C90 Columns
FILM AND TELEVISION: "Cultural Baggage Reclaim"
The 'docu-soap' hadn't become a TV staple when Italian critic Umberto Eco wrote about the shift from Paleo-TV to Neo-TV. Paleo-TV was about the 'real world', whereas Neo-TV talked mainly about a television world. For Neo-TV fans, docu-soap fuses familiar elements of soap with 'fly-on-the-wall' conventions to build an enclosed, 'everyday' world with added dramatic impact.
Soap's continuity of character is essential to the BBC's Airport. The programme is not about individual passengers and their problems but the constant cast of staff (introduced in the opening credits) who are central to the series of mini-narratives structured from Neo-dawn to dusk. Paradoxically, Airport is not about those who travel, so much as those who don't--those whose feet stay firmly on the ground.
Airport constructs Heathrow as a self-contained city-state. Despite continuity of location, the camera shows a strange city. It conceals the broader social and physical subsystems, and constructs the airport in terms of 'dealing with people'. It shows check-in desks and immigration control rather than other invisible substructures, the people who deal with 'things'--the workers who prepare the food or fuel the aircraft. Even fire officers admonish staff who've ignored the alarm rather than being shown dealing with a fire.
Sometimes issues of class and status emerge--VIP passengers, sports and pop stars, even furry pets (another favourite of TV) as special transit characters/passengers, while the airport paparazzi hover for a glimpse of celebrities. But Neo-TV's 'real' stars are generated by the programme itself.
For example, in one of the strangest sequences, Jeremy--by far Airport's biggest star--teaches young recruits in the travel industry how to handle various crises. Here we have the media star--a household name manufactured in the first series--in a semi-simulation of a classroom, making real trainees simulate a real airport... This is not so much fly-on-the-wall as camera-team-in-the-wings, and the main 'stars' in the sim airport are those who know when to play up to the camera (the faceless character), blurring the simulation and reality. In this convoluted Neo-reality, different ambitions are at play: the central star with an eye to daytime TV, producer pressure to deliver brand expectations etc...
Although docu-soaps borrow traditional soap conventions, distinctions between commercial and public services abound; the BBC's Airport focuses on the airport and public sector airlines while ITV's Airline concentrates on one private, no-frills airline. The BBC uses specially commissioned music while ITV has an off-the-shelf sig tune. The BBC's voiceover asserts its traditional voice of authority in contrast to ITV's more matey address. The close affinity between traditional soaps and their younger upstarts is clinched as the BBC announces an 'Airport Christmas Special'. But what comes across most forcibly in the genre is the emphasis on the camera--not invisible as in older (Paleo) TV but with a flagrant insistence on its construction of a simulated world and, for a second generation of docu-soap stars, a passport to Radio Times celebrity status.
Stephanie McBride
