GIGO

"Real" Facts

I recently read a video review of Forgotten Silver, the fake documentary that Peter Jackson made about a pioneering film-maker. The reviewer dubbed the film as "pointless", apparently because it wasn't about a real subject. At least he didn't have the aggrieved tones that sounded up and down the nation from worthies outraged that they could be taken for a ride by the cleverly disguised spoof when it first aired.

Yet we regularly see far less entertaining fare which claims to present Real Facts -- with as much "real" substance as Jackson's piece but with far less style -- and there's nary a whisper of condemnation. Perhaps it's because we now lump National Geographic specials in with productions which claim that the Tower of Babel was a mammoth crystal radio set.

We have a capacity for accepting -- though one could hope it is simply ignoring -- those pseudo-documentaries which use the cloak of science to hide the nakedness of evidence. It's not hard to start nodding in agreement when the speculation starts off as reasonable and keep on nodding as it progresses through unlikely and on into straight-out crazy.

I was intrigued by the discussion Forgotten Silver engendered when it first showed, with people speculating as to how likely the claims were. Jackson put in enough hints to make then thinking members of his audience start to wonder. Perhaps the outrage comes in having one's uncritical nose well and truly rubbed in it, though chagrin would have been more appropriate.

A similar spoof documentary, Alternative Three, showed too many years ago for me to recall the details, but I do remember my classmates tackling me about the reality of the US space programme after its showing. I pointed out that the shots allegedly from Mars had the wrong colour sky -- a technical quibble that was immediately dismissed. The clincher in identifying the thing as a fake was that one of the alleged astronauts had played Elsie Tanner's American husband in Coronation St some years earlier. (Saved by the soaps!)

I think that Forgotten Silver, in reminding us that we shouldn't necessarily believe everything that is presented as fact, was rather more pointed than pointless.

Vicki Hyde is the editor of New Zealand Science Monthly.