The Moment of Truth

Viewed now, the spoken dialogue between Jones and Grundy sounds curiously quaint, but the episode as a whole is still engaging. The actual swearing - 'the muck' which prompted Mr Holmes to put his boot through the tube - seems almost as weighed down by self-consciousness as Bill Grundy's attempts to rise above his cheeky guests with a touch of school-masterly sarcasm. 'What a clever boy!' he purrs, with thinly veiled rage, as Jones responds to his challenge to 'say something outrageous' by calling him first a 'dirty fucker' and then a 'fucking rotter'.

Leaving aside the early evening transmission time - which was the overriding factor that got Today into trouble and Grundy suspended - what remains compelling is the all too apparent manner in which the presenter loses control of his guests, and, as a consequence, reveals the speed with which television can lose its assumed authority. Throughout the shambolic interview, during which it becomes clear that The Sex Pistols are not going to submit to the role of 'studio guests', there is a gradual accumulation of tension - part embarrassment and part threat - which derives less from the inevitability of a conflict, than from the sense that we are witnessing an authentic breakdown in the power of television to contain its subject. As Grundy attempts to return to the autocue - his only lifeline to safety - we see a moment of extreme vulnerability in a medium which relies on the illusion of control.

There is a common social impulse to witness spectacle, and, equally importantly, a desire to experience that frisson of excitement, shock, or fear which accompanies the moment when the predictable passage of daily events is suddenly converted into drama by the occurrence of extreme behaviour. From a scuffle in the street to a major disaster, these moments of transition disrupt our sense of security and our perception of the world. To be present in the vicinity of such a disruption is to experience the adrenaline rush of confusion and fear which we instinctively generate to protect ourselves. But to witness those same occasions in their mediated form is to experience all of their drama, but with none of the personal danger. We absorb the atmosphere of spectacle as a kind of narrative - a fact which has been well illustrated, in photographic terms, by Weegee's stark images of life and death 'as-it-happened' on the streets of New York.

Through sound, the Internet and lens-based media we can pick out the soft centres, as it were, of heightened emotions and volatile situations. We can all become members of an invisible audience, the legitimacy of whose presence will be the subject of continuous and necessary debate. But whether we authorise our consumption of mediated events in the name of public interest and reportage, or whether we argue the fine line between voyeurism and documentary, we require, above all, that the occasions of disruption which comprise our sense of spectacle are authentic - 'authenticity' is the hallmark of truth, and hence the gauge of social value.

Today, authenticity as spectacle has become the Holy Grail of contemporary culture, the unifying style by which the zeitgeist is seen to be made articulate. From the gritty pop-realism inspired by the cross-media phenomenon of Trainspotting (1997), and 'BritPulp' fiction with its debt to the suedehead fables of Richard Allen and the boiled beef brutalism of Get Carter (1971), to the interactive scenarios of third person video games such as Metal Gear Solid (1998), Resident Evil (1996) or Silent Hill (1999) - in which media techniques of 'truthfulness' are used to heighten action, control and suspense - there is now the sense that authenticity itself can be sculpted to suggest veracity as an image, while truth remains ambiguous. This is not a marginalised creative form: the re-shaping of current affairs programming to convey immediacy has been matched by the cult of broadsheet columnists - as satirised by 'Polly Filler' in Private Eye - to recount their personal lives as contemporary fables, embracing the breadth of the human condition.

But nowhere has this trend been more pervasive - and the issue of veracity more contested - than within the wake of 'popular factual programming': a genre which links the 'authenticity' of docu-soap and docu-drama to the studio-based spectacle of The Jerry Springer Show or Vanessa. As a cultural phenomenon, popular factual programme-making - and its impact on television ratings, advertising and commentary - can be seen as the defining spirit of the time: how do we mediate ourselves, and who defines the mediation?

Back in the mid-70s, television barely understood that programmes could be made by simply filming volatile 'real life' domestic and civic situations, and rely entirely on flash-points of confrontation to hold the attention of the viewers. Televised conflict, beyond the sphere of current affairs, was a rarity, and the occasions on which the authority of the medium had been challenged by circumstances beyond its control - as it had with The Sex Pistols - were regarded as memorable. When the dramatist and critic Kenneth Tynan became the first man to say 'fuck' on television, during a debate over censorship on Ned Sherrin's BBC3, on 13 November, 1965, he remarked that he would probably only be remembered for that incident. The fact that he had used the word within a dry academic discussion about the audience's relationship with language, was an irony which failed to save him from being branded, immediately, as 'the man who said "fuck" on television'. What sealed his reputation was the objectivity of the medium: we actually saw him say it - our sense of stability had been challenged, and an evolutionary stage in the potency of television had been defined.

In 1974, a defining moment in the evolution of TV took place when the BBC made a successful excursion into filming a factual series - regarded at the time as a radical experiment - about the daily life of a British family. In so doing, they discovered not only the power of the hand-held camera and the fly-on-the-wall point of view to convey tension and intimacy, but also the allure of authenticity. Paul Watson's series, The Family (1974), was greeted by some critics with incredulity and distaste - how could a film about daily domestic routine, with no specific subject or story, possibly hold anyone's attention? But the public proved the pundits wrong, and tuned in by the million to watch the volatility of a low-income, working family. Thus a template was established - already sketched out by the soft sociology of 'kitchen sink' cinema - that authenticity was synonymous with dysfunctionalism.

The route to authenticity - or, more cynically, the allure of mass-voyeurism - lay in the simple televisual device of apparently removing the fourth wall of a person's room and thus laying bare their privacy. By this means, a compelling sense of 'risk' - absent in scripted soaps - was written into the TV format, answering our need for authenticity and spectacle.

Previously, such subject matter - ordinary British life - had been the highly politicised terrain of ground-breaking documentary directors like Humphrey Jennings, whose films, such as Listen To Britain (1942), would prompt the young left-wing director Lindsay Anderson to pass an assessment of British cinema in 1957 which predicted the vogue for today's popular factual television but assumed, wrongly, that social conscience and the rights of the individual would take priority over mere sensationalism and ritual humiliation: 'I want to make people - ordinary people, not just top people - feel their dignity and their importance. The cinema is an industry, but it is something else as well: it is a means of making connections. Now this makes it peculiarly relevant to the problem of community - the need for a sense of belonging together. I want a Britain in which the cinema can be respected and understood by everybody, as an essential part of the creative life of the community.'

What Anderson regarded as the ordinary person's right to importance and significance as a subject for documentary - 'the creative treatment of actuality', as he cited from documentarist John Grierson - has now become what The Sex Pistols once described as 'a cheap holiday in other people's misery'. In the 90s, following on from the success of such docu-soap series as Hotel, Airport, Pleasure Beach and The Cruise, TV companies fell over themselves to combine the phenomenal appeal of 'real' characters (Jane McDonald from The Cruise has now presented The National Lottery Live and played at the London Palladium) with the moments of conflict that typify the format of studio debates (or 'studio rage' as it has been called). Fact, not only stranger than fiction, was perceived to be stronger, even if one ITC report opined that popular factual programming was pandering to 'the worst of human behaviour'.

As docu-soap and conflict television both scored impressive ratings, the fusion of the two forms has come to revolutionise the programming schedules: one Friday evening's viewing on ITV in April 1999, ran as follows: Parking Wars, Motorway Life, Family Feud and Neighbours From Hell. Even the BBC's Business Unit got sexy with a docu-soap-drama about company merger, Blood On The Carpet. On cable, Sky TV has given us the hugely successful Ibiza Uncovered and myriad half-hour shows - Tango Tango, Police, Action Camera, and America's Dumbest Criminals - which edit chunks of CCTV and surveillance video into a kind of You've Been Framed (or 'You've Been Arrested') by the Emergency Services.

As a format, popular factual programming can be seen as a reinvention of social realism, but one which replaces the cold objectivity of the naturalistic style with a highly-charged and heavily coerced core of subjective values. Other than being comparatively cheap, the key to PFP's success is the engagement with public empathy, placing the viewer in the centre of a situation which is bound to test their tolerance and arouse their sense of vulnerability. In this way, the reality which such programmes mediate is being massaged by various formal devices to appear more real than real: the surface of the images is lacklustre and flattened, drawing attention to the immediate prompts of the situation - litter, clutter or any evidence of the subject being unprepared for their 15 minutes of being famous for being ordinary; long, unedited shots (sometimes running for minutes) which create a sense of portentous tension, while the new technology of small, digital cameras can convey a sense of intimacy or claustrophobia. Thus the medium is stretched so taut that the slightest word or gesture becomes amplified. The traditional role of a voice-over narration - to suggest authority, time-line or commentary - has either been removed or replaced by a kind of disembodied Chorus, which hints at off-camera action, the consequences of which we are about to see. On programmes which deal with such volatile areas as debt collection, environmental health and the RSPCA, there is the sense of being suddenly dragged back to safety at the ultimate moment of conflict - when someone throws a punch - or allowed to linger for as long as possible - when someone bursts into tears.

In most cases, the 'authenticity' of popular factual programming has been used to promote its treatment of the subject matter as being, to some degree, in the public interest. But in many ways such a claim for the genre is nothing more than the old device of positing pornography as sociology - 'look at these photographs - aren't they disgusting?'. This also puts any critique of 'authenticity' into the kind of moral headlock common in debates over contemporary art: to condemn contested material as sensationalist or prurient can be construed as the worst form of bourgeois elitism. What remains, beyond an unwinnable contest of value judgements, is the seismic shifts of audience share and ratings which will dictate the direction of programme-making.

From the point of view of programme makers, the genre is as inexhaustible as the collective index of social situations and professions. But such a position is endemic within the genre of social realism. Robert Baldick, describing the cultural circumstances in which J-K Huysmans came to write Against Nature (1884), refers to the disillusionment of social realist writers in France in the latter half of the 19th century: '...the novel of adultery had been worked to death by writers great and small; and as for the social documentary, they saw little point in plodding through every trade and profession, one by one, from rat-catcher to stockbroker...'

Television's answer to such a cyclical problem has been to spread the techniques of popular factual programme-making - the span of social realism - into other strands of the medium: celebrities such as Geri Halliwell and Martine McCutcheon are presented in a carefully edited form of stylised 'docudrama' - thus satisfying the public's need to be shown behind the scenes of fame and offered a sniff of intimacy with the stars. Similarly, the fact that traditional situation comedies were based on the very professions and areas of human interest which now comprise docudrama - corner shops, department stores, hospitals, police stations - has prompted Carlton to commission a situation comedy - Pay and Display - which replicates the look of a docu-soap.

And therein lies a key metaphor: the notion that veracity has become synonymous with confusion and dysfunctionalism - through our depictions of ourselves as vulnerable, damaged or volatile - has been matched by our fetishising of realism. And this, perhaps, is an accurate reflection of contemporary society, revealing a truth about the way in which we live through our very attempts to come to terms with authenticity.