Wide-Ranging Book

One of the most complained about programmes ever on British television was broadcast on Channel 4 in 2001. This one-off Brass Eye documentary was about paedophilia, and it featured a reconstruction involving a potato and something unmentionable, a pop star endorsing a campaign entitled "Nonce Sense", and a famous disc jockey claiming that a crab and a paedophile shared the same DNA. The programme was tasteless, offensive and (to some) very funny. It was a spoof, of course, the work of the radical satirist Chris Morris, who specialised in fake factual programmes that conflated the boundaries between fact and fiction, the comic and the serious, and thereby revealed the volatile nature of both.

Brett Mills' study of Morris is the concluding chapter of this excellent collection of essays on experimental British television from the 1950s to the present day. At first glance, the satirist's inclusion seems surprising; one would have thought that he was a hoaxer of genius, but not a fully paid-up member of the avant-garde. Yet Mills shows that this gifted trickster was a serious manipulator —and hence critic—of television aesthetics and meanings. He argues that Morris's programmes revealed how factual television conventions can limit the reporting of news and current affairs, sealing off alternative lines of enquiry and, at times, colluding with self-serving celebrities (and even members of Parliament), who are prepared to put their names to anything for the sake of media exposure. The implication is that irreverent games with form can become very serious games with meaning, with what the medium can - and what it is allowed - to say.

It follows that "experiment" is a wide-ranging term as far as the box is concerned, so this is a very wide-ranging book. As Laura Mulvey points out in her introduction, it is hard to pin down "television specificity" because the medium is so volatile in terms of its genres, its technologies (and, one might add, the composition of its audiences). It is no surprise, then, to find one chapter devoted to the more or less untilled furrow of music videos, while another deals with the almost obligatory figure of Ken Russell, maverick maker of arts documentaries and permanent thorn in the side of the more staid members of the BBC hierarchy.

The essays are arranged in chronological order. To begin with, we are in the BBC of the late 1950s. John Hill tells the story of Anthony Pelissier and the Langham Group, a specialist drama unit whose function was to find new forms of studio-based drama. The experiment was short-lived (and rather pretentious by the sound of it) but, as Hill shows, the group did open up important possibilities for the future and, above all, established experimentation as an important part of the Corporation's job.

During the 1960s, the torch was taken up by a number of writers and directors. One was Troy Kennedy Martin, a prime mover behind Z-Cars, an innovative police series of the time. In collaboration with the director John McGrath, Martin created Diary of a Young Man, a six-part series about a lad from the north of England trying to make his way in Swinging London. (It was broadcast in prime time on a Saturday night. Those were the days.) Hill contributes a second essay on this programme, which used music, stills montages and filmed inserts to create a non-naturalistic drama that emphasised social absurdity and dream states. The BBC mandarins loved the series; unfortunately, the viewers did not. Over on the commercial ITV, however, Armchair Theatre did much better, maybe because it was an anthology series of single plays with very different styles and outlooks. Helen Wheatley writes a fascinating chapter on this series and on its spin-off, Armchair Mystery Theatre, which at times managed to sugar the pill of experimentation by presenting it in the context of good old Gothic melodrama.

The cosy duopoly of the BBC and ITV was disrupted in the early 1980s by what in retrospect...