Dominic Lawson: The camera always lies. So why deny it?

My friend the documentary programme maker is perplexed. In common with all independent production companies contracted by the BBC, his firm has received an email from the corporation's director of television, Jana Bennett, asking it to review its entire output, both past and pending, to establish whether it has any "faked footage". "This is madness," says my friend: "It's absolutely traditional that documentary makers manipulate footage to try to make the story better."

He's right, of course. Unfortunately for him, however, the BBC's director general, Mark Thompson, has launched operation Safeguarding Trust, following the political row over some footage which was edited to suggest, falsely, that the Queen had stormed out of a photographic session with Annie Leibowitz. Given the deceptions which documentary film-makers have successfully perpetrated over many years, it is ironic, at the least, that this BBC internal inquisition should have been provoked by a bit of fakery which was never intended to be broadcast. On the other hand, a very powerful woman has been offended - and the Queen, too, is thought to have been annoyed.

"Where are we meant to draw the line?" my friend complains, as he unwillingly embarks upon a trawl throughout his entire BBC oeuvre: "It's bizarre to think that there is a clear dividing line between the real and unreal in documentaries."

You might find this statement disturbing; I think it is magnificent honesty. Anyone who has taken part in a television documentary knows just how contrived is the whole exercise. Last year I participated in one of a series of BBC documentaries called Who Do You Think You Are?, in which well-known people were meant to find out about their family's origins; in this particular programme the subject was my sister Nigella.

At one stage she and I were meant to have looked up our ancestry on some public record office website and we were filmed apparently making this discovery together. We had done no such thing. The programme makers had stuck the whole document on my computer - and told us what buttons to press: we then pretended to be doing the work ourselves - and also to be startled to find out the truth (which of course we already knew).

You might argue that the BBC could not have succeeded in this little deception unless we had been prepared to go along with it - and you would be right. What happens in such situations is that you begin to see things from the point of view of the programme maker - who wants drama - and so fall in with his script.

I did draw the line at one stage - when the director asked me to pretend to "discover" the will of one of our ancestors and to express astonishment at how much wealth he had accumulated, despite his poor origins. I would like to claim that I refused his request solely on the grounds that the scene would have been phoney - but the truth is that I was simply embarrassed.

The makers of Who Do You Think You Are? could justifiably claim that they are principally in the entertainment business and that their audience is not looking for absolute reality so much as a diverting hour in front of the television. The problem is that a large section of the population seems increasingly to believe that what is on television is reality - and that the real world outside those ever bigger screens is of decreasing significance.

Thus it is that the mass circulation newspapers devote more and more of their pages to the imaginary world of the TV soap operas - as if these characters were actually real. Most disconcertingly of all, they seem to intuit that their readers are most involved in the weird nether-world of so-called reality television, in which the manipulation and phoniness is all the more potent for being entirely covert.

The tabloid press has a peculiarly ambivalent role in all this. On the one hand, its devotion of acres of newsprint to the activities of soap stars and reality television participants can only act as a promotional tool for the likes of Endemol, the producers of Big Brother. On the other hand, the tabloid press recognises that every hour a member of the public spends watching such programmes is time that he or she will no longer spend reading newspapers.

That uneasy thought doubtless lies behind the censoriousness which the press has displayed towards the BBC in the past couple of weeks, with a series of editorials denouncing the deceptions perpetrated by programmes such as Comic Relief. After a fortnight of executive grovelling and dumping by the BBC, there are some signs of a fightback: in yesterday's Independent the chairman of the independent production body PACT, Alex Graham, protested that "when a TV company distorts the truth , they are hung out to dry. When a newspaper does it, it's just another day at the office."

There is something in Mr Graham's complaint: many of the newspapers which have been most critical of the way in which the BBC unwittingly stitched up Her Majesty the Queen are themselves without peer in the twisting of facts to fit a preconceived script. This, however, is very well understood by the public: that is why it has become commonplace to say that "you can't believe anything you read in the papers." That is why, when opinion polls are commissioned on this matter, red-top newspapers are shown to have a dramatically lower level of public trust than that enjoyed by the television networks.

Somehow, I don't think that this divergence in the level of public trust between press and broadcasting will be arrested by the recent revelations of deception among some of our most eminent television companies, including the BBC. I suspect that the public, in the main, will continue to think that the camera doesn't lie - that it is as dispassionate and as disinterested as a High Court stenographer - even though anyone who has been on either side of it knows that it absolutely does.

Indeed, as Malcolm Muggeridge, a great print journalist who became a regular television performer in his old age, said: "Not only can the camera lie; it always lies." That, in effect, is what my friend the documentary maker thinks too - although he would probably prefer to express the thought in post-modern terms: that there is no such thing as absolute truth or reality.

We can never expect Mark Thompson to make such an admission - it's more than his highly-politicised job would be worth; but I would have welcomed a little less in the way of expressions of astonishment on his part at the little deception involving the Queen. Her Majesty might not have been amused - but he will not have been amazed.

d.lawson@independent.co.uk

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