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THIS IS NOT US: Performance, Relationships and Shame in Documentary Filmmaking

Daisy Asquith

PhD CREATIVE & CRITICAL PRACTICE

University of Sussex, June 2018

WORD COUNT: 35.842

PRACTICE ONLINE: https://daisy-asquith-xdrf.squarespace.com/flms/ 2

Summary

This thesis investigates performance, identity, representation and shame in documentary flmmaking. Identities that are performed and mediated through a relationship between flmmaker and participant are examined with detailed reference to two decades of my own practice. A refexive, feminist approach engages my own flms - and the relationships that produced them - in analysis of the ethical potholes and emotional challenges in representing others on TV. The trigger for this research was the furiously angry reaction of the One Direction fandom to my representation of them in Crazy About One Direction (Channel 4, 2013). This offered an opportunity to investigate the potential for shame in documentary; a loud and clear case study of flmed participants using social media to contest their image on screen.

In the space between documentary confession and the reception of a story by the audience, a dangerous moment comes, in which shame can be received, perceived, projected, internalised or imagined. The point of this research is to offer to existing documentary theory a practitioner’s understanding of the processes which produce shame and to establish for documentary flmmakers some practical ways to resist and prepare against the rupture in identity that representation can cause those they flm. Engaging both theory and practice in pursuit of the same research questions, I make a self-refexive investigation into the ethics, affect and impact of representing others, employing the mediums and methods of fans to answer their complaints.

All the flms, artwork, documentation of the installation, sources, written work, appendices and past documentaries referred to in this thesis can be best experienced online at https://daisy-asquith-xdrf.squarespace.com, the website hosting this PhD, but are also provided on the accompanying USB drive. 3

Acknowledgements

Huge thanks and admiration are due to all the participants of my past documentaries for their patience, honesty and good humour on the subject of my flming them. I am particularly grateful to those that supported this project with new interviews;

Kimberley, Josephine, Marshal, Vegas, Lola, Zigi, Johnny, Mary and Tommy. I am proud to call them my friends and family. I also want to thank my supervisors at

Sussex University for their inspiration and reassurance: Thomas Austin and Adrian

Goycoolea. She won’t like it, as it’s so tiring being so inspiring, but I can’t help it if she is the best: thank you for giving me so many ideas Professor Lucy Robinson… I was very lucky to have you as my unofficial supervisor. The brilliant friends that have kept me afoat and helped me in all kinds of clever, creative, fnancial and other loving ways are Mike Nicholls, Cathy Bergin, Jason Porter, Alice Nutter, Miriam Stahl, Tora

Colwill, Roger Johnson, Eilis Nic An Ri, Doireann de Buitlear and Timothy Thornton.

Lily Asquith has consistently told me I could do it: without her I wouldn’t have. Thank you to my daughter Lola, my son Lenny, my mum Pat and my babyfather Dunstan for your patience and love, even though this made us broke. Thank you One Direction fans, for being who you are, and regardless of the complex reasons, circumstances and context investigated by this thesis, I’m sorry for upsetting you. 4

Contents

Introduction………………………………………………………………………….6

Methodology & Literature Review………………………………………………… 13

1 This is Not Us: Contested Representation in the One Direction Fandom……….. 21 - Seeing Fans 23 - Filming Fans 27 - Shaming Fans 33

2 This is the Real Me: Performance, Reality and Reception……………………….. 41 - Holocaust Survivors and the Unperformed 41 - Performing Gay Parenting 48 - Playing the Self 52

3 This is Me Now: Identity, Refection and Longitudinal Relationships……………55 - Kimberley: Between You and Me 55 - Josephine: Give Me a Voice 62 - I’ll Be Your Mirror 64

4 This is Me Unmediated: Representing the Self……………………………………71 - Youtube 72 - Facebook 75 - Twitter 80 - Found Footage 82

5 Refexive Practice…………………………………………………………………..87 - This is Not Us 87 - This is the Real Me 89 - ACCA installation 102 - Linear Film 106 - Online Space 110

Conclusion………………………………………………………………………….. 112

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………124

Appendices…………………………………………………………………………..133

1 Transcript of Youtube videos made by One Direction fans……………………………………………133 2 Transcript of interviews with Past Documentary Participants……………………………………….. 179 3 Press clippings for Crazy About One Direction………………………………………………………. 206 4 LovinLarry17 suicide saga…………………………………………………………………………….211 5 Sample of #ThisisNotUs Tweets……………………………………………………………………….214 6 This Is Not Us ACCA installation guide…………………………………………………………………215 7 This is Not Us online……………………………………………………………………………………217 5

Illustrations fg.1 example of angry tweet 6 fg.2 example of Larry fan art 9 fg.3 1D3D: This Is Us movie poster 26 fg.4 Twitter response during broadcast, data visualisation by Second Sync 34 fg.5 example #ThisisNotUs tweet from Aug 13 2013 35 fg.6 example of Larry fan art 37 fg.7 example of press pathologisation of fan hysteria 39 fg.8 Freddie Knoller, still from documentary 43 fg.9 Gena Turgel, still from documentary 43 fg.10 Zigi Shipper, still from documentary 44 fg. 11 Barrie Drewitt-Barlow, still from the documentary 50 fg. 12 Kimberley, still from the documentary 56 fg.13 Josephine, still from the documentary 63 fg.14 Kimberley, Facebook Live 2018 75 fg.15 Josephine, Facebook Live 2018 76 fg.16 Barrie, Facebook Live 2017 76 fg.17 Twitter Worldwide Trends 15 Aug 2013 80 fg.18 Graph showing spike in followers of @daisyasquith by TwitterCounter 81 fg.19 Tweet claiming Larry is real 82 fg.20 ‘Casey’ contests the documentary on her Youtube channel, August 2013 84 fg.21 Kimberley in 2000 (L) and 2017 (R) 91 fg.22 Marshal in 2005 (L) and 2017 (R) 92 fg.23 Josephine in 2006 (L) and 2017 (R) 94 fg.24 Johnny & Mary in 2014 (L) and 2018 (R) 95 fg.25 Vegas & Lola in 2013 (L) and 2018 (R) 97 fg.26 Tommy in 2008 (L) and 2018 (R) 99 fg.27 Installation at Attenborough Centre for Creative Arts, 21 April 2018 102 fg.28 This is Not Us grid, installation at ACCA, 21 April 2018 103 fg.29 This is Not Us edit timeline in Premiere Pro 103 fg.30 Mike Nicholls and Tommy Tickle in the bedroom of a fan, ACCA April 2018 104 fg.31 Twitter loop at ACCA 105 fg.32 From comments book at installation 106 fg.33 Screen shot of This is Not Us website 110 fg.34 Meta representation: Vegas and Lola in front of This is the Real Me 118 6

Introduction

On 13th August 2013 a disturbing hashtag began to trend worldwide on

Twitter. #RIPLarryShippers appeared to be reporting and mourning the tragic deaths of 42 Larry shippers—the One Direction fans that celebrate, fantasise, and sometimes believe in the idea that Harry Styles and his bandmate Louis Tomlinson are in a secret gay relationship. Thousands of fans on Twitter were claiming that the shippers had killed themselves as a direct result of the inclusion of their homoerotic Larry fan art1 in a documentary I had made for Channel 4, Crazy About One Direction. Although the program was only officially available on British television, the tech-savvy fandom had copied and shared it globally overnight with astonishing speed. The fandom were furious that I had included Larry in my representation of them, and sent hundreds of death and bomb threats to my Twitter account.

fg.1 example of angry tweet

#RIPLarryShippers trended worldwide for 48 hours. The fear that I felt, particularly before it became clear that the suicides were a hoax, has inspired this PhD in Creative and Critical Practice. Why were the One Direction fans so angry and upset with me? I genuinely admired them and enjoyed their enthusiasm, savviness and humour. What was it about the way that I represented them that caused this tsunami of shame and somehow ruptured their collective identity? This PhD represents my investigation of that question, engaging with the response from fans, as well as a number of other people I have flmed in the past, to try and analyse the way that performance,

1 for an example see http://rockitrocket.tumblr.com/tagged/larryfanart1 7 identity, representation and reception interact, sometimes producing shame.

Identities that are performed and mediated through a relationship between flmmaker and participant are examined with detailed reference to two decades of my own practice. A refexive, feminist approach engages my own flms - and the relationships that produced them - in analysis of the ethical potholes and emotional challenges in representing others on TV. In the space between documentary confession and the reception of a story by the audience, a dangerous moment comes, in which shame can be received, perceived, projected, internalised or imagined. The point of this research is to offer to existing documentary theory a practitioner’s understanding of the processes which produce shame and to establish for documentary flmmakers some practical ways to resist and prepare against the rupture in identity that representation can cause those they flm.

I defne performance as the way a person presents themselves to the documentary camera. This is related partly to the person they wish to be, partly to the person they are, and partly to the person they think others expect to see. So a documentary performance is made up of a complex mix of identities and projections. The representation of that performance adds another layer of complexity, engaging the subjective perspective of the flmmaker, as well as the infuence of their funders who are likewise infuenced by the expectations of their perceived audience. Stuart Hall shows us that “meaning is a slippery customer… (and) does not survive representation intact.”2 In the slippage of meaning and representation there is a strong risk of shame being felt or imposed. Shame is not to be confused or confated with ‘guilt’ as it is in many languages. Shame always happens in the presence and awareness of others.3 It is only possible when a person asks “What do they think of me?” It is a self-conscious emotion that shifts with the movement of public opinion.

2 Hall Representation: Cultural Practice and Signifying Practices 2013: 9

3 see Stearns A Brief History of Shame 2017 8

Thus, television documentary is a perfect storm in which shame can occur. The flmed person risks sharing their intimate life with a characteristically judgemental public audience, in the case of my documentary work, on the BBC and Channel 4 between

1998 and 2018. The trigger for this research was the One Direction fandom’s furious response to my representation of them, but the potential for shame has been a recurring theme in my 20 years in documentary, and I experienced it myself when I made a flm about my own mother’s secret adoption from rural Catholic Ireland.4

Certain subjects have more potential for shame projection than others, depending on the society the documentary representation is broadcast. In Ireland, adoption, abortion and homosexuality are key areas for prejudice and shame. In the UK currently, being on benefts, having plastic surgery, being obese are the most shamed.5 One Directions fans are widely derided and characterised as stupid and hysterical, in a patronising, mysogynist and generalised way. This PhD will look at the way audiences help create the meanings made by documentary on television.

In Chapter One, This is Not Us, I conduct a refexive post-mortem on the fandom crisis of my own causing. While my extensive research at the time of broadcast quickly established that the Larry shipper suicides were in fact just a rumour, the fans reasons for starting the rumour are important. I have happily extended my immersion in the creative, subversive and globally networked fandom of One Direction to uncover the queer erotic meanings in their Larry fan art and investigate the subcultural codes that dictate who can enjoy it and share it. I look at fan performances, collective identity, the relationships between fans and myself as flmmaker and how shame is seeded and reinforced. It is important to look at the wider media context in which my documentary was made. The hierarchies, taste policing and internalised shame

4 see After the Dance (re-titled My Mother the Secret Baby by the BBC), BBC4, 2015

5 see Stearns A Brief History of Shame 2017 for more detail 9 within the fandom6 collide awkwardly with the projected shame and derision that is applied from outside. I will argue that in moving Larry from Tumblr to television my flm may have decontextualised it, but the fears and fury of fans result from their understanding of the total unacceptability of teenage female desire and to some extent the female gaze7 in patriarchal society. Analysis of the fan response to Crazy

About One Direction must be situated and understood within this climate of shame.

fg.2 example of Larry fan art

In Chapter Two I investigate further the concept of performance in documentary, comparing the public and private personas of the people I have flmed. I focus on two of the subjects of my past documentaries: Holocaust survivors and gay fathers. I look at the way stories change in our memories and interact with what our audiences need to hear. Does the truth, or the ‘true self’, become irrelevant when the purpose is to warn the public of the extreme cruelty possible in human behaviour for example?

Or to attempt to alter public opinion on the rights of homosexuals to have families?

How do audiences impact upon the stories they receive by privileging and

6 see Larsen & Zubernis 2012

7 see Mulvey "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". Screen. 16. and its now popular flip side 10 welcoming the heroic, cathartic and heartwarming versions of history over the disturbing, meaningless or shameful? And how willing are documentary participants to alter their performances in light of audience expectations?

In Chapter Three I look at the way longitudinal documentary interacts and impacts upon the identity of the flmed participant by investigating the long term relationships I have had with documentary participants. Kimberley, who I frst met when she was only 14, has allowed me to flm her life over a period of 20 years and the resulting flms have become a part of who she is and how she sees herself, an infuential factor in her ever-evolving sense of identity. Josephine allowed me to start flming her 13 years ago when she and her children were newly arrived refugees to the UK from Zimbabwe. I flmed their experiences of moving to Britain for fve consecutive years for the Channel 4 series My New Home, and Josephine and I later made a flm about comparative poverty together for the BBC’s Why Poverty? season.

Longitudinal documentary projects have a particular set of ethical considerations and challenges and the relationship required is ever-shifting and fexible but must also be robust. I look closely at these relationships and at the way flming alters what is flmed, not only in the moment, but over long periods of time.

In Chapter Four I engage with the way people choose to represent themselves in the

21st century, on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and Youtube. Many of the flmed participants of my past documentaries now choose to self-flm and publish their lives to audiences of varying sizes. I unpick the differences between the selves they choose to share with the world and the selves they shared with my camera. I look at the Facebook Live videos of Kimberley (This is Me 2000) and Josephine (My New Home

2011) and the way that these unmediated versions of the self are performed. The self- 11 representation of One Direction fans on Youtube, both before Crazy About One

Direction, and in response to it, and their collective use of voice on Twitter can then be compared to these examples and analysed in the context of the current mass popularity of self-documenting.

