 A Passage to India, 45 Peak TV, 22, 112 Performance, 2, 6, 10, 15, 17, 33, 37–40, 42, 44, 50, 52, 54, 62, 63, 67–77, 79, 81–88, 96, 105, 141, 155, 178, 187–191, 197, 198, 200, 202, 204–207, 213, 216, 218–220 Period drama, 4, 15, 19, 23, 28, 44–52, 54, 55, 62, 65, 79, 103, 110, 113, 213, 216 Persona, see Public life Piers Morgan’s Life Stories, 187 Play for Today, 17, 18 Play of the Week, 18 Popular memory, 47, 48, 76, 80, 87, 151, 220, 221 Portrait of a Marriage, 45, 135

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INDEX

Privacy, 9, 39, 51, 53, 151–154, 158, 171, 172, 180, 199, 200, 217, 218 See also Ethics; Private life Private life, 3, 27, 55, 83, 85, 115, 153, 155, 162, 179, 212, 218 Profile, 15, 161, 170, 179, 186–189, 193, 195, 196, 207 Public interest, see Ethics Public life, 84, 218 Public service broadcasting, see BBC; Channel 4; ITV Q Quality drama, 19, 22, 108, 178 R Raised by Wolves, 23 Reality television, see Factual television Rediffusion, 18 Richard of Bordeaux, 17 Russell, Ken, 12, 15, 18, 136, 152, 158–167, 217, 218 S The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister, 15, 94, 113, 218 The Secret Life of Mrs Beeton, 80, 99 Secret Lives, 135, 186 Self-consciousness, 77–81, 86 Self Made, 23 Serial Drama, 18, 43 Seriality, 101–105 Seven Up!, 16, 192, 193 The Shadow of the Tower, 19 Shirley, 14, 22 Single drama, see Television play The Six Wives of Henry VIII, 19, 188n1

Six Wives with Lucy Worsley, 189 Soap Opera, 42, 43, 81, 101, 108 Solo, 18 Song of Summer, 136 The Sopranos, 43 The South Bank Show, 186 Stan, 76 Steptoe and Son, 172–175, 214 Sykes and a…, 96 T Talk Show, 207 Television as cultural forum, 9, 212 as intimate medium, 145 and public address, 218 Television drama, 3, 4, 7, 9, 11, 12, 14, 16, 21, 23, 28, 31, 43, 44, 49, 50, 55, 62, 65, 75, 77, 78, 89, 94, 101, 102, 106, 108, 108n1, 112, 118, 119, 124, 130–139, 145, 146, 201, 212, 213, 218, 219, 221, 222 Television play, 17, 38, 82, 94, 133 See also Single drama Temple Grandin, 22 Theatre 625, 18 The Tiger, 16 Toast, 136 Tommy Cooper: Not Like this Like That, 63, 220 Torvill and Dean, 133 To Walk Invisible, 15, 48–54, 221 Transnational television, 19–20, 22–23, 108, 114 The Trial of Christine Keeler, 13 Trust, 8, 33, 77–80, 140, 152, 160, 167, 168, 179, 217 Truth essential truth, 42, 153, 177

 INDEX 

and fiction, 4–6, 35, 44, 65–66, 79–80, 127–129, 158–160, 167–169, 181–182, 192–193, 201, 203–204, 214–217 Truth Claims, 3, 5, 8, 30, 39, 68, 78, 86, 88, 123, 138, 214 Twin Peaks, 43 U The Up Series, 185, 192, 194, 197, 213 V Value, 1–10 cultural evaluation, 10, 11, 23, 199 cultural devaluation, 11, 31, 70–71, 218 See also Ethics Verisimilitude, 54, 62, 65, 66, 68, 88, 176, 213, 214 Victoria, 13, 20, 67, 94, 96, 108, 110, 111, 114, 119, 134, 135

231

Victoria Regina, 17, 18, 160 Vincent the Dutchman, 134 W Wainwright, Sally, 48–50, 52, 113, 114, 116 The Wednesday Play, 17, 18 When Steptoe Met Son, 173 Who Do You Think You Are?, 16, 185, 202–207 Wild Decembers, 17 Will Shakespeare, 19 The Wire, 43 Wolf Hall, 137, 138 Women We Loved season, 21 World in Action, 192 Worried about the Boy, 131, 138 Y Yorkshire Television, 15, 19, 50, 99 Z Z: The Beginning of Everything, 23