The Second World War in Colour: The UK History Documentary Boom and Colour Archive

Abstract

This article will consider the function of colour archive within the context of a changing televisual landscape, and the changing form of history documentary in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The term ‘history documentary’ is defined here as any factual television programme that was clearly positioned by broadcasters as engaging with historical events and figures. History documentaries are further sub-categorised through five main ‘types’, derived from the dominant formal ingredients in each programme: ‘Archive/Testimony’ (including the use of an unseen authoritative commentary often from a famous actor), ‘Presenter-led’ (in which the expert status and charisma of a presenter is utilised), ‘Reconstruction’ (in which dramatic codes are used to aid exposition and emotive connection in conjunction with the first two types), ‘Living History’ (in which reality TV conventions are utilised) and ‘Drama-documentary’ (in which events are fully scripted and acted). The primary concentration is, however, on an example of the Archive/Testimony type, the series The Second World War in Colour (TWI and Carlton for ITV, 1999) in order to place a discussion of history documentary form in the context of wider changes in UK factual television during the 1990s and early 2000s. I will argue that in this period official ‘seriousness’ was exchanged for individual and subjective authorial perspectives, as in Dovey’s concept of ‘first person media’ (Dovey 2000: 1–5), and that the television documentary adopted a more playful engagement with documentary form and function, as in Corner’s concept of ‘documentary as diversion’ (Corner 2002: 260). In doing so I will introduce and assess different claims for the existence of a history documentary boom, and will ask how the boom related to structural and systemic changes in the television industry during the 1980s and 1990s.1