Chapter Five looks at the process and results of my own refexive and creative practice research. Engaging with the Youtube response of One Direction fans, transcribing, analysing, sharing, editing and re-sharing them results in a rich understanding of both their feelings about my documentary and their sense of collective identity. It also uncovers a complex power struggle over that identity, between the fans, the documentary maker and the audience. Juxtaposing the videos in an installation, as well as online space, with interviews with other participants of my documentaries, Kimberley (This is Me 2000), Marshal and Josephine (My New

Home 2011), my own relatives Johnny and Mary (After the Dance 2015), Tommy Tickle

(Clowns 2008) and Vegas, one of the original fans flmed for Crazy About One

Direction, creates an analysis of the relationship between flmer and flmed, the sense of performance that participants have and the way being flmed has impacted upon their identities.

The titles of my chapters, and subtitles, refect the privileging of the relationship in my creative practice. The “Us”, “Me”, “We”, You”, “I”, “Them” and “They” are recurring terms and the spaces in-between them feature heavily as the overarching theme of this research. This is Not Us can refer to the collision between the way we see ourselves and the way they see us, as well as challenging the power structures of them and us, that risk a damaging othering of flmed participants in documentary. The title of chapter three, This is Me, was also the title of one of the frst documentaries I made in

1999-2000. It was inspired by the words of the flm’s protagonist Kimberley, for whom 12

“this is me…” followed by an impression of what she had said to someone else previously, was a much-used fgure of her daily speech. The use of these three words allowed her to own the storytelling; rather than just being recorded by me, she was representing herself. I have taken this idea and applied it to all my chapter headings, using them to highlight and think about the ways in which flmed participants perform the self. The real me as opposed to the me that others see, the me then as opposed to the me now, the me I am as opposed to the me I want to be.

Taking as my main title the very words of the One Direction fans themselves, used powerfully to oppose my representation of them is purposefully designed to signify a relinquishing of a little of that power. The fact that they created this hashtag

#ThisIsNotUs specifcally to refer to One Direction’s own documentary, titled

1D3D:This is Us8, is neatly symbolic. Morgan Spurlock would have been in search of a title that promised the very intimacy that neither he nor the fans could ever have with the band. Whether the fans appreciated the irony of the comparison between a scripted and heavily mediated performance of fve slickly constructed pop star personas, who trade on being themselves, and the far more courageous, honest and

“real” performances of fan love that they were protesting against, doesn’t really matter. I have used their words to trigger an investigation into what performance, relationships and shame in documentary are made of, and how they impact upon each other. This thesis can be found online, alongside many of the sources I have collected, curated and represented, as well as the creative practical work and documentation of the gallery installation, at https://daisy-asquith- xdrf.squarespace.com and it is best experienced as a whole in that space.

8 Morgan Spurlock’s feature documentary 2013 13 Methodology & Literature Review

Research as creative and critical practice is still being theorised by practitioner- theorists and my understanding of the modes and methods it encompasses and allows has grown with each year of this PhD. This thesis engages three forms of research, which do not exist separately but overlap and interact:

1. Theoretical research into the ethics, aesthetics, tropes and relationships in

documentary flmmaking

2. Refexive textual research that interrogates the researcher’s own practice

3. Creative practice research which both makes, and interrogates the making of,

documentary flm

Renov has called documentary a “discourse of jouissance” 9, rather than sobriety, he sees playfulness, fun, excitement, joy, in the experience of making a documentary, both for flmer and flmed. Comolli describes the process of flming as “a precious and fragile gift for all involved: the flmmakers end up with a flm, but the flmed ones are also gifted because the process of flming involves a break, the ordinary becomes extraordinary.”10 Piotrowski makes use of a little-known essay by Comilli, in which he describes the trust between flmer and flmed: “A ‘two of us’ is created, an ensemble that’s not stated as such. If we come to use the word ‘contract’, it is understood as a

‘moral contract’ that should and does remain implicit, tacit, unspoken ... You can, if you like call it ‘confdence’, but I prefer to locate it under the aegis of desire. Desire of one for the other, desire of the other in each.”11 It is possible that the damage done to

9 Renov 2004:23

10 Comollie in Piotrowska 2014:71

11 Comolli, Jean-Louis1999:45 14 those flmed is done when flming stops, when the attention is withdrawn (if it is withdrawn) and life returns to banal ordinariness. Certainly this is a problem when flming continues for up to a year in the flmed persons’ life. Rosenthal says the single most important question is “how the flmmaker should treat people in flms so as to avoid exploiting them and causing them unnecessary suffering.”12 Positive documentary experiences occur when the flmed person is treated as a collaborator rather than a resource, and fully informed of the intentions of the flmmaker and the ambitions of the flm. In television, the need for what is rather disturbingly called

“aftercare” is acknowledged, but in more than 20 documentaries I made for British television, no-one ever funded me to do it. Any meaningful responsibility assumed by documentary flmmakers is overwhelmingly a personal undertaking.

My flming methodology has barely changed in twenty years practice and maybe that is because it was instinctive to start with. I began making documentaries without realising it, as a teenager with a second hand camcorder bought from the

Friday Ad. I flmed my family frst. Their behaviours, languages, jokes, arguments and dysfunctions were all recorded, and I had a sense that it mattered. I recognise now that it also gave me power in a powerless situation; a chance to be heard, even if just by the camera. I realised quickly that I would be able to flm more interesting and honest moments if I had the collaboration of the person I was flming. That intimacy and trust became the foundation of the flms I made. The relationship was always way more important than the exposure, focus, sound quality, or steadiness of the camera. I used the smallest semi-professional cameras I could fnd. I wanted the camera to ft in my handbag; and to ft into my relationship with the person I was flming, rather than the other way round. The visual beauty of the flm was desirable,

12 Rosenthal 1988:245 15 but it was worthless without the emotional depth of an intimate relationship with the flmed person.

In the practice research for this PhD I have tried to use the same techniques to get to the heart of these relationships, what they mean when flming, what they are based on and how they change over time. I have tried to unpick what being in a documentary does to a person’s identity and why for some documentary participants this a deeply therapeutic and positive experience, while for others it is disturbing and unsettling. I have made the flmmaking and the relationship the subject rather than using it as a means to another story. I have also used found footage, limiting my control, to investigate my own motives in mediation. Editing and charting this footage has been challenging and revealing. The slightest cut carries with it meaning, and even the curation of footage involves subjective and partial decisions.

Interestingly, it also feels unethical at times, as the footage was not meant for me, or directed at me. Robinson unpicks this problem in her work about subcultures - “as historians we are unavoidably working with sources that were never meant for us.”13

Those sources that were aimed at historicisation would of course be unreliable sources anyway.

