Addressing the wide range of programmes and formats from news, to documentary, to popular factual genres, Annette Hill’s new book examines the ways viewers navigate their way through a busy, noisy and constantly changing factual television environment.
Restyling Factual TV addresses the wide range of programmes that fall within the category of 'factuality', from politics, to natural history, to reality entertainment.
Based on research with audiences of factual TV, primarily in Sweden and the UK, but with reference to other countries such as the US, this book tackles issues such as legitimacy, ethics and value in contemporary news and current affairs, documentary and reality programming.
Drawing on the ethics of truth-telling and notions of quality, this wide-ranging, authoritative book expands the debate on popular factual entertainment and will be a welcome addition to the current literature.

Restyling Factual TV : Audiences and News, Documentary and Reality Genres

https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/17578/1/StagingData-FINAL_June_13.pdf

Staging data: theatre as a tool for analysis and knowledge transfer in health research.

This article discusses the reflexive and educational use of theater constructed from verbatim ethnographic account work undertaken in health settings. In particular, the potential of the ethnodrama process to provide emancipatory opportunities and insights for both health informants and health professionals is described in relation to two ethnographic performance projects involving persons with schizophrenia and persons who are alcohol dependent.

The Theater of Ethnography: The Reconstruction of Ethnography Into Theater With Emancipatory Potential:

Research-based theatre represents an innovative approach to disseminating the results of qualitative studies In this paper, we provide a rationale for the importance of research-based theatre and also review previous work that has been done in the area We then describe our experience in transforming research data into a dramatic production, Handle with Care? This production was based on two studies - one with women with metastatic breast cancer, and the other with medical oncologists treating breast cancer patients Results from ongoing assessment of the project are reported We discuss some of the factors related to the success of Handle with Care? and reflect on what has been learned about the process of developing dramatic pieces related to serious illness

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1046/j.1369-6513.2000.00071.x

The use of research-based theatre in a project related to metastatic breast cancer

Whose Lives Are They Anyway?: Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre

‘Verbatim Theatre’ has been the term utilized by Derek Paget during his extensive researches into that form of documentary drama which employs (largely or exclusively) tape-recorded material from the ‘real-life’ originals of the characters and events to which it gives dramatic shape. Though clearly indebted to sources such as the radio ballads of the 'fifties, and to the tradition which culminated in Joan Littlewood's Oh what a Lovely War, most of its practitioners acknowledge Peter Cheeseman's work at Stoke-on-Trent as the direct inspiration - in one case, as first received through the ‘Production Casebook’ on his work published in the first issue of the original Theatre Quarterly (1971). Quite simply, the form owes its present health and exciting potential to the flexibility and unobtrusiveness of the portable cassette recorder - ironically, a technological weapon against which are ranged other mass technological media such as broadcasting and the press, which tend to marginalize the concerns and emphases of popular oral history. Here, Derek Paget, who is currently completing his doctoral thesis on this subject, discusses with leading practitioners their ideas and working methods. Derek Paget teaches English and Drama at Worcester College of Higher Education, and has also had practical theatre experience ranging from community work to the West End, and from Joan Littlewood's final season at Stratford East to the King's Head, Islington.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0266464X00002463

‘Verbatim Theatre’: Oral History and Documentary Techniques

"True Stories" are an often controversial feature of modern cultural production which disrupt the fact/fiction boundary on stage acreen and radio. Always potentially transgressive, they have developed from a widespread "faith in facts" and an exploration of "documentary" modes of representation, which began around the time of the Russian Revolution. The author considers examples from past and contemporary practices in the UK and US, showing how the media confronts issues such as Vietnam, South Africa, the Falklands War and the nuclear holocaust. The cultural materialistic approach seeks to undermine the assumptions behind the social realism of film amd television, and to claim that alternatives to this disrupt the political project of the hegemony. The book may be of interest to academics and students of media, cultural and theatre studies.

True Stories: Documentary Drama on Radio, Screen and Stage

This article investigates the influence of a French communist writer on Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop. Joan Littlewood celebrated her eightieth birthday in 1994 – a year which also saw an ‘Arena’ programme about her life and the publication of her memoir Joan's Book. Critics and commentators are agreed that Littlewood was a charismatic director, her Theatre Workshop a ground-breaking company which in the late 1950s and early 1960s acquired an international reputation only matched later by the RSC. However, the company's distinctive style drew as much from a European as from a native English theatre tradition, and in this article Derek Paget examines the contribution to that style of a seminal work on design – Leon Moussinac's The New Movement in the Theatre of 1931. Although he was also important as a theorist of the emerging cinema, Moussinac's chief influence was as a transmitter of ideas in the theatre, and in the following article Derek Paget argues that his book offered the Manchester-based group insights into European radical left theatre unavailable to them in any other way. Moussinac thus helped Theatre Workshop to become a ‘Trojan horse’ for radical theatricality in the post-war years, while his design ideas were to sustain the Workshop throughout its period of major creativity and influence. Derek Paget worked in the early 1970s on Joan Littlewood's last productions at Stratford East, and he wrote on Oh What a Lovely War in NTQ 23 (1990). He is now Reader in Drama at Worcester College of Higher Education.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0266464X0000909X

Theatre Workshop, Moussinac, and the European Connection

This year marks no less than the twenty-seventh anniversary of the first performance, on 19 March 1963, of Oh What a Lovely War by the Theatre Workshop company at Stratford East – a production which has been alternatively mythologized as the apogee of the company's achievement under Joan Littlewood, and, by fewer but influential critics (notably the late Ewan MacColl), as its nadir. Even those who saw the show after its transfer to Wyndham's Theatre on 20 June 1963 may, as Derek Paget here illustrates, have seen a production which differed significantly from the original: while those who did not see either version (even if they can be persuaded that the subsequent film bears little relation to either) have to rely on the text as published by Methuen. But this, as Paget demonstrates, provides only one. albeit the most accessible, of the several sources of textual documentation: and in this article, derived from the author's doctoral thesis for Manchester University, he draws on the recollections of actors and other theatre workers as well as on printed, manuscript, and source materials, to illuminate the creation and, arguably, the subsequent dilution of this collectively created indictment of war.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0266464X00004553

Derek Paget

Papers

‘Verbatim Theatre’: Oral History and Documentary Techniques

True Stories: Documentary Drama on Radio, Screen and Stage

Theatre Workshop, Moussinac, and the European Connection

‘Oh What a Lovely War’: the Texts and Their Context

No other way to tell it