Content area
Full Text
Between 2002 and 2006 four feature-length docudramas were shown on UK television: Smallpox 2002: Silent Weapon (2002), The Day Britain Stopped (2003) and The Man Who Broke Britain (2004) on BBC 2; and Death of a President (2006) broadcast first on More4, before being aired on Channel 4.1 Our contention is that these four docudramas share certain similarities, which taken together can be usefully examined as a distinctive phenomenon, or collection of texts.2 The programmes are worth examining because of their distinctive qualitative form, as well as because of their apparent effectiveness, attracting not only large audiences, but also considerable public debate, engendering both uncertainty and anxiety.
After detailing the critical and public reception of these docudramas, as well as using qualitative analysis of the programmes, it is argued that these docudramas can be defined as a form of historical event television - as texts or cultural technologies that mix aesthetic modes and perform a number of cultural functions. But first: a brief summary of the programmes' narratives of disaster. Smallpox 2002 documents the deliberate release of the smallpox virus in New York by a lone individual and the global epidemic that this unleashes, killing 60 million people. Retrospective interviews with witnesses and experts highlight problems of vaccine shortage and distribution, as well as failures in emergency response and containment procedures. The Day Britain Stopped is about a series of transport failures, which, on the busiest day of the year on the roads, are indirectly responsible for a mid-air collision between a Czech cargo plane and a British passenger flight. The Man Who Broke Britain chronicles a similar domino effect, with a crisis precipitated by derivative trading that brings about the collapse of a few banks, which, in turn, paralyses the global economy. Post-credit crunch, and with the subsequent tightening of lending restrictions by banks, the prescience of the docudrama seems further underscored. But the programme stands out regarding the extent and quality of its warning. No other text, to our knowledge, gives so much narrative and aesthetic, documentary and affective detail to its prediction. In saying this, though, The Man Who Broke Britain's farsightedness should also be located within other, broader late-modern phenomena or tendencies - in particular, the expansion of the discursive...