I try in the written element of this thesis to unpick the ethics and aesthetics of my past practice; to both trigger and respond to current practice; to engage with the process of research; and to assess the impact on both audience and documentary participant. I have engaged in interdisciplinary fashion with queer and feminist theory, documentary and representational theory, fan studies theory and psychology, social media theory and audience theory for this project. I rely heavily on

Judith Butler’s theories of performativity, Stuart Hall’s construction of identity as a

13 Robinson, Lucy, reflexive history lecture, University of Sussex 2017 16 work in progress, Larsen and Zubernis on shame, Stella Bruzzi on performances of the self and Erica Rand on queering popular culture. I engage with the methodology of other documentary flmmakers such as Jerry Rothwell, Errol Morris, Werner Herzog,

Sarah Polley, Kim Longinotto, Agniezka Piotrowska, Cahal McLaughlin and Joshua

Oppenheimer. A theoretical foundation is the frst layer in any documentary work I have made since beginning a Cultural History MA at Brighton university in evening classes 8 years ago. Pulling apart the issues, the contradictions and the affect theoretically before attempting to flm a story helps me to know what the subject’s important values and meanings are, creating a more productive and sensitive flming experience. I could not have made After the Holocaust (2012) without reading Saul

Friedlander and Anne Karpf; I could not have made Crazy About One Direction (2013) without reading Matt Hills and Katherine Larsen; I could not have made Queerama

(2017) without reading Andrea Weiss, Andy Medhurst, Richard Dyer or Matt Cook. In turn the flming or editing of material counter-challenges the theory and keeps it present, sharp and realistic.

One of the most effective relationships between the theory and practice is the way doing both enforces a certain subjectivity. What is our relationship to the things we love when we study them? What happens when we study the things that directly affect our own lives? If a history is our own, or that of our ancestors, does our historiography lose or gain rigour? If a theory describes our own class, race, sexuality, gender, religion, workplace or family can we still be objective and impartial theorists?

Is it possible to make ethnographies about our own communities with as clear eyed an approach as when we talk about others? The enforcement of ideas over emotions, facts over feelings is gendered. Feminist writing encourages the combination of robust theory with genuine feelings. Philosophy has established the value of situated knowledge over rationality. Anthropology and Sociology have challenged the 17 imperial gaze of traditional ethnography. New models embrace local knowledge and acknowledge the complex relationships between researcher and subject. In documentary theory our subjectivities, viewpoints and affects are increasingly embraced as bringing another layer of truth to a flm, and doing away with the artifce of “fy on the wall” or the pretence of objectivity. New cultural studies embraces the intimacy, immediacy and proximity afforded by a researcher’s positionality and subjectivity. Werner Herzog has said the best documentaries “are when the flmmaker is clear about who they are in the story.”14 A researcher close to their subject, embedded in it even, is beginning to be recognised as an asset rather than a liability.

In the documentary flm Derrida, the philosopher notes at one point that the interviewer asks him a question, followed by an immediate technical interruption as the cameraman wants to adjust the refector. Derrida complains that he can’t concentrate and can’t answer a question if his attention is continually drawn to the process, saying “the refector interrupts the refection”.15 But the scene tells us much about him, perhaps more than his answer to the original question could have. In Nick

Broomfeld’s flm The Leader, the Driver and the Driver’s Wife16, a similar effect is achieved when Broomfeld irritates Eugene Terre Blanche by arriving late to do an interview. Broomfeld has often claimed he was late on purpose, as the resulting tantrum was so revealing about the nature of the South African tyrant. Sometimes, drawing attention to the process can be more revealing than flming what supposedly would have happened had the camera not been present, or flming the performances that are so meticulously controlled by participants to documentary.

14 Herzog in Vice interview 2013

15 Derrida in Derrida, Ziering Hoffman ****

16 Broomfield The Leader… 18

In the new introduction to the cultural studies anthology Hop on Pop, Henry Jenkins identifes three areas in which embedded and invested researchers in pop culture and fandom can add value17. These are important elements of research which so called insiders may better understand and communicate. The frst is intensifcation - the exaggeration of everyday emotions which provoke strong feelings or a release from normal perception. This can also be related to spirituality, trauma or other experiences which are triggered by certain knowledge or intense memories. The second is identifcation - strong attachments to fctional characters or celebrities, which I argue is also applicable to the attachments we feel to communities, our families, our ethnicities or sexualities. The third element is Intimacy - the embedding of popular culture into the fabric of our daily lives, into the ways we think about ourselves and the world around us. Intimacy is perhaps the most important element.

Intimate documentary flmmakers and researchers have access to the best information, insights, experiences of their participants.

The rational, political, objective and emotional distance that has been seen to exempt researchers, flmmakers and journalists from accusations of partiality or unprofessional attachments has made for a dry and even untrustworthy voice, unjustly authoritative and inauthentic. Involvement, participation, passion, and engagement are not allowed. Fantasy and imagination are seen as irrelevant. So,

Jenkins asks, how do we write/speak as insiders rather than outsiders and still be respected? Otherwise…how can queer people talk about queerness? Poor people talk about poverty? Black people talk about race? Existence, affect and experience can be the starting point for critical research, a source of knowledge and motivation.

17 Jenkins Hop on Pop 2003 19

Intimacy, intensifcation and engagement, those core skills of fans, should perhaps be remodelled as expertise.

Documentary flmmakers have long grappled with the impact of subjectivity on truth. For some there is no such thing as truth, certainly not in flm. Errol Morris responded to Bruno Forestier’s claim that “cinema is truth 24 times a second” with

“cinema is lies 24 times a second.”18 For Morris “truth isn’t guaranteed by style or expression. It isn’t guaranteed by anything.”19 The “endless choices” that Barrow describes the flmmaker making, impact on every frame of the flm, adjusting and shifting what is real, until it is unrecognisable. But perhaps that doesn’t matter. Stella

Bruzzi argues “ a documentary will never be reality, nor will it erase or invalidate that reality by being representational.”20 In my own work subjectivity has been ever present. My documentaries are records of the relationship that was developing between myself and the person I was flming.

Desmond Bell has very clearly described practice research as artistic research.21 As a practitioner and researcher I try to combine theory with practice, allowing one to challenge, enrich and deepen the meanings of the other. I try to see theory and flmmaking as two methods of research after the same set of insights, rather than as two different research areas. Making documentaries requires a robust and rigorous research period, as there are stringent fact checks in television, and each flm is examined carefully by lawyers before it can be broadcast. They look for fakery, false claims, inconsistencies, slander and chronological aberrations. They also took for inappropriate suggestions, lazy conclusions, the use of misleading words or pictures,

18 Forestier in Wright 2010:92

19 Morris in Cineaste 17, 1989:17

20 Bruzzi New Documentary 2006:6

21 Bell, Desmond Screen Production Research 2018 20 holes and gaps in the story. The commissioning editor of each flm made for television will demand that the story is fully coherent, contains no dog-legs, feels authentic and appears to be true. They will also demand entertainment, which is possibly the only way the process differentiates from academic peer review.

