Confessions to a new public: Video Nation Shorts

Television made about `ordinary people' and featuring them speaking directly to the camera about their experiences has come to be a staple of popular broadcast television in the UK and elsewhere. This article focuses on one British series, Video Nation, produced between 1995 and 2000, which attempted to assemble a picture of the nation through the voices of such ordinary people. Where many more recent uses of `first person media' have situated themselves explicitly as entertainment television, the Video Nation project was firmly situated within public broadcasting and a tradition of access television. The makers set out to extend the 1930s Mass Observation project. Video Nation, however, attends not so much to the `public' world of graffiti or cinema-queue discussions of politicians as to personal narratives of domestic life. This article will discuss the significance of this shift in emphasis from the 1930s to the 1990s, a shift towards mapping the nation through practices of the self. The article will ask whether confessional style marks a renegotiation of the way we imagine public spaces.