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injured kids and their shell-shocked parents. It’s easy to sneer at the show’s success, but impossible to dismiss it: the last series drew audiences of 7 million. This is no mean feat when you consider that most of us would do almost anything to avoid the circumstances depicted in the programme.
It was business as usual at Birmingham Children’s Hospital: 7-year-old Nicole had sustained head injuries in a motorway accident, 12-year-old Lisa was waiting for a hole-in-the-heart operation, and tiny 3-hour-old Sam had been born with his innards hanging out of a hole in his stomach, a knotty, livid mass. The surgeons got to work, the distraught parents wept, and the patients (at least those who were conscious) showed almost unbelievable pluck. As the programme wore on, one could only wonder why 7 million people would voluntarily subject themselves to such harrowing viewing. This isn’t, after all, a kid-glove handling of the subject, despite what the syrupy title music may suggest:
the images of tiny children strapped into terrifying machines, with gloved hands manipulating their intestines, are the stuff of nightmare. The fact that this material is shown pre-watershed5simply compounds the mystery.
It’s impossible not to get caught up in so much suffering humanity, nor to fail to admire the health professionals who deal with this stuff every day of their working lives – but to watch it for enjoyment? Hopefully the hospital benefits from the publicity that a prime-time BBC1 slot generates, but other than that it’s difficult to understand the show’s raison d’être. The success of Children’s Hospital, Animal Hospital, Pet Rescue and any show in which vulnerable creatures suffer and die suggests that the nation is in the grip of a mass outbreak of Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy.6
The raison d’être is, of course, that whopping audience – and what the Guardian is grappling with here is that unaccountable human appetite for other people’s suffering. That is something we shall return to in the next chapter, but the more general point is that this gave rise to a whole welter of docu-soaps, some of which also ran for years.
Animal Hospital ran from 1994 to 2004 on BBC1, starting and ending at the RSPCA Harmsworth Memorial Animal Hospital, but also filming tales of animal woe and human grief in various different animal hospitals. The famously unquenchable thirst of British people for all things animal was further served in 1996 by Vets’ School and its sequel the following year, 20 episodes of Vets in Practice.7This had the additional value of doing what long-running drama regularly does to refresh audience interest: move the characters into new places with new challenges, but which real life does not always deliver to schedule. It also made stars of two of the graduates of the Bristol University Veterinary School, Trude Mostue and Steve Leonard, who went on to host Vets in the Wild (1997) and become full-time television wildlife presenters. In this way in particular, it was the precursor of twenty-first-century reality television, driven as so much of it is by the quest for fame and fortune, not formerly a major concern of documentary.
The apotheosis of this kind of fame vehicle was BBC1’s 1997 Driving School and its nemesis, Maureen Rees, a Welsh cleaner who had spectacularly failed her driving test several times.8Although only one of the learner drivers featured, her stomach-churning inability to control a car safely turned her into a national figure, who even went on to make a hit record (a cover of Madness’s Driving in My Car) and who is still revisited by journalists and broadcasters. Clampers attempted to recapture the entertainment potential the following year, with a singing wheel clamper called Ray Brown standing out among his mates.9They even
made a Clampers Christmas Special, in which Ray Brown performed set piece songs just as in conventional seasonal entertainment spectaculars. At this point, the entertainment has superseded any documentary value, giving credence to those who argue that a growing number of incidents in this kind of docu-soap were being engineered by the production to make a more entertaining show. This was probably an inevitable outcome of the explosion of the form as a result of its popularity. There were four docu-soaps made in Britain in 1995.
There were 22 in 1998. A trickle had turned to a flood and, in the increasingly competitive television market, imitation had become the sincerest form of flattery. As commissioners rushed to repeat each others’ success, respect for the facts was not their top priority.
In 1995, the BBC had launched the long-running Airport, featuring stories of life at London’s Heathrow, the world’s busiest airport.10Three years later, ITV countered with Airline, whose first series gave us the personal stories of some of Britain’s largest charter airline, Britannia Airways’ staff and crews.11 While Airport pulled an astonishing peak audience of 10.7 million (a 44 per cent share) in 1998, Airline beat it with 11.4 million and a full 50 per cent share. A nation increasingly familiar with the trials and tribulations of air travel were transfixed with the minutiae of life behind the check-in desk. A certain entrepreneur, Stelios Haji-Ioannou, had launched the low-cost airline EasyJet in 1995, with one eye on the use of the developing internet as a cheap and efficient booking tool, and the other on television as a great brand enforcer. From 1999, Airline featured the staff and workings of EasyJet, and thus its orange livery became a familiar icon. Given that the broadcasters could not legally cede editorial control of these institutional docu-soaps, it is interesting to see what those that were prepared to reveal their staff ’s true nature, warts and all, stood to gain. Easyjet Managing Director Ray Webster penned a piece for The Observer newspaper in 2000:
We took a big but calculated risk when we opted to give LWT’s television cameras almost total access to Easyjet staff and passengers in mid-1998. As a rapidly growing young airline there were obviously going to be certain things that we didn’t want to be shown on prime-time ITV . . . The business rationale is simple: we don’t sell through travel agents, so all our customers have to come to us – 70 per cent to our website and the rest to our call centre. Therefore we have to find as many ways as possible of keeping the Easyjet brand name in front of the consumer. We spend millions of pounds on press and poster advertising each year but nothing on television, so the Airline series provides us with a useful way of getting ourselves onto the screens . . . We do not always agree with LWT over what constitutes good television, but our expertise is in running an airline – not in programme-making. And the number of people who regularly tune in to watch the series is a testament to the fact they know what they’re doing.12
What they were doing was making Stelios Haji-Ioannou rich. Seven and a half million people watched Airline at 9 pm on Friday nights in 1999 (a 37 per cent share), the kind of advertising which a low-cost airline would never have been able to buy. EasyJet also got to see every episode before transmission and could challenge sequences they saw as potentially threatening safety or security. They claim not to have been enabled to get embarrassing footage removed, but they were secure in research which told them that 85 per cent of the audience only remember the name, if anything, so the business benefit was secure.
Furthermore, the relationship between producers and company over ten years was too well-established and valuable to both parties for either to do anything to threaten it.
So lucrative is the franchise that ITV started another docu-soap based around Luton Airport13in 2005. It could be argued that this kind of practice allows of no more critical detachment than correspondents can achieve when covering war embedded with troops, and the job is emphatically not to uncover wrongdoing or analyse the implications of the stories told. Thus Children’s Hospital celebrated Birmingham Children’s Hospital’s move into its spanking new premises in 1999, but did not interrogate the controversial PFI scheme that had financed it, nor go into the £3.5 million shortfall in the budget. The argument is that ratings chasing had been prioritised over editorial impartiality. But even, or especially, if that was not always the case, institutions and corporations with anything to hide were unlikely to allow the cameras in. Programmes such as The House (Chapter 5) had exposed their subjects, the Royal Opera House and its management, to such public evisceration and ridicule that other companies were much more nervous about assuming the EasyJet benefit.