Linear narrative documentary flmmaking, particularly when it engages with subjectivity and refexivity, is a very rewarding form of research, but opening my mind to other forms of practice research has been very fruitful. Working with found footage, curating both self-shot and archive video online, juxtaposing videos in a physical space and thinking about audience interactivity have all made this work more rigorous and interesting.

My creative practice research exists in fve modes:

1. A grid flm made from found footage created by One Direction fans on Youtube -

This is Not Us, 20 mins. https://daisy-asquith-xdrf.squarespace.com/flms/#/this-is-

not-us-flm/

2. A linear flm made from new flmed interviews with eight past participants of my

television documentaries - This is the Real Me, 22 mins. https://daisy-asquith-

xdrf.squarespace.com/flms/#/20-min-flm/

3. A gallery installation, including the reconstructed bedroom of a One Direction

fan, the two flms above and looped digital media. First exhibited at the

Attenborough Centre for Creative Arts at the University of Sussex, April 2018.

https://daisy-asquith-xdrf.squarespace.com/installation/

4. An online space that curates the sources from Youtube, Twitter and my own

practice - https://daisy-asquith-xdrf.squarespace.com

5. This written thesis 21

Chapter 1 This is Not Us Contested Representation in the One Direction Fandom

When Channel 4 asked me to make a documentary about One Direction fans I was delighted. Fandom has fascinated me since the late 80s when I frst tippexed

Siouxsie and the Banshees on the back of my leather jacket. Perhaps my decision to wear that Siouxsie uniform (despite a secretive musical preference for pop), indicated a desire for subcultural capital: a “cultishness” that pop music didn’t offer me22. So it seems I was born to be a Larry shipper—a rare deviant space of queer rebellion within a fandom that couldn’t be more mainstream in its musical taste. Professionally, as a documentary maker, I saw a gap that needed flling between what I knew of fandom and the way it has been represented ever since screaming Beatles fans were derided by the media in the 1960s. This simplifcation of young women’s emotional and cerebral response to an artist or production takes the threat out of the phenomenon, infantilising them and belittling their emotional experience and overlooking their impressive skills - networking and coordinating large groups in common purpose, producing and distributing creative fan material and gathering intelligence on their chosen subject. Fandoms have always been “stereotyped and pathologised as cultural ‘others’—as obsessive, freakish, hysterical, infantile and regressive social subjects” writes Hills23 marked by “danger, abnormality and stillness”24 and thought to engage in “secret lives... without much purpose”25. And of course there is the musical taste-policing, where “if girls like it, it must be shit”26.

22 Hills 2002a

23 Hills 2007: 463

24 Jensen 1992 in Hellekson and Busse 2015

25 Harris 1998: 11

26 Robinson lecture, History as Feminist Practice, University of Sussex, March 2015 22

Ruth Deller specifcally unpicks the class and gender prejudice that One Direction fans are subject to: “Lots of different fans are seen as strange. Some of that has to do with class: different pursuits are seen as more culturally valuable than others. Some of it has to do with gender. There’s a whole range of cultural prejudices. One thing our society seems to value is moderation. Fandom represents excess and is therefore seen as negative.”27 There is no doubt that Crazy About One Direction was commissioned in the wake of yet another fuss about the fandom’s behaviour in the tabloids, and it is undeniable that television commissioners desire their audiences to be both compelled and appalled by the most extreme stories possible. But it is also true that the commissioning editor on this occasion was a One Direction fan herself, and that she and I shared huge admiration for the fandom and an explicitly feminist mission to celebrate this unashamed display of teenage girls’ desire, rather than the passive consumption model that persists. As Barbara Ehrenreich said of Beatles fans in the 1960s: “When they screamed they were also celebrating themselves, their freedom, their youth, their power. Screaming didn’t drown out the performance: it was a performance.”28 The One Direction fandom and particularly Larry Shippers, seemed to have answered “that often asked feminist query, how can pop culture be subversively refunctioned for women’s pleasure?”29 Television has the least self- selecting audience in the world - it is possible to bring a story you are proud of into the living room of someone who would never otherwise come across it, for which reason I will always love and defend it as a medium. The opportunity to celebrate fandom in public was irresistible.

27 Deller quoted in Observer article by Dorian Lynskey, 29 September 2013

28 Lynskey, Observer article, 29 September 2013

29 Rand Barbie’s Queer Accessories 1995: 1 23

Seeing Fans

If, as Hills says, fans and academics have an uneasy relationship30, fans and the media have a completely dysfunctional one. Perhaps being a documentary maker I don’t suffer from the type of imagined rationality that an academic might project in fan representations. Instead I suffer from an imagined “media-type” untrustworthiness, or conversely an imagined journalistic objectivity, depending on your perspective. In fact my representation of fans was an entirely subjective one, as I will argue all documentaries are, and I had no dark motive other than to understand what drives the immersed and passionate fan. The refexivity that Hills employs in his theoretical work acknowledges that his “theories are also stories”31. Our gender, class, age, sexuality, politics, and sense of self are all players in the stories we tell. This chimes with much recent work in documentary theory on the impossibility of objectivity32.

Neither the reader nor the TV viewer beneft from the invisible or detached researcher. My practice was characterised by a personal, experiential, authored and immersive approach which aimed to speak with the authentic voice of a fan.

Authenticity and intimacy have been important themes for One Direction, endlessly batted back and forth between the band members, management and fans. The band’s own use of video diaries during the X Factor competition was a defning moment for the fandom. When the band were frst formed and moved into the X

Factor house33 a weekly video diary34 was broadcast. The 5 boys, aged between 16

(Harry Styles) and 18 (Louis Tomlinson) took to this routine like ducks to water. They sat huddled together on the stairs, chatting and teasing each other like the ordinary

30 Hills 2002a

31 Hills 2002a: 11

32 see Bruzzi 2000; Pearce 2007, Morris 2013

33 a kind of holding pen where they are tortured until they sign lifetime contracts

34 X Factor 2010 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGrcGnnaHBw 24 teenage boys that they were, still, at that time. They thanked individual girls that they had waited to meet them outside the studio. They answered individual questions from girls on Twitter. They were shambolic, sometimes confused, often silly. It was partly scripted, but even to an authenticity-sensitive teenage audience it was very clear that a large part of the chatting was spontaneous. The boys also appeared to grow up a little each week. Harry and Louis appeared very close. They cuddled, stroked each other’s hair and faces, even pretended to lick each other. This combination of ordinariness and vulnerability with cuteness and new found fame was completely addictive and exhilarating to the teenage girls watching. For the frst time ever they were watching fve normal boys that they could imagine going to their school (albeit with better haircuts than most of the teenage boys they knew), turning into pop stars in front of their eyes. And the audience had a hand in their transformation. The group of girls at the studios grew massively each week, until by week 4 the boys could no longer come out to meet them as it was considered too dangerous. They apologised for this in their video diary, assuring fans that they loved the attention, and that they noticed the familiar faces. Their fandom on Twitter grew at speed. The fans looked up to other fans that by meeting the boys, or being tweeted by them, were rising up the fandom hierarchy. A community was formed on

Twitter. This passionate fandom was noticed by Simon Cowell who then decided to break his own rules and sign the band even though they only came third in the competition. The fans had a strong and justifed sense of having themselves lifted the band to success.

