Documentary alive and well in 2003

Factual entertainment and reality programmes may have taken much of the limelight, but the traditional Documentary was alive and well on terrestrial television in 2003, according to research carried out by David Graham Associates (DGA).
Over 680 hours of first-run UK-produced documentary programming were shown on the terrestrial channels, with 56% of these hours coming from independent producers.
In-house BBC productions accounted for just over 40% of documentary viewing on terrestrial channels in 2003. Aside from Granada (7%) no other company accounted for more than 5% of terrestrial viewing in the genre.
Channel 4 showed more hours of documentary programming than any other channel (234 hours), while the BBC showed 307 hours of first-run Documentary programming on BBC1 and BBC2.
In terms of individual top-rating documentaries, ‘Pompeii: The Last Day’, performed best for BBC1 with 10m viewers (a 55.3% share). The programme used factual characters, based on historical and forensic evidence unearthed in Pompeii and Herculaneum, to bring to life one of the most notorious disasters in history.
For ITV, the most successful documentary was ‘Spoilt Rotten’, a programme that detailed the over-indulged lives of the offspring of wealthy parents, which drew 8m viewers (a 33.3% share).
The highest-rating independent documentary of 2003 was Impossible Pictures’ ‘Sea Monsters’, a look at prehistoric life in the ocean, which attracted 7.6m viewers to BBC1. Mentorn’s ‘The Boy Who Gave Birth To His Twin’ attracted 5.4m viewers on Channel 4, giving the channel its third-highest audience of the year.
Natural History remained a favourite subject for documentary makers and accounted for over 10% of hours, thanks largely to the BBC. History was popular and, in a year of conflict, War and Military subjects were prominent — over 50 hours were dedicated to the subject in 2003 (most of them on Channel 4 and Five), ranging from World War I (3BM’s ‘World War I In Colour’ for Five) to Iraq (Flashback’s ‘Bravo Two Zero: The True Story’).
(GB)