Leading Article: Drama out of suffering

GRANADA Television is engaged in an unseemly dispute with four of those held hostage in the Lebanon in the Eighties. John McCarthy, Brian Keenan, Terry Waite and Terry Anderson have dissociated themselves from Hostages, the drama-documentary based on their imprisonment, which is to be transmitted tomorrow, and have cast doubts on the programme's accuracy.

The four men initially refused to co-operate in the making of the programme, in part because, as they made clear yesterday in a letter to the Guardian, 'we are all writing personal accounts of our experiences'. Granada appears to believe that their commercial interest undermines any complaints the former hostages may have. Crudely, the company's defence is that the hostages merely want first bite at the cherry.

There are two flaws in this line of argument. The first is that the hostages' suffering is uniquely their own, and it did not end with their liberation. It will be a long time before all of them have fully recovered and are able to earn their own living. If anybody is to make money out of their experiences, then, morally, it should be the victims and not a television company. Moreover, Granada's interest in the story is equally (and quite properly) mercenary. The company's object is to attract viewers and advertisers and to make a profit. It ill behoves those involved in a commercial film-making enterprise to belittle the four men because they too have to think about money.

The former hostages also complain that the programme, made without their consent, contains 'scenes involving us that are pure fiction'. They add that the film-makers are 'grossly misleading the public by giving them the impression that they will see what actually happened'. It is a grave charge because Granada has a generally good reputation for producing balanced dramatic reconstructions of contentious events, following prolonged and meticulous research and off-the-record interviews with many of the major players.

On this occasion, however, Granada wants to have things both ways. On the one hand the programme-makers claim to have used their best endeavours to ensure that Hostages is accurate, and to have instructed the writers to follow as closely as possible the extensive research that the company undertook. On the other hand, the introduction will state that events and characters have been elided and the chronology changed. This suggests that dramatic licence and a desire to entertain have been permitted to take precedence over truth.

The power exercised by television images is very great. Sophisticated people who would query newspaper reports or books based on supposedly meticulous research tend to believe that a version of events portrayed on the television screen is truthful. This is why drama-documentary, accurate or not, carries great impact - and why those portrayed, if still alive, are so affronted if they feel they are being presented in a misleading manner.

Where politicians are concerned, it is reasonable to be relatively cavalier about hurt feelings, when, say, the events round the Cabinet table are reconstructed. But those held hostage in the Lebanon were not public figures and their suffering was essentially private. In making Hostages in spite of their objections, Granada has been guilty of distressing insensitivity.