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This is a drama based on actual events." This phrase prefaced the opening sequence to Channel 4's Bradford Riots, as it prefaces so many films on television, now that we live in the age of the docudrama. There's something about the phrase that makes me wary. It's a disclaimer, but it's also a claim - it goes both ways, like a hologram or one of those Renaissance anamorphic paintings: from one angle, everything we see is true' at the same time, seen from another angle, everything is simply made-up.
This is all very well for historical dramatisations. Once 40 odd years have passed since the "actual events", I am happy to enjoy them blended in the Magimix of a scriptwriter's fancy. But are the last hours of the 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta best communicated in fiction by Martin Amis? (Amis's account, a disconcerting mix of the magisterial and the hypothetical, was published in the New Yorker last month.) And is a docudrama the best way for us to learn about the last days of the London suicide bombers of 7 July? A BBC production is currently in progress' initially slated for the anniversary of the bombing, it now looks set to air in October. The delay has been caused in part by the fact that new evidence about the bombers is emerging all the time. Which is presumably a bit of a pain for continuity.
In the case of the Bradford drama, too, filming was difficult: recreations of the riots couldn't take place because local sensitivities still ran high, so shooting had...