A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Etheses - Queen Margaret ...

as „awful‟ - we can see again the way in which the media simultaneously promotes and
sustains horizons of domesticity and assumptions around normality and abnormality.
Culture as management
We gain further understanding of the role of current disability documentaries by considering
Gareth Palmer‟s argument that, as the chief focus of leisure for millions of people, TV is:
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part of the work of culture-as-management, where culture is a set of practices aimed
at producing – in line with governmental objectives – self-regulating, self-governing
individuals (Palmer, 2003:18).
Palmer argues that early TV documentaries gathered and presented the voices of diverse
individuals in order „to make reasoned cases for change in the social sphere that they were
simultaneously trying to create‟ (Palmer, 2003:7). He asserts that pre-1979 the documentary
form was used to encourage and develop critical debate around issues of citizenship within
the welfare state, to problematise institutions, issues and situations. An educational purpose
was assumed as the function of documentary within a context in which TV was understood
as having a public service role:
Documentary workers were licensed to criticise the operations of the State while still
deriving their income from publicly funded bodies such as the BBC or in the relative
security (in today‟s terms) of independent television (Palmer, 2003:8).
The shake-up of consensus established by the arrival of the Thatcher government of 1979 led
to an overt celebration of the individual over the social. As with many other cultural forms,
this had an impact on TV documentary, which increasingly addressed viewers as consumers
rather than as citizens. The focus of documentary shifted from analysis of social issues to
individual behaviours. Palmer states that while new populists argue that docu-soaps and
Reality TV formats are changing documentary in positive ways, what he sees is a growing
mechanism of panopticism:
Such mechanisms ensure the docility of the body as more and more aspects of life
are made more open to examination. Such examinations in turn form new types of
knowledge with which the problem of population can be managed (Palmer, 2003:6).
Charles echoes Palmer: