Do docudramas feed a culture of misinformation? | thearticle

“Complete and utter rubbish” (Tony Blair). “A barrel-load of malicious nonsense”(John Major).  These are comments from political heavyweights on the fifth series of _The Crown, _now in the

news.    Netflix must be laughing all the way to the bank.  But I don’t think _we _should laugh.  What is called “fictional dramatisation” is feeding a culture of misinformation.  Truth is

becoming the collateral damage of the communications revolution and the quest for power and profit. Perhaps we should be grateful to Kellyane Conway, campaign manager and adviser to

President Trump, speaking two days after his inauguration in January 2017.  Trump had been claiming that more people turned out in Washington DC to celebrate his victory than they did for

President Obama’s.  Photographs of the two events left no doubt that this was nonsense — in fact, a straightforward lie.  Conway explained in a NBC _Meet the Press_ interview that the

President was simply providing “alternative facts”. We all jeered.  But she was alerting everyone that the USA was now tuning in to George Orwell’s _Nineteen Eighty-Four _and the sinister

perversion of language he dubbed “Newspeak”_.  _Believing that Trump was cheated out of the last presidential election is an example of today’s “Goodthink_”_.  Nothing to laugh at. The

worrying thing is that the cultural elite who laughed at Kellyanne Conway have now embraced her “alternative facts” under its newly assumed guise of “re-imagining”.  In _The Crown,_ for

instance, Prince Charles sounds out John Major after an opinion poll has shown that the British public favour abdication.  Following Tony Blair’s election in May 1997 Prince Charles meets

the new Prime Minister, hoping to find a way to marry Camilla Parker Bowles, then his “secret companion”, now his wife and Queen Consort._ _  Neither of these meetings happened. It is fine

within drama documentaries to imagine conversations between real people, provided these conversations convey a truth.  The late Queen loved horses, so imagined conversations with her trainer

  can convey a truth.  When drama-documentaries imagine such private conversations, or present the results of hard-won investigative journalism, rather than audience-thrilling inventions,

they stand up to scrutiny. _The Crown, _though, deliberately mixes and blurs fact and fiction, using archive footage to reinforce its story-lines.   Such “re-imagining” joins the tidal wave

of misinformation that characterises our postmodern era.  In this post-truth world, disclaimers are overlooked and cultural leaders seem to be parting company with facts in search of

ratings. Another king has recently come into focus: Richard III in Steve Coogan’s _The Lost King_.  The film, released in the UK this October, follows a pattern to which audiences are

accustomed and enjoy, the story of the amateur who gets it right.  In _The Dig_ (2021) a self-taught archaeologist played by Ralph Fiennes finds the Sutton Hoo Anglo-Saxon burial ship,

resists discouragement and shares in the triumph.  In real life he was marginalised by the professionals.  _The Lost King_ has a similar story – an amateur finds the body of a king, rather

than a boat.  The screenplay shoehorns the story into the same template, with truth the first casualty. Sally Hawkins plays the amateur historian Philippa Langley, who gets it right about

Richard III’s burial place despite the University of Leicester’s and its Archeological Services’ attempt to sideline her.   Richard Taylor, the University’s deputy-registrar, describes his

portrayal in the film as derisive, obstructive, manipulative, amused at the king’s disability, and even rather sexist, bordering on defamation.  He has no redress.  This raises the question:

does misrepresenting a character only matter if he or she is alive to suffer the consequences? How about two centuries ago?  Frances O’Connor’s newly-released biopic _Emily_ raises a

further problem.   The Reverend Patrick Brontë’s evangelical curate, William Weightman, appears as the film’s guilt-stricken, hypocritical sex interest.  Emily and Weightman have a

passionate affair with sex scenes in the hay. But the lives of the Brontës are exceptionally well-documented and researched; there is no historical evidence that Emily Brontë had an affair

with anyone. The Rev. William Weightman was in reality a pious evangelical who died in 1842 from cholera, which he probably caught while visiting the sick in Haworth parish.  Much loved by

his parishioners, he is honoured in Haworth church by a plaque that describes him as a man of “orthodox principles, active zeal, moral habits, learning and affability”. Weightman did indeed,

as in the movie, send each of the Brontë sisters a Valentine and there is some evidence that there were warmer feelings between him and Emily’s younger sister Anne, but he was clearly no

clerical sexual predator or hypocrite.  Does traducing the long-dead Emily Brontë and Weightman matter?  Is Frances O’Connor entitled to “re-imagine” the truth about them for our

entertainment? “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,” as Winston Smith obediently says in _Nineteen Eighty-Four_.  And as Stalin allegedly

once said: “It’s difficult to predict the past” — though Putin’s Russia is doing its best.   Newspeak has clamped down on the people of China.  The Democrats are in an electoral struggle to

keep crazy conspiracy theories at bay in the USA.  Here in the UK we should not be complacent: a high percentage of Tory Party membership is more than relaxed about a man accused of being an

inveterate, compulsive liar holding the highest office of State.  There is real danger that fictional dramatisation is the soft power of the contemporary beast devouring the concept of

truth. When the difference between fact and fiction is deliberately blurred, when we can’t distinguish between the two, or can’t be bothered to, we end up accustomed to and reconciled to

“re-imagining”, to “alternative facts”, and to falsehoods.  Drama-docs, biopics and fictional dramatisations certainly provide one of the three Reithian principles for the BBC: they

entertain.   But we should not forget the other two: it is worth being vigilant to ensure that these art forms also inform and educate, rather than contribute to a culture of misinformation.

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