Docudrama – Notes #2: Disclaimers

Posted on 1 June, 2026 by admin

by DAVID ROLINSON

Dirty Business (2026),¹ a docudrama about sewage pollution by private water companies and the failures of the Environment Agency, cites sources and provides corroborating information through the use of on-screen captions. For example, when a whistleblower alleges that huge profits have been made whilst using “cuts as a smokescreen” for inaction, the information is cited via an on-screen caption led by an asterisk: the information comes from the “2015-2023 Funding Totals for Environment & Business, The Environment Agency” and that information was accessed due to a “Freedom of Information Request”. Through devices such as these “television footnotes”,² Dirty Business provides a reminder of the importance of “captioning”, which, as Derek Paget observed, “consists in direct address to an audience whether in the form of speech in voice-over, or of on-screen graphical patterns of words (still and rolling), or of both these things simultaneously”.³ Paget argued that captions have various functions, serving to “set the scene, put the audience in touch with ‘out-of-story’ events and characters, negotiate representation codes, guard against legal repercussions and pitch claims for authenticity of varying kinds”.⁴ The caption is a form of “label”, or “signpost”, providing “weight” or the “anchoring of images”.⁵

It is unusual for a docudrama to use on-screen captions during scenes to provide such footnotes. However, a more familiar form of captioning appeared at the start of Dirty Business. The episode begins with two successive captions. The first one states that “This drama is based on real events, extensive interviews and research”. The second states that “Some dialogue, characters and scenes – including some depictions of pollution – have been recreated for the purposes of dramatisation”.⁶ Such opening captions are disclaimers, which, as Paget argued, are a “specialised kind” of caption.⁷ This article explores a wide range of docudramas to discuss what disclaimers do and how they do this: for example, when a disclaimer warns that a docudrama is “based on a true story”, what does this claim mean and how does the visual presentation of that claim reinforce it? The article builds on the discussion of disclaimers in my new book, An Adventure in Space and Time (2026), reproducing some of that discussion but substantially extending it and providing many more examples.⁸

Dirty Business, wr./dr. Joseph Bullman, tx. Channel 4, 23-25 February 2026. The images in this article come from episode 3, tx. Channel 4, 25 February 2026. ↩
This phrase will be discussed later in this article. It comes from Leslie Woodhead, ‘The Guardian Lecture’, in Alan Rosenthal (editor), Why Docudrama? Fact-Fiction on Film and TV (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), p. 109. ↩
Derek Paget, ‘Disclaimers, Denials and Direct Address: Captioning in Docudrama’, in John Izod and Richard Kilborn, with Matthew Hibberd (editors), From Grierson to the Docu-Soap: Breaking the Boundaries (Luton: University of Luton Press, 2000), p. 199. ↩
Derek Paget, No Other Way to Tell It: Docudrama on Film and Television (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2011), p. 103. Second Edition. ↩
Paget, ‘Disclaimers, Denials and Direct Address’, p. 199. Paget is replying to phrases from (respectively) John Willis, ‘Tainted by the Fiction Faction’, Guardian Media Supplement, 16 November 1998, p. 9 and John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (London: Macmillan, 1988). ↩
The final sentence in this disclaimer will be discussed later in this article. ↩
Paget, No Other Way to Tell It, p. 103. Second Edition. Paget referred to the disclaimer as a “specialised kind of opening or closing caption”, but this article focuses on opening captions. ↩
David Rolinson, An Adventure in Space and Time (Edinburgh: Obverse, 2026). Some of the discussion in this article, and that book, also returns to David Rolinson, ‘British Docudrama: New Directions in Reflexivity’, in Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann and Derek Paget (editors), Docudrama on European Television: A Selective Survey. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 199-227. ↩

A Day in Summer (1989)

Posted on 28 February, 2018 by admin

by JOHN WHEATCROFT

There is a lot of dark stuff going on in A Day in Summer, the first novel by J.L. (James Lloyd) Carr. Literary critic D.J. Taylor described the novel as one that “defied classification […] a comic tragedy, if you like, by a gifted amateur still learning his trade.”¹ It is a testament to Alan Plater’s skill that his adaptation of A Day in Summer (1989) handles so seamlessly the comic and tragic elements. This essay examines this Yorkshire Television production, drawing from an interview that I conducted with Carr in 1993 and new archival research into the production.²

D.J. Taylor, Introduction, J.L. Carr, A Day in Summer (London: Hogarth Press, 1989). Originally published by Barrie and Rockliff, 1963. ↩
A Day in Summer, Yorkshire for ITV, tx. 1 February 1989. Screenplay by Alan Plater, based on a book by J.L. Carr, produced by Keith Richardson, directed by Bob Mahoney. ↩

Disputed Territory: Drama and the Falklands

Posted on 2 April, 2012 by admin

by OLIVER WAKE

Every major conflict in living memory has become the subject of drama almost the moment it was over. The Falklands war, which this month reached its thirtieth anniversary and is again in the news due to renewed tensions between Britain and Argentina over the islands, is no exception. Numerous plays about the conflict reached the stage and radio in its aftermath, but none caught the attention of the public at large. However, when television tackled the subject for the mass audience, the results were frequently politically charged and contentious.

