JFK and Doctor Who: the four stages of a TV anniversary
|
Version 0 of 1. The position in literary history of the writers of The Chronicles of Narnia and Brave New World has always been slightly overshadowed by a morbid coincidence. CS Lewis (1898-1963) and Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) both had the misfortune to die of natural causes on the day that President John F Kennedy was unnaturally killed, meaning that first their obituaries and then their death anniversaries have been drowned out in the media by JFK's. At the time, it seemed equally bad luck for a fictional TV character to be born into disrupted schedules the day after Kennedy died, but, 50 years on, the schedules have impressively stretched to accommodate lavish tributes for today's 50th anniversary of JFK's end and tomorrow's marking of five decades since the Doctor's beginning. The overlap is instructive because it brings together cases of television celebrating an event in its history and one in the larger story of the world. In a further complication for broadcasters, England happened to win the Rugby World Cup on the 40th anniversary of the Kennedy death, and so that event also has to jostle – Rugby World Cup Winners: 10 Years On (ITV, tonight, 10.35pm) – for attention. What the coincidence shows, though, is that there is an established formula for television commemoration, which breaks down into ordained stages. 1. The main event When the festivities involve a TV programme, the centrepiece is easily decided: in its traditional Saturday evening slot, Doctor Who has a 50th birthday edition, The Day of the Doctor, written by showrunner Steven Moffat. In the case of JFK, the event being marked is both bloodily tragic and was missed by television (with only the amateur Zapruder home movie really capturing the assassination). The nearest equivalent to source material is reconstruction through witness testimony, as in ITV's recent Leslie Woodhead film, The Day Kennedy Died, and More4's JFK: News of a Shooting (tonight, 9pm), in which actor George Clooney and director Alastair Layzell talk to surviving journalists who reported the tragedy. 2. Dramatisation Because JFK lived and died in an era when TV news was expensive and cumbersome to record, the direct archive of him is small, so drama has filled the gap. Channel 4, which has formally declared a "JFK season", has Killing Kennedy (tomorrow, 9pm), which those obsessed with both 50th anniversary subjects can watch just after the Doctor Who special ends. This drama-doc, which earned a record audience for the National Geographic channel when screened in the US last week, stars Rob Lowe as the president. He trails useful credentials from The West Wing, a drama that was in part a Kennedy resurrection fantasy. Thriftily, BBC2 has also been repeating The Kennedys, the 2011 mini-series, timing the run so that the Dallas episode went out on the eve of the anniversary. It is a mark of how seductive a genre the drama-doc is that even Doctor Who, though itself a fiction, was afforded one: Mark Gatiss's An Adventure in Time and Space, screened last night. But the obvious risk in all these cases, though less seriously with regard to a TV drama than a presidential death, is that history and fiction become intertwined. 3. Documentary As TV seeks ways of holding on to its increasingly skittish and distracted audience, documentaries spun off from a core programme, and arranged into official or unofficial seasons, have become an industry. The factual material sandbagging the Doctor Who 50th special includes Matthew Sweet's You, Me and Doctor Who: A Culture Show Special (9.30pm, tonight, BBC2), which, after a short break for Newsnight (no Doctor Who items, please, for God's sake), is followed by The Science of Doctor Who, which will presumably settle whether an old police box can be bigger inside than out. Documentaries in More4's JFK season include Kennedy's Nuclear Nightmare, a film about the Cuban missile crisis, which I had cynically assumed was a recycled repeat from the 50th anniversary of that event last year, but which proves to be new. 4. Lateral thinking The above example of using a 1962 story to commemorate a 1963 event shows how inventive television is when it comes to the commemoration business. Movie channels have pulled out of the vaults the obvious re-runs of Oliver Stone's JFK and the cleverer selection of Clint Eastwood's In the Line of Fire, in which the central character is a secret service agent traumatised by the assassination in Dallas. The proliferation of channels – compared with the two that existed in Britain when JFK died and Doctor Who was born – allow space for BBC4 to show the very first story about the Time Lord, which is a clever reuse of old material. Rather more desperate is Pointless Celebrities (tomorrow, 5.40pm, BBC1), which has also insisted on having a Doctor Who special. With some subjects, there would be a worry that the audience will be stuffed on the starters by the time tomorrow's main-course episode is served, but the Whovians are famously among the more fanatical of fans and so the deluge may be justified, and JFK devotees are probably almost as forgiving of overkill. Even so, the Pointless edition of Doctor Who carries a warning in its title about the risks of TV tribute. In football, it is a punishable offence to "overcelebrate" a goal, and television should be aware of the risk in relation to anniversaries. At least we have so far been spared Gareth Malone teaching canteen workers the hymns sung at Kennedy's funeral, or Lee Harvey Oswald rifle-toting routines on Strictly Come Dancing. Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning. |