There is a long-established tradition of television producers pushing at the boundaries of taste, to see how much they can get away with, and the extent to which they are responsible for the changing limits of public acceptance is clearly significant, if difficult to determine.
The recent appetite for the extremes of human misery feeds a jaded palate sated on more common problems. The documentary series Extraordinary Lives is one of the few undisputed successes on the UK Channel 5, regularly attracting an audience larger than much of their entertainment fare. The year 2007 saw the launch of the seventh run of this series that attempts to find freakily unique human conditions or, as their website says: ‘Sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes inspiring, each thought-provoking film tells the story of a person whose unusual condition, ability or power challenges scientific understanding.’37The titles tell you what to expect: The Boy Who Sees Without Eyes – the 14-year-old blind American boy who navigates by sound; The Twin Within the Twin – the 36-year-old Bengali who carries his foetal twin inside his abdomen; and The Twins Who Share a Body – Abby and Brittany Hensel, the world’s only known dicephalus conjoined twins, i.e. two heads on one body. Sue Davidson commissioned the strand for Five:
Extraordinary People grew out of the Science brief and Justin Kershaw, who created it, was fascinated by the whole area of the Sachs books – The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat and so on – and saw the titles of all our programmes in somewhat similar vein.
It started off what has become a bit of a genre now, looking at the most extreme variations in human bodies, human abilities, disabilities, whatever, but within the umbrella of Science. Although a lot of them could be described in the ‘shock doc’ genre, I don’t think they are if you look at the tone of programme: it’s the fact that they are rooted in science that gives them a kind of rigour and stops them becoming completely gratuitous and exploitative, because you feel there’s a real journey there.
This is a fine, though important, distinction. The pejorative label ‘shock doc’ is invited by the Channel 4 series more challengingly entitled BodyShock, which has run since 2003. The titles seem similar: The Boy Who Gave Birth to His Twin, Born with Two Heads, World’s Biggest Boy and Half Ton Man. The subject matter is virtually identical, but Channel 4 is more direct in its appeal to the prurient in its audience. Sample the gleeful tabloid tone of their online write-up of the Half Ton Man:
Weighing the same as five baby elephants and a shade less than a Mini Cooper, Patrick Deuel is one of the heaviest men ever and a medical miracle. His heart and other organs should have collapsed long before he reached his record-breaking weight of 76 stone 8 lbs. A wall has to be knocked out of his house so he can be taken to hospital – in a reinforced ambulance – where he is kept on a strict diet and loses a staggering 30 stone.
After a gastric by-pass operation he is sent home. It is now up to him to decide if he wants to live or carry on eating himself to death.
One of Patrick’s supporters has been Rosalie Bradford, who was one of the world’s fattest women. She was eight feet wide and could not leave the house. It was only when she realised her addiction to food was a response to being abandoned as a child that she lost an incredible 900 pounds. Through the remarkable stories of Patrick and Rosalie, BodyShock anatomises the science of extreme weight loss and the bewildering lives of the growing number of people who seem intent on eating themselves to death.38 Science makes a relatively late, light entry to the picture here, and the sign-off ‘eating themselves to death’ is indicative of a harder-nosed programme agenda. ITV followed up
with a whole Brooklyn hospital full of subjects in Half Ton Hospital where ‘patients carry an incredible average weight of 50 stones each.39Sue Davidson is convinced that is what distinguishes her commissions from the opposition. ‘We’re not like BodyShock, we only do uplifting stories, so there is a feel-good factor to them, which is very Five’. This is not a broad attack on another channel. Channel 4’s contribution to public service documentary is universally acknowledged, and its best known contribution to this arena, The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off,40garnered worldwide praise and Davidson’s unstinting admiration:
We would have done because that was a very uplifting tale. We would have had a lot more science in it, so you would have learnt more about the condition, but we would have done it because he was uplifting about his death. It wasn’t dark.
The eponymous ‘boy’ was actually a man of 36 called Jonny Kennedy. He had a genetic condition called Dystrophic Epidermolysis Bullosa (EB) – which meant that his skin literally fell off at the slightest touch, leaving his body covered in agonising sores. The deal he struck with filmmaker Patrick Collerton was that he would review his life while filming his final fight against skin cancer. Jonny’s extraordinary character and wit shone through his grim tale and untimely death, even embellishing the customised coffin he was interred in, and his tale reached an extraordinary 5 million viewers’ hearts, raising £500,000 for DebRA, the charity working on behalf of people with this hitherto unsung condition. This, most commentators agreed, is what the public service remit of British television is for, and the grabby title was more than justified by the results. Mark Lawson in the Guardian had anticipated that this was another huckstering title ‘designed to entrap channel-flickers’ but concluded: ‘Few television programmes in history have managed simultaneously to be so hard to watch and so rewarding.’41Jonny’s mother and carer Edna, had made a moving contribution to the original film, and added her assessment to an update made in the aftermath of the film’s success:
Jonny wanted to do the film to get EB and DebRA better known, but it has been so much more than that; the film seems to have touched so many people . . . Jonny has achieved something amazing and I know that, wherever he is now, he will be jumping with joy at the response the film has had.42
Not all films can aspire to these heights or win an International Emmy, as this one did, but this level of sympathy and engagement with the subjects and their condition could rescue programmes from the charges of unsavoury exploitation. However, their very prevalence suggests a return to the days of the fairground freak show, and disability activists have begun to mount a critical challenge to them. Laurence Clark writes for the BBC disability website Ouch! (It’s a disability thing) and mounts a robust case:
During these programmes I often find myself screaming at the TV: ‘Where the hell do they find these people?!’ I suspect that someone somewhere has set up an agency called Rent-a-Freak, specifically to supply the most bizarre, eccentric disabled people they can find to budding documentary makers. But unlike today’s documentary subjects, the freaks of old were at least paid to take part – and had some say over their performances.43