30-07-2013, 08:36 PM
Jan Klimkowski Wrote:Albert - as a journalist I can write copy for a broadsheet or a tabloid.
As a filmmaker, I've directed documentaries for the mass audience of BBC1 and the tiny rarefied audience of BBC4, with some garbage NatGeo and mendacious Discovery in between.
I worked on many episodes of the world's most intellectual and highbrow science documentary programme, BBC2's Horizon. There were some rules which were set in stone, passed down from the mythical "Golden Age of Television":
1) in a fifty-minute documentary, even an intellectual audience can only assimilate three new facts;
2) whenever a new fact is introduced, it should be subject to the Rule of Three Repeats, eg the narrator articulates the new information, a contributor repeats it in their own words, the narrator underlines the point.
There are many who still believe Greer shot JFK, a nonsense promulgated and cast out here at DPF.
Jan, your point about the ability to assimilate new ideas is well taken. My complaint, however, is leveled more at a presumption concerning the recipient's ability to evaluate what she hears or reads. Perhaps the signature on Lauren's message says it all.