One of the intriguing things about the BBC’s recently broadcast docudrama Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution is that in order to balance the liberal perspective they invited Slavoj Zizek on as an apologist for Robespierre. It’s not often you find calls for revolution on mainstream TV programming (well OK it is on BBC2 not BBC1 but in a high profile time slot). I wasn’t convinced in the end by Slavoj’s “no omelette without eggs” argument but I was struck that the BBC seemed incapable of leaving the audience in any doubt that the revolutionary terror was a Bad Thing. Why provide the appearance of balance then have a voiceover ending which leaves the viewer with the ‘author’s message’ that the French revolutionary terror was the precursor to bloodthirsty dictators like Pol Pot and Stalin? I suppose the BBC’s explanatory blurb said it all:

during the 365 days that Robespierre sat on the Committee of Public Safety, the French Republic descended into a bloodbath … [this documentary] looks at how Robespierre’s revolutionary idealism so quickly became an excuse for tyranny.

Still the programme is well worth watching if only for the chilling reconstructions of the committee’s own deliberations, based on contemporary sources.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 12th, 2009 at 2:40 pm and is filed under Content Regulation, Media Regulation, Politics, mass media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.