The great documentary heist

Ruth Zanker - 1 August 1989

Press, 19 October 1988

Sometimes a programme really makes one think about how television defines what is important for us to know about.

Take “U.F.O. Cover Up.” This is a_ classic example of no-one ever going broke by underestimating the intelligence of a TV audience on a Saturday night.

Seligman may not give a damn about U.F.O.s but it’s clear he cares a lot about the audience that does. “U.F.O. Cover Up” is typical Seligman “schlockumentary.” Remember his Al Capone caper? This kind of entertainment-through-investigation is television’s equivalent of the tabloid press, and it’s my guess that we’ll be seeing a lot more of its type hot off the satellites as local production budgets tighten. It’s worth looking closely at this programme for lots of reasons. Sure, there’s nothing wrong with cheap entertainment, but this programme entertains in an insidious way.

Marshall McLuhan would be delighted at how “U.F.O. Cover Up” illustrates his theory that the way television tells stories ends up being more important than the stories themselves.

Like the tabloid press, this programme presented a very soft piece of speculative story-telling in the tions of a joint Soviet/United States U.F.O. expedition to Siberia conventions of hard-hitting documentary. It tried to steal documentary’s thunder.

All too easily, the phantasmagoria of settings and electronic wizardry became the story. We had Mike Farrell, the silver-haired, senatorial — link-person. Everything about him reeked of authority. Over and over again we: were reminded that he was “reporting from the seat of our(!) government, Washington D.C.” We were given unsolicited comments on the importance of U.F.O.s to world peace by Reagan and Carter.

Then we had expert witnesses sitting on sets that “Dr Who” set-designers would kill for. “This is not tatty, fly-by-night television at all,” it signalled.

Fortunately the interviewees weren’t up to acting their parts. The horror of the auto-cue showed, their eyes flickered from right to left, their smiles set in rigor as they told their ”true-life” stories. Bless them. But technology quickly neutralised that impression and took over. completely in the scrambled “android-speak” messages from “Condor,” the American military informant. It was a chilling steal from the news-format of C.BS., N.B.C. and TVNZ.

So the great documentary heist continued in the reports from Ezekiel to Florida of sightings, kidnappings and wreckage stored in nitrogen. We dipped into the convention of cutting to ‘“down-home” folks in Breeze Florida who stood convinced that they’d seen them. Testimony, was in the air.

And finally we had the U.F.O. summit with Sergei in Moscow. His suggestion came as a bit of a shock. It broke all the rules of the genre.

Especially after all the delicious shots from B-grade fifties paranoia movies where U.F.O.s and reds under the bed are interchangeable. Were we to weep for joy at uniting against the heavens?

When it was boiled down nothing new was said. It had all appeared in one form or another in those tedious snippets that Karen Sims and Neil Billington take from satellite to lighten the diet of wars and pestilence on “World Watch.”

“V” on Sunday night was back to good old-fashioned sci-fi. The friendly aliens aren’t what they seem to be, and there, looming reassuringly over the White House, was the old paranoia shot of spaceships.

Meanwhile, tucked away inaccessibly in the egghead slot was some of the best television of the whole week-end:

It’s the first in a series on one of the most amazing stories of the last millennium, the growth of the first global language, English. Not high on your entertainment value? Try “The Story of English” and see. And remember that the first words aliens are likely to encounter when entering our galaxy are not an official U.N. welcome but, bouncing from satellite to dish, “Coca Cola hits the spot.”