It Only Happened if it Was on TV...

It seems that nowadays nobody believes anything until they've seen it on TV.  Not as a news item, that is, but seen it dramatised with familiar actors playing all of the main participants.  Take the Post Office scandal, for instance, when all those sub-postmasters were wrongly accused of stealing from the Post Office - some even going to jail - due to a fault with an IT system.  That story ran for years in the news media, with numerous campaigns to try and get justice for the wrongly accused, but nothing happened and the public just seemed to give a collective shrug of resignation.  But as soon as was turned into a TV drama, it was a different story, with the public clamouring for justice.  It seems that seeing Toby Jones playing a victim and chief campaigner being harassed by the Post Office was more evocative than reading about it happening to the real person that he was playing.  That's the key: the participants in news stories are just ordinary people, unknown to the general public who just can't identify or empathise with them.  But replace them in a drama about the story with recognisable TV faces the public knows and loves, then they become outraged at the injustice.  Hence, we now have a Channel Four drama about the water companies dumping shit in our rivers featuring the likes of Jason Watkins and people are suddenly talking about the issue.  Although you'd think that shitting in the rivers was enough an issue in itself to mobilise the public.  

But it isn't just members of the public who now have to be portrayed in a TV drama by well known actors in order to get people engaged with their stories.  Right now, we're being promised a drama about the downfall of newsreader Huw Edwards, with Edwards played by Martin Clunes.  Bearing in mind that this story played out for real, with huge headlines, quite recently, you'd have thought that people really wouldn't need to see it played out as a drama with the star of Men Behaving Badly.  What detail or insight could such a pantomime possibly highlight that we hadn't already been exposed to for real?  But, of course, the real thing didn't count as it had Huw Edwards appearing as himself and he couldn't possibly play himself as well as Martin Clunes could.  So, I guess that people won't really appreciate just how monstrous the Trump regime is, despite living through it (twice, in fact - they had one dose, kicked him out, then re-elected him, having apparently suffered mass amnesia), until they see the TV drama about it a few years down the line, with a padded up Robert De Niro as Trump, Al Pacino as Bernie Sanders and Anthony Hopkins as Joe Biden.  Of course, if they had made it directly after his first term, then the people of the US would of said 'Wow! That guy's a dangerous psycho, unfit to hold office, Thank God all his secret depravities have been exposed over six hour long episodes!' and his second term would never have happened.  Such is the power of TV.