Opinion For the Longer Form

The first,on the BBC,was a documentary from the much-loved fantasy author Terry Pratchett. Pratchett followed people with dreadful,terminal diseases who were travelling to Switzerland,to ask a physician to help them to die. (Assisted suicide is legal there,but not in Britain.) One of them,Peter Smedley,a man with degenerative motor neuron disease,told Pratchett as he sat surrounded by his family,a few short minutes away from taking the drugs that would kill him: “Strange how time has different values at different occasions.” The documentary was given an added poignancy by the fact that Pratchett himself,a warm and compelling figure,has had Alzheimer’s for years,and has said he wants to die on his own lawn,with a brandy in his hand — “and,with the music of Thomas Tallis playing on my iPod,I would shake hands with Death.”

You wouldn’t think the same way about the choice of physician-assisted suicide after that. And was it news? Indeed; it,after all,showed people dying,and it comes as the UK’s upper house,for the third time,blocked a bill making assisted-death legal. In fact,several peers wrote an angry letter to the BBC accusing it of subverting parliament’s will by showing the documentary. Ah,if only parliamentary democracy was subverted with such grace and skill here.

Then there was the even bigger news: the Channel 4 documentary on accusations of war crimes by Sri Lanka’s army in the final stages of the war against the LTTE. Channel 4 spent years authenticating the footage,some of which — in particular,of soldiers shooting unarmed prisoners and of field hospitals being targeted — was harrowing. The day after it was shown,Cameron was asked questions in parliament about how he would pressure Colombo to investigate war crimes.

Both these documentaries made a point; both created a stir; both caused the political class to respond. Both used TV’s uniqueness differently: the BBC by catching,sensitively and unobtrusively,the dignity with which Smedley approached his death and his wife dealt with it in the seconds after it happened; and Channel 4 by shocking us visually into wakefulness about atrocities committed elsewhere,to other people.

India’s news channels have never quite worked out the news-documentary format. NDTV has,in the past,shown some decent documentaries made by others: Rafeeq Elias’s The Legend of Fat Mama,for example,on Calcutta’s Chinatown,presents itself as a quest for a half-remembered,perfect cup of noodles as it explored the forgotten,and frequently discomforting,history of the Indian Chinese community. I also remember,amusedly,Cowboys in India,a self-parody from an expat journalist confused by slick Vedanta PR and know-it-all fixers on a trip to Orissa. Those were both short pieces,but they came in at an angle to the day’s headlines — and helped us place those headlines in a certain useful context.

I haven’t seen anything in-house that approaches the UK news-documentaries. Nor do I see the space for such. NDTV’s India Matters,for example,has become a place for news stories,too long for a bulletin,to be hurriedly stretched into a 20-minute slot. Meanwhile documentaries become ever cheaper to make; as recent documentary festivals in Delhi have shown,more and more are made in India today that are excellent,persuasive and analytical — and go unsold,unwatched,unappreciated.

News television needs to realise that there is life beyond screechy,eight-person discussion shows making the same points night after night. There is a place for them too — they’re entertaining,for one — but that isn’t how TV tells stories best. Longer-form news has its place,beyond ten-minute soliloquies from anchors. The channel that genuinely invests time and effort in documentaries,I predict,is the channel that people will trust most.