The Singing Detective 25th Anniversary Event (2011)

Posted on 20 December, 2011 by admin

by DAVID ROLINSON

“in keeping with the modernist sensibility and self-reflexivity of Hide and Seek and Only Make Believe, the decision to root a view of the past in the experiences and imagination of a writer protagonist, emphasises the fact that, far from being an objective assessment, any perspective on history can only ever be subjective” – John R. Cook.¹

This one-day symposium, staged by Royal Holloway University of London on 10 December 2011, celebrated the 25th anniversary of The Singing Detective (1986).² It paid tribute to the serial’s “narrative complexity, generic hybridity and formal experimentation” and placed writer Dennis Potter’s contribution alongside the contributions made by his collaborators, several of whom were present: producer Kenith Trodd, choreographer Quinny Sacks and actors Patrick Malahide and Bill Paterson.³ Other guests included Peter Bowker (as a modern television writer inspired by Potter), plus academic speakers and, mixing practitioner and academic perspectives, Professor Jonathan Powell, who was Head of Drama at the BBC when The Singing Detective was made. This mixture of academic and practitioner perspectives has been a welcome and often rewarding feature of British television drama conferences in recent years: see, for instance, the conference proceedings published as part of British Television Drama: Past, Present and Future.⁴

John R. Cook, Dennis Potter: A Life on Screen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 217. Second edition. Play for Today: Only Make Believe, tx. BBC1, 12 February 1973. ↩
The Singing Detective, tx. BBC1, 16 November 1986-21 December 1986. ↩
Quotation from the conference blurb, which is still available, with the day’s running order, at http://ies.sas.ac.uk/events/conferences/2011/SingingDetective/ ↩
Jonathan Bignell, Madeleine Macmurraugh-Kavanagh and Stephen Lacey (editors), British Television Drama: Past, Present and Future (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000). ↩

Tales Out of School (1983)

Posted on 10 July, 2011 by admin

by FRANK COLLINS

Writer: David Leland; Producer: Margaret Matheson; Directors: Mike Newell, Edward Bennett, Jane Howell, Alan Clarke

Because this site’s editor, Dave Rolinson, was involved with the Tales Out of School DVD (writing its 12,000-word booklet), it seemed fairer to ask a guest writer to review it: so here’s a review by Frank Collins, who writes the excellent, highly-recommended film & TV review blog Cathode Ray Tube. Many thanks to Frank for letting us reproduce this review.

David Leland’s quartet of dramas from 1983, under their original umbrella title of Tales Out of School, gets a very welcome release from Network this month. All four films, Birth of a Nation, Flying into the Wind, RHINO and Made in Britain, were commissioned by Central Independent Television, the ITV franchise that emerged from the restructuring of the original ATV, and were produced by Margaret Matheson, who had become Controller of Drama after a successful if controversial time at the BBC where she had produced Alan Clarke’s banned television play, Scum. After a steady career as an actor during the 1960s and 1970s, Leland’s reputation as a writer willing to tackle socially sensitive subject matters grew through his work in 1981 on Play For Today, on Psy Warriors and Beloved Enemy.

Both plays had also brought him into contact with director Alan Clarke whose work, radical and realist in tone, had become fiercely political and controversial (he had directed the banned production of Scum for Matheson and the later cinema version). Their paths would all cross again on the production of these four films, with Clarke directing the Prix Italia award-winning Made in Britain, the final film of the quartet. As Leland outlines in both of the excellent documentaries that supplement this release, he had been concerned with the structure and power of mass education for some time.

Tales Out of School firmly belongs in the tradition of social realist drama that stretches back to the work of Loach, Garnett and Sandford on Cathy Come Home in 1966, and was contemporaneously in 1982, in what was seen as a very politically and socially divisive period, perhaps then exemplified by Bleasdale’s recent Boys from the Blackstuff. In his four films Leland traces a number of still contentious ideas about education, questioning the institutional roles and teaching practices within schools, the power of the education system, the law and the judges and courts that dispense order and structure within a complex web of relationships between pupils, teachers, parents, education officers, the police, magistrates and social workers. By doing so he asks us to consider how these institutions, and schools particularly in the first two films, shape the futures of young people, perhaps through a repressive and conformist curriculum that is more concerned with processing young minds for the job market above all else. This also brings in themes about identity, marginalisation, oppression and race, class and gender.