Activity: Participating in or organising an event › Conference participation
Description
Paper entitled 'Formatting the War on Terror', delivered to the Screens of Terror conference at London South Bank University.
9/11 was the starting point for a particular kind of drama-documentary on television - the 'adrenaline-doc', a minute-by-minute, sometimes second-by-second, visceral retelling of an event through the eyes of those who were there. (Examples would be Zero Hour, on which I worked for three seasons, and included two films that were actually banned by the commissioning broadcaster; Seconds from Disaster, a National Geographic series; Alive, a Channel 4/Discovery series; Banged Up Abroad, a Channel Five/Nat Geo series (again I worked on this) and so on). They all follow broadly similar formal conventions - and have similar problems, especially that they displace other, more obviously 'contestable' documentary evidence and testimony with a single timeline.