01 August 2007
MALCOLM AND BARBARA: IT RUMBLES ON
Now Michael Grade's released a statement.
I have today appointed Olswang, legal media specialists, to conduct a thorough, but speedy, investigation into the issues concerning the film Malcolm and Barbara: Love’s Farewell.
We need to discover why the film was originally understood to include the moment of death only for it to be established, after the intervention of Malcolm Pointon’s brother Graham earlier this week, that he died some days after the last scene in the film.
This is a very serious matter. I am on record as taking a “zero tolerance” approach to deliberate deceit in television programmes. I intend to establish the facts in this case as quickly as possible. I will publish the conclusions of the report and then take effective action as necessary.
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Well, the film maker, Paul Watson was on Front Row on Radio 4 this evening and from what he's described he took an artistic decision to leave the close of the documentary deliberately ambiguous because in this case the point of death was ambiguous too -- he filmed the moment when the gentleman lost consciousness which as he described as far as his widow understood to begin the process towards death.
The tape was then sent to the ITV who reviewed it and wrote the press release which as far as he's concerned misrepresented the content of the documentary. He said that if he was guilty of a crime it was not paying attention to what was in that press release which seems ridiculous since surely he should have been able to trust the information being put out by the people who commissioned the programme, admittedly in a very different period for television.
The interviewer was very lucid, asked the difficult questions but Watson at no point came across as someone who'd set out to deceive and was on the defensive.
Something I didn't know was that the controversy was stoked by Mediawatch, the new name for Mary Whitehouse's National Viewers and Listeners Association. He mentions it again in here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/medicine/story/0,,2138932,00.html
Which makes my blood run cold, frankly.
It seems entirely horrifying that a filmmaker can spend eleven years of his life following the decline of a man taken by a debilitating disease, hoping to highlight the plight of people in that situation and hopefully providing some solace to the relatives of people in the same situation and pointing out that they're cared for, for *years* unpaid by loving relatives only for the whole thing to be over shadowed by the current flash in the pan over probity in television with hysteria once again being stoked by newspapers whose own sensationalism in regards to well, any story, is far more reprehensible.
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The tape was then sent to the ITV who reviewed it and wrote the press release which as far as he's concerned misrepresented the content of the documentary. He said that if he was guilty of a crime it was not paying attention to what was in that press release which seems ridiculous since surely he should have been able to trust the information being put out by the people who commissioned the programme, admittedly in a very different period for television.
The interviewer was very lucid, asked the difficult questions but Watson at no point came across as someone who'd set out to deceive and was on the defensive.
Something I didn't know was that the controversy was stoked by Mediawatch, the new name for Mary Whitehouse's National Viewers and Listeners Association. He mentions it again in here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/medicine/story/0,,2138932,00.html
Which makes my blood run cold, frankly.
It seems entirely horrifying that a filmmaker can spend eleven years of his life following the decline of a man taken by a debilitating disease, hoping to highlight the plight of people in that situation and hopefully providing some solace to the relatives of people in the same situation and pointing out that they're cared for, for *years* unpaid by loving relatives only for the whole thing to be over shadowed by the current flash in the pan over probity in television with hysteria once again being stoked by newspapers whose own sensationalism in regards to well, any story, is far more reprehensible.
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