Content area
Full Text
A new documentary series from producer Kirk Docker takes viewers deep into important - and tragic - moments of history You might recall the innovative You Can’t Ask That, the lateral interview show that appeared on the ABC for multiple seasons from 2016. Created by Kirk Docker, Jon Casimir and Aaron Smith, and later taken over by Docker who directed most of the episodes, it was a socially conscious exercise in stereotype busting, and as entertaining as it was sometimes confronting.
It attracted a surprisingly large number of regular viewers – around the 600,000 mark, which is more than the viewership of many free-to-air reality shows on commercial TV during these dismal years for broadcast TV.
Its creators decided to ask what would happen if you gave people the opportunity to ask society’s outsiders about issues they would normally shy away from broaching, if only for fear of being offensive or causing embarrassment or even harassment.
And You Can’t Ask That turned out to be one of the most diverse projects to grace Australian TV, featuring among others wheelchair users, recent war veterans, S&M aficionados, the short-statured, Muslims, the polyamorous, ex-prisoners, obese people, and those suffering from extreme facial differences. They answered anonymous online queries, collated by the producers, in front of a seemingly static camera before a simple, carnival-style backcloth.
It was delightfully minimalistic in its visual design and its textural organisation but still developed an imaginative engagement out of all proportion to its starkness as a form of journalistic inquiry. (The backdrop and the set packed down into eight bags that Docker said could be taken anywhere on the smallest plane, or packed into a car, and set up in someone’s house, in a hotel room, or in a town hall.) The format was picked up in 32 other countries too, a hit with international broadcasters, format producers and digital platforms. It was simply a brilliant example of the way TV can still function as a place for negotiating controversial topics and ideas and modelling civic engagement.
...