The era of the shock doc

by Aaron Jolly

Documentaries have been a source of education for many years, but over the noughties a new kind of documentary has emerged with the tendency to shock and appall the audience.

Channel 4 is one of the broadcasters profiteering from this kind of programme via their Body Shock series that has documented the morbidly obese, cannibalism and assorted bodily mutations.

The televised autopsies performed by Dr Gunther Von Hagens on both humans and animals, which spawned an exhibition of real carcasses, have caused shock and outrage among the public.

However, we like to see things that are not normal and seemingly even more so in recent years. People are getting used to seeing shocking and unusual things in the media and therefore we appear to have become more desensitised.

The broadcasters easily defend this in the name of audience demand, however Justine Kershaw of Five believes that Channel 4 has sometimes: “sullied the genre” with its Bodyshock stance – which has included the likes of The Curse Of The Mermaid Baby and The Boy Who Gave Birth To Twins.

"Bodyshock has a much clearer propensity to shock. Channel 4 can get away with it because it has this wonderful get-out clause of having a remit to shock, but it does drag everything down with it," she says.

This is disputed by managing director of Redback Films, Viv McGrath, who is responsible for the two programmes in question.

She says: "Yes, our films have got a really shocking title and story. But they are very well made, very traditional, sensitive documentaries. They provoke feelings of 'thank God it's not me' but also 'they tell me something about myself because it's another human being'."

This feeling is also backed up by sociologists, who lend an explanation to this through the theory of deviance – that seeing abnormal things make us feel more normal and generally better about ourselves.

Wherever the shockumentary trend is going, one thing is for certain– we can expect to see more controverial programming during the next decade.