Performing the Real

Abstract

This article places Big Brother in the context of shifts in factual television's forms and functions. Having identified some of the distinctive features of Big Brother's construction of telereality, it reviews the category of “documentary” across some of its dominant modes. The current emphasis on formats that divert as much as they inform or question is given particular attention, and the wider social and cultural coordinates of this trend are noted. The possibility that we are moving into a “postdocumentary” culture is posed. This is a culture in which many conventional elements of documentary will continue to develop, but in a radically changed setting—economic and cultural—for all audiovisual documentation.