The video diaries that were so popular were ripped and shared hundreds of thousands of times on Youtube and became the most admired element of the canon for many fans. When the One Direction machine was in full swing and they had a team of people to tweet for them if necessary, authenticity became more and more 25 important in the fandom and the video diaries were held up as a nostalgic “true” space. At time of writing the One Direction Vevo Youtube channel still has 23 million subscribers.35 The fans noticed and raged whenever a tweet was written by

“management”. They analysed interviews with the boys for anything “scripted”. They were furious if they felt the boys were being dressed in too coherent a style, and fought for their right to be individuals. Thanks to Twitter One Direction’s management were well aware that the fans were craving the authenticity of the early video diaries and tried to deliver it in a controlled way. The band’s official documentary 1D:3D This Is Us (2013) was a perfect example of constructed authenticity, in the way that much documentary that claims to be authentic is. Even the title promises the “real”. The documentary maker behind Super Size Me (2004),

Morgan Spurlock, who had a reputation for intimate personal journalism, was reportedly paid £1m dollars to make this feature length advert for the band, with their X Factor mentor Simon Cowell as one of the producers. It grossed $67.3m worldwide, but the reviews were less than favourable, with Miriam Bale in the New

York Times writing: "With a group so evidently versed in the visuals of rock history, it’s a shame that a flmmaker wasn't hired who would pay homage to classic pop flms instead of offering a satisfactory paid promotional. In the end credits — Richard

Lester-style scenes of the boys in costumes doing pranks — we see how this flm might have been more successful: as an obvious fction starring these appealing personalities rather than a tame and somewhat fake documentary.”36

A request was made in early 2013 by the band on Youtube for fans to upload comments to be included in the fnal edit, but ultimately fans were only represented as Robinson’s “amorphous mass of screaming bedwetters”37,

35 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-subscribed_YouTube_channels

36 Bale, Miriam "Meet the Boys: A Mutual Lovefest.'One Direction: This Is Us,' Documentary by Morgan Spurlock". The New York Times. (29 August 2013).

37 Robinson, Lucy, blog Now That’s What I Call History https://proflrobinson.com/ 26 with a white coated psychologist explaining

(or mansplaining!) what was happening in their brains. In scenes that were sold as “intimate” in

This is Us the band members were flmed in

“off-duty” situations, such as lying on a boardwalk chatting, fshing rods in hand, which couldn’t have been less authentic in reality. Their chats felt scripted and insincere, and failed to live up to the messy immediacy of

fg.3 1D3D: This Is Us movie poster fans’ favourite moments from the early days. In fact the only spontaneous access fans had to the band after the Youtube video diaries of 2010, was in other fans’ videos uploaded to Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and Keek, of chance encounters with the band in the street. It was this passionate communal fan space that I set out to represent. 27

Filming Fans

When I arrived at the Manchester Arena in April 2013 there were around 500 teenage girl members of the One Direction fandom waiting outside. Sandra and

Becky had been there since 8am and bounced over to my camera and me. They were singing and dancing in the street, not so much waiting for “the boys,” as partying, being together, belonging. Sandra and Becky were extremely keen to be part of the flm—as were almost every one of the hundreds of fans I met. Of course having your identity represented on television is a powerful form of recognition and establishes belonging. The performance of the self that occurs when a camera is pointed at someone is a powerful way of working through identity. The camera seems to say I see you and hear you and you exist and matter38. Two and a half decades after Butler’s

Gender Trouble (1990), the social media generation is accustomed to performing their own identities online and constantly thinking through the way they represent themselves. Every selfe posted on Facebook, every invitation to “ask me anything” on

Tumblr, every Instagram photo and tweet invites recognition or offers it to someone else, or both. If love is returned, then all the better, but if criticism, or “hate” is the result, then at least the initial poster has received attention, and has a chance to learn something more about who they are, who they might become, and what their impact and position might be in the world, or in other words, “instigate a transformation”39. In the case of Crazy About One Direction the “becoming” they may have wished to solicit was the elevation of self into uniqueness, from “just another fan” into a signifcant fan, so signifcant in fact that the band were bound to notice them, and to see oneself projected onto the future, immortalised and made special, making the ordinary extraordinary40. My job in this context was to make sure I found

38 see Piotrowska, Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary Film 2013

39 Butler 2004: 44

40 see Piotrowska 2014: 268 28 fans who were emotionally capable of managing this extraordinariness and prepared them psychologically for the impact of broadcast. Their parents were also engaged in this process.

Unsurprisingly there was some pressure from Channel 4 to include the most angry and hysterical fans, the crazy fans. I resisted this simplistic stereotype from the start, but I am also obliged to accept the commercial demands that ultimately fund my programs, and I also understand that the medium is designed to be entertaining. The pre - title sequence and trailers therefore privilege the most extreme moments in order to attract an audience, but as all makers of television documentaries understand, this does not obstruct the documentary itself being subtle, thoughtful, and even warm. Humour is also very important, and without it documentary is a dull proposition. Humour does not negate respect if handled with care and the joke should be owned or at least shared by the flmed participant to avoid a sneeriness which sometimes exists on Channel 4 at 9pm. However, when it came to the title it is signifcant that I was not allowed to keep my preferred choice: I Heart One Direction was changed by Channel 4 on the very last day of the edit to Crazy About One

Direction. This news required me to speak personally to all the fans in the flm and explain that it wasn’t me calling them crazy, and it wasn’t the intended message of the program. They took the news well, at that moment accepting more readily than I did that this was their dramatic reputation and therefore inevitably the selling point of the documentary.

The Michael Jackson fan documentary Wacko About Jacko41 was another victim of

Channel 4’s trick of re-titling its programs at a late stage, with or without the approval

41 Leveugle 2005, film 47 mins, Channel 4 29 of the flmmaker. The problem is, Hills writes, that Wacko About Jacko “undermines fans’ moral narratives by linking them to emotivism”42 but actually Wacko About Jacko appears to have been made with genuine affection and respect for the fans. The process of editorial selection, narration, use of slow motion and soundtrack are all mediation on the part of flmmaker Leveugle, but they are not utilised in such a way as to make fun of, or exoticise Jackson fans. The fans are not wacko at all, but likeable, passionate people who are willing to be led by fantasy rather than behaving in a self- consciously sensible fashion. It would be counter-productive to suggest that a focus on the affective or embodied response should be considered less important, valid, or interesting than a response driven by rationality or cognitive critique. Hills rightly argues that the flm does nothing to normalise fandom43, but many fans I met did not wish to be normalised, preferring that their extraordinary passion and creativity be celebrated. The words Wacko and Crazy are clearly what are considered necessary to draw an audience to a slot. Wacko can be seen as a judgment call offered to the audience. Unfortunately, as in the case of Crazy About One Direction, the title’s impact has the potential to reach far beyond the program’s attentive audience, and taken at face value, it can have a stigmatising effect.

