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There’s a major fuss going on in the UK with the BBC at the moment – they’ve had a couple of situations that have ended in a very damaging attack on their integrity.

The latest is a documentary made by a company called RDF Media. As far as I understand this from my distant perspective, in a nutshell, someone working for RDF thought the documentary was getting a bit dull, so they re-edited the footage to make it seem as though the Queen (yes, that Queen, HRH Elizabeth II herself) was storming out of an interview.

The problem is the footage they used to do this was actually footage of her arriving for the interview, so the final edit was, by anyone’s book, misleading.

There’s been a huge outcry in the papers and the industry over this, and both the BBC and ITV (the two mass market broadcasters in the UK) have said they will not be commissioning anything from RDF in the indefinite future.

As a result, the RDF share price has fallen substantially in the last few days:

There is a counter attack of course. It comes from the more sophisticated industry commentators and insiders, and pours scorn over this “knee-jerk” reaction by saying that anyone who ever imagined a documentary was ever impartial, or that ever could be such a thing as an impartial editorial position in any documentary, is simple minded, or deluded.

That’s a huge argument, and I’m not going there in this blog. But it seems clear to me that if what we are reading about is actually true, then the program makers clearly “mislabelled” footage.

I think there is a big difference between this and an authorial interpretation of events made in good faith – especially when the suspicion has to be that this could have been done in order to spice up an otherwise flagging narrative.

I’m not privy to any of the facts on this, so it’s all just supposition on my case, but the REAL point I want to make is that we in the world of dramatic fiction might think of ourselves being immune to such problems. We might think that when we make everything up then we can say what we like (so long as we avoid libel) and who cares what the reality is?

Actually, in the same way now as you haven’t been able to look at a documentary for years without wondering how exactly you are being manipulated by careful choices of shots and angles, I think that drama that is not truthful is by far the weaker.

In fact, I think a very useful definition of melodrama would have to include the idea of drama in which the emotions do not feel “truthful”.

In my Screenwriting Goldmine eBook I bang on about the need for research at great length before you start writing. This is because I genuinely think that scripts that are based on reality, whether it’s the reality of the technical details of the world you are writing about, or the reality and ‘truth’ of the emotional changes you are ringing, are way stronger, and much more satisfying.

I would go so far as to say that Truth in a screenplay is one of the most important things.

No-one’s going to lower your share price if you neglect the Truth you have about the world of your story – the odds are they just won’t enjoy it very much.