Iraqi Kurdistan All in the Timing

GEO Media
An Education in Oil
How can the media best engage the public on fossil fuels?
Documentary or drama? The BBC has been attempting both.
It seems the BBC has been on a bit of
a mission. As the UK grapples with
declining North Sea production, the
rise of Scottish nationalism and the
possibility of becoming a Frack Nation,
the corporation has broadcast a threepart
radio documentary series on the
impact of North Sea oil and a series of
seven stand-alone radio dramas, set in oil
hot-spots around the world, past, present
and future. The aim, it seems, has been
to raise the public’s consciousness of
this industry as it faces unprecedented
challenges. It is an attempt that should
be applauded, although
the results were mixed.
BP Archive
Documentary or
Drama?
A Crude History of
Britain, presented by
James Naughtie, sets
out to remind us of the
extraordinary technical
challenges faced by North
Sea engineers in the ’60s
and ’70s. However, it is
the cultural, political
and economic impacts of oil that are
likely to register more deeply with
listeners. It is fascinating for those of us
who were not there to hear of the gold
rush atmosphere, and the impact of
Americans with their Stetsons and pints
of Dom Perignon arriving in an isolated,
traditional Scottish town. It is probably
a shock to most British listeners to hear
how very dependent the country was on
American expertise at the time.
The series is packed with small
surprises as it rolls through recent British
economic history. Who remembers
that in the 1970s there was no taxation
structure for oil exploitation and the
country was, apparently, ‘taken to
the cleaners’ by the Americans? Who
remembers that the industry was pleading
with government to keep the oil in the
ground as the exchange rate shot up
and exports fell? Now that the UK looks
enviously at Norway’s sovereign wealth
fund, it is interesting to be reminded how
successive embattled governments, both
left and right, were saved by oil revenues.
Did we know that the UK was invited
to join OPEC? Or that it chose to see off
Nigerian competition by staying outside
the cartel and operating through its Saudi
allies? I didn’t.
All about oil – clockwise from top: Mohammad
Mosaddegh, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Deepwater
Horizon explosion, North Sea platform 1990.
US Coast Guard
The seven dramas were perhaps less
successful in their mission to inform.
Salient episodes of recent ‘oil history’ were
fictionalised with moderate success – the
deposing of Mosaddegh, the execution
of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the start of the 1990
Gulf war, and the 1975 kidnapping of
Sheikh Yamani. Added to this were the
purely imaginative attempts of a young
journalist to discover ‘the truth’ behind
the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the
disappearance of an environmentalist in
Alaska and a futuristic look at the UK’s
fracking industry.
NIKKI JONES
In contrast to the documentary
series, each episode seemed to be
bursting out of its 40-minute slot,
each play ambitiously attempting to
both educate and entertain. However,
the pace and scope of each drama, the
dropping in of informative ‘asides’ and
the inevitable inclusion of some casual,
light-entertainment sex made many of
them hard to follow.
Engaging the Public
What will listeners have learnt? Perhaps
that oil is at the top of the tree when
it comes to politically
messy, dangerous, don’tlook-down
industries.
That’s not news. Is it
useful to remind the
public, through fiction,
that the British and
Americans manufactured
witnesses to get the
public behind the first
Gulf war, that blow-out
preventers only ever
work 50% of the time,
that the world, including
the Middle Eastern oil states, has
abandoned the Palestinians, that a range
of environmental disasters is likely in the
near future? The answer can only be ‘yes’,
although this series succeeded through
the most brutish hammering home of
basic truths. The finer points were lost in
the ambitious, fast-paced plots.
So the question remains: how do you
get the public to engage with this most
critical of industries? The BBC should
be applauded for its attempts, although
on this occasion the calm narrative of
documentary stayed too safely in the
uncontroversial, domestic arena, while
the dramas probably lost most of their
listeners somewhere in their vaulting
ambitions. But more please: worldwide,
the public needs to understand
where its energy comes from and the
implications of its consumption.
Clearly, both drama and documentary
have a role to play.
88 GEOExPro November 2015