Ethical documentary practice can be an elusive and imprecise target. There are clear ethical guidelines in television that take care of the audience with regard to the truth claims of a documentary (exemplifed by the BBC’s Safeguarding Trust course to be taken by every producer after 2008)44. But what about ethical practice with regard to the care of participants in television documentaries? Winston has claimed it is our relationships with the people we flm that are the most important measure of ethical

42 Hills 2007

43 Hills 2007: 468

44 http://www.bbc.co.uk/safeguardingtrust/introduction/index.shtml 30 production.45 Ethical - by which I mean emotionally intelligent, sensitive and responsible - documentary is made when the flmed person is treated as a collaborator rather than a resource, and fully informed of the intentions of the flmmaker and the ambitions of the flm. Piotrowska has described how when flming fnishes ”the relationship is broken”46 and sadly this is often the case. But if attention is not abruptly withdrawn at the end of flming but a meaningful relationship pursued throughout the edit, broadcast and beyond; if participants are shown the rough cut, genuinely consulted on its veracity (not necessarily on editorial decisions); and if they are held in equal regard by the flmmaker as the ratings-hungry executive.

In these ideal circumstances a documentary can be a truly rewarding and satisfying experience for those flmed—the flm about their life a rare and therapeutic refection to be treasured. At the opposite extreme, if those flmed are treated as a commodity by a team of researchers as inexperienced as they are eager to please, lazily commodifed as “contribs” (contributors), sweet-talked, fannelled, made to sign release forms within fve seconds of the camera rolling, abandoned instantly the camera returns to its bag, ill-informed, misunderstood, then re-fashioned in the edit to ft whatever the broadcaster has been promised, being flmed can be a disastrously disturbing experience of powerlessness and misplaced trust. The reality can fall anywhere between these extremes.

If my flming of Directioners was to be ethical, it was necessary I try to make the flm in the language of the fans so that they became active collaborators rather than defensive subjects. As Heinich writes: “in matters of admiration and celebration every request for justifcation produces a backlash”47. By asking a fan to explain their

45 Winston 2000: 1

46 Piotrowska The Horror of a Doppelgänger in Documentary Film 2013:305

47 Hills 2002a: 65 31 fandom, a flmmaker (or academic) immediately invites defensiveness. I attempted to get around this by participating in fan activities alongside the fans I flmed and allowing their voices to overtake mine. I waited outside the back gates of arenas for hours, spent days on YouTube and Twitter following One Direction themed hashtags, even spent a night on a Dublin pavement with them in pursuit of concert tickets. I also included, with specifc individual permission, their YouTube videos, flmed before and during my flming period, and not originally intended for my flm. These captured a performance of fandom that was intended for other fans, but they translate well to an outsider audience. The “stalking” of Zayn and Niall in the corridors outside their hotel room is here represented by the fan as tongue-in-cheek comedy as well as evidence of the courage required to get close to the band, an important status booster within the fandom. In the flming period I allowed a space for fans to perform the identities they wanted. Bruzzi argues that all documentaries are

“performative acts, inherently fuid and unstable and informed by issues of performance and performativity”48. There are many subtle forces at play in their fan performance. It must be sufficiently true to the self that they inhabit, and sufficiently close to the self they wish to project. Documentary maker Errol Morris describes this territory as “a strange limbo land between fantasy and reality”49, and both realms should be welcomed when flming. The self projected must also be the self that they are comfortable offering in the presence of flmmaker and camera. The camera creates a space for feelings to be verbalised, enacted, and shared, and in a complex exchange “a documentary only comes into being as it is performed”50.

48 Bruzzi 2006: 154

49 Morris in Vice 2013

50 Bruzzi 2006 32

There is also an element of performing the behaviours that are expected by the rest of the fandom, and by the wider society. Derrida, in the refexive documentary about him by the same name, comments “when one improvises in front of a camera one ventriloquizes.” He says he felt obliged while being flmed to “reproduce the stereotypical discourse”51. I found that One Direction fans did this to a point, particularly before they felt confdent enough to present a more subtle version of themselves. They were more complex in their performed identities when in the familiar safe space of their own bedrooms, whereas outside in the street, in large groups, they performed more stereotypical fan identities. It may be most accurate to say that Crazy About One Direction is a documentary about what happens when you make a documentary about Directioners. What is recorded is the space between the flmer and flmed, an ever-evolving negotiation resulting in a complex, compromised truth52. Nash describes a “fow of power” that happens in an ethical documentary relationship; “a contested relationship in which each is acting with the goal of infuencing the other”53. And furthermore, by virtue of their subjectivity, any other flmmaker would have made a different flm.

There is no doubt that my subjectivity was in play when making this flm. It was my story about the One Direction fandom. Consequently it is not a defnitive version of all fans everywhere. I do not make overt truth claims in my flms, but hope instead that the refexive and interactive aspects of what I do communicate an experiential integrity. As the flmmaker Chris Terrill says: “Our stock in trade has to be honesty; not necessarily truth, whatever truth is—truth is a construct”54. Making a documentary

51 Ziering, Koffman and Dick Derrida 2002

52 Bruzzi 2006: 9

53 Nash 2010: 27

54 Terrill in Lee-Wright 2010: 103 33 involves “endless choices”55 and Crazy About One Direction was no exception—the choices of who to flm; where to flm; what questions to ask; what cuts to make; what music to add; what meanings to convey; were all mine. In addition to the title, some choices were made by Channel 4, such as how long to allow me to make it (six weeks flming and seven weeks editing), how extreme the trailer should be (very), who should record the voice over (not me, it was decided eventually, but the comedian

Julia Davis). These choices all result in signifying certain meanings56 and render the notion of one truth an impossibility.

Shaming Fans

On broadcast of Crazy About One Direction, it was signifcantly not the fans I had flmed that objected to my representation of the fandom. By taking care of all the stages of research and production myself, I had been able to be consistent with my participants, keep my promises, and keep them informed and consulted during and after flming. Apart from being ethically sound, the sense of increased power this gives subjects during flming tends to make for a better, more intimate flm, which in turn increases the likelihood that they will approve of the fnal cut. Relationships also affect the reception of a documentary because “the assumptions which the viewer makes about this relationship, on the basis of signals intended or unintended, will inform his [sic] perception of the flm”57. My relationships with the fans I flmed were strong enough for them to have positive expectations of the flm and understand its affectionate humorous tone. For reasons I will explore in this section, their confdence and appreciation was not shared by the majority of the fandom.

55 Barnouw in Bruzzi 2006: 6

56 one fan complained on Twitter that the voiceover was recorded by someone who was “famous for playing a psychopath” - Julia Davis in the comedy show she wrote and starred in, Nighty Night.

