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10 hours ago
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I was once trying to get a television idea commissioned about a subject or issue that I thought was important. So important that I can no longer remember what it was. Whatever it was, the commissioner stayed alert for a minute or two but soon clouded over and demanded: “What is it you’re trying to say?”
“Say? I’m just saying it’s really interesting.”
“And it is,” she conceded. “But you can’t just do a general …” She groped for the right word. “Grope,” she said eventually, firmly. “You can’t just do a general grope around a subject.” She made a kind of rummaging motion with her hands as she said this.
The thing is, what I crave as a listener and viewer is exactly that: a general – basic, simple, idiot’s guide, call it what you will – examination of a story or issue.
I was listening to You Do Not Have to Say Anything on Radio 4. It’s a series of 10 15-minute programmes explaining the workings – also not workings – of the criminal justice system, presented by a defence barrister called Joanna Hardy Susskind. I enjoyed it so much that I found myself wondering how on earth it got commissioned because it amounted to, as my commissioner might have put it, a general grope. And I have no greater compliment to pay any piece of broadcasting.
In it, we are walked through the process of criminal justice, from arrest through to conviction or acquittal. This is important stuff, which frankly we all ought to know anyway and doubtless kid ourselves we do, when we really don’t. There are many reasons for this, not least among them the absence of programmes like this one. Credit is due to those who resisted – or perhaps never made – demands to innovate, say something new or say something old but in a new, imaginative way, with whatever bells, whistles, tricks, conceits or freaky formats can be drummed up. Even the sound design on this one is just right – unusual, but subtle and nonintrusive.
It’s so rare to come across anyone in documentary-making playing a straight bat. To be fair, the problem is often someone like me, a presenter, getting in the way. I crave beginning-to-end histories of things. Ken Burns is the master, with his series on Vietnam, the civil war, prohibition, baseball and so on. And I’ve embarrassed myself several times upon meeting Norma Percy, falling at the feet of the extraordinary woman behind The Death of Yugoslavia, Putin, Russia and the West and many others. Her latest film, Israel and the Palestinians: The Road to 7th October, is out now. Given the subject, I’m sure people will find in it fuel for their fury, but there’s no fancy footwork getting in the way of the story she is trying to get across.
Tellingly, some of the most successful podcasts tend to be the most basic in structure. The Rest Is History features two adults speaking knowledgeably to each other in order to get an in-depth story told. No innovation necessary. Although it’s so simple a format that probably in itself counts as radical. It works.
Yet the innovators, the reimaginers and the revolutionaries march on, and not just in media. And to some extent that’s healthy and necessary, as long as it’s clear that not everything must improve, not everything must be changed. Otherwise, I end up with 30 functions on my tumble dryer when I only need two – namely how long and how hot. And my mum has to choose between 92 buttons on two remote controls to operate her telly. And my electric car gives me not physical buttons, switches or sliders to grasp, but a touchscreen that would be amazing if I could keep my (nondominant) left hand steady enough to actually use it.
All this fulmination may of course merely be a sign that I’m now the old fart I swore I’d never become, thinking everything used to be better in the old days. But I don’t think so. Good question for a documentary, that.
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Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
