Abstract

This article considers recent UK history programming as a lens through which to contemplate the extent to which TV offers the potential for an audience to reflect on their personal past and present identity: ethnic, religious, regional or familial, in a wider public context, whilst also shaping aspects of personal and familial memory to be presented on screen as public memory. Although, as Bill Nichols (156) asserted in the early 1990s, subjectivity and identification are less frequently explored in documentaries than in fiction, I will also consider the extent to which some recent factual programmes on British television have succeeded in doing so, and also viewers’ responses to them.