57 Vaughan in Austin 2007:104 34

Within minutes of the broadcast of Crazy About One Direction on 15 August 2013 it was being ripped on Tumblr, viewed (in part at least) and criticised passionately by fans all around the world. One link I found the following day had over a quarter of a million views. There were 368,139 tweets during the hour of transmission, ten times more than the next most tweeted show - Big Brother - initiated that evening.58

fg.4 Twitter response during broadcast, data visualisation by Second Sync

Twitter was dominated by related hashtags for the next 48 hours, including

#RIPLarryShippers, #ThisIsNotUs, #1DWereNotLikeTheseGirlsontheDocumentary,and

#BeliebersareHereforDirectioners, touchingly uniting the normally antagonistic Justin

Bieber fandom in rare sympathy with the One Direction fandom.59 Twitter has been used by One Direction fans since the band’s frst X Factor appearance to gather and

58 according to Second Sync Big Brother got less than 30,000 tweets during transmission

59 see some example tweets in appendix 7 and online at https://daisy-asquith-xdrf.squarespace.com 35 share intelligence on the boys. Fans use it to collectively protest management decisions, share fantasies, police each others’ fan behaviour, provide tactical false information and rumours, vote in competitions, and form factions and hierarchies within the fandom. Ultimately each fan covets a tweet or follow from a band member, a high-value chip of cultural capital in the fandom which gives an instant boost to fan status. In the days after the broadcast, tweets were split between hate for Larry shippers, who had supposedly embarrassed the fandom by sharing their fantasy, and hate for the producers of the documentary for broadcasting it. There

fg.5 example #ThisisNotUs tweet from Aug 13 2013 were thousands of bomb threats to Channel 4, death threats to me, and invitations to

Larry shippers to “Go kill yourself.” Following #RIPLarryShippers in real time I watched the number of reported Larry “suicides” creep up from 4 to 12, then to 19, to 28 and then 42 in a few hours.60 It was a huge relief to me to discover the concept

“pseuicide”61 in which an online avatar dies when a Twitter or Tumblr account is deleted, often in protest. Why and how teenagers use suicide as a cultural bargaining tool, or an emotional weapon, is beyond the scope of this thesis, but an analysis of the YouTube rants that were tagged #ThisIsNotUs provides some understanding of the fans’ issues with my flm.

60 I looked in detail at one of the fans who had supposedly committed suicide LovinLarry17 and her Tweets during the saga are reproduced in appendix 6

61 https://fanlore.org/wiki/Pseuicide, also see tweets recorded on https://daisy-asquith- xdrf.squarespace.com 36

The shame these fans describe does not necessarily originate in Crazy About One

Direction. The meanings carried by a documentary are the result of a complex negotiation between text and context. The reception of a flm by its audience is a factor in the making of those meanings, arguably as important an infuence as the intentions of the flmmaker and the cultural moment it is released into. In this light the defensive reaction of the fandom was unsurprising and even justifed in the context of three years of negative and patronising media representations of

Directioners. Just as tabloid journalists might assume that the documentary is about the mass hysteria of silly teenage girls; just as fan sympathisers might connect with the positive aspects portrayed about fandom; Directioners will receive the message they expect, which is one of derision, criticism, humiliation. They have adopted a generalised sense of shame about their fandom, taught to them by a patriarchal society that looks down on expressions of extreme emotion, teenage passion, mainstream pop and female sexuality. Larry in private fan spaces is fun, clever and naughty, but seen through the public eye it suddenly feels embarrassing and stupid to fans, not because it is, but because everyone keeps telling them it is.

The Larry ship is the biggest and most hotly contended division in the One Direction fandom. Approximately half the fandom ship Larry, the other half preferring Elounor

(the heterosexual relationship between Louis and his girlfriend Eleanor). Elounor shippers are deemed homophobic and in opposition to Louis and Harry’s human right to be gay together in public. Larry shippers are often accused of invading the band members’ privacy and of being pornographic and morally vacuous. Larry is an erotic space in which fans can play out their sexual fantasies unhampered by the dull and limiting sexual identities offered to them as teenage girls. The boys in their artwork are often rendered so androgynous that gender is transcended. They have 37 queered and given emotional and erotic depth to what is on offer to them by the band’s corporate producers making something less blandly fxed in gender roles, and far more desirable and limitless in potential62. Similarly to the mass queering of

Barbie analysed by Rand, Larry Shippers have subversively refunctioned Harry and

Louis for their own pleasure.63 However they were not happy to share this subversion outside the fandom. One of the most intriguing arguments made by the YouTubers in my sample is that including Larry meant I had trespassed on their “private” fan spaces.

But although the majority of fans use aliases online, they do not prevent outsiders from seeing their productions, which are readily available on Tumblr, Twitter and

fg.6 example of Larry fan art

Youtube. Although all the fan art I included was cleared with individual artists, the fandom assumed they must have been stolen. They consider Tumblr to be an almost sacred space, in which the Larry fandom can be private, and this false sense of obscurity may have prevailed for a few years because outsiders did not know what to look for. As Larsen & Zubernis write, “The twin cultural biases against overt displays of

62 see Doty 1993; Rand 1995

63 see Rand Barbie’s Queer Accessories 1995 38 emotion and (for women) displays of inappropriate sexuality combine to keep fans in the closet.”64 Larry is in the closet and the closet is Tumblr.

So Crazy About One Direction outed the Larry ship. Jenkins describes being asked by fans not to write about real person slash (RPS) for the frst edition of his landmark fan studies book Textual Poachers, as it was seen as “fandom’s dirty little secret”65. But he acknowledges that these secrets are not as easy to keep in digital fandom, raising important questions as yet unanswered about the etiquette of online cultural spaces and the way meanings are altered by context. “What happens when materials produced within a subculture get decontextualised, when slash videos circulate to people who do not have slash reading practices?”66. He cites the example of the

Closer video—a Kirk/Spock slash cut to a Nine Inch Nails song, which broke out of the fandom and now has 1.7 million views on YouTube67. Jenkins says it received titillated laughter from outsiders, despite being originally intended to make people think about sexual violence. The conclusion that moral codes of slash can only be understood by insiders seems rather old fashioned and unworkable; a parochial approach to a cultural practice that is defned by its open-minded, open-source sensibilities. Striking a balance between the invisibility of texts that express female desire and the kind of mainstreaming of subcultural information that causes it to lose its value68, is a challenge. But agreeing not to document some forms of slash at all carries a judgment and only helps perpetuate the perception of wrongness.

64 Larsen & Zubernis 2012

65 Jenkins 2012d: xxxiv

66 Jenkins 2012d: xxxvi

67 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uxTpyCdriY

68 Thornton in Hills 2002a 39

It is important to recognise that a fandom that is repeatedly pathologised and derided by the media will have low expectations of any representation. Fan identities are riddled with internalised shame which is consistently reinforced by the performance of distaste, even disgust, that largely male critics and detractors display

fg.7 example of press pathologisation of fan hysteria to them. Schoolboys, their brothers, their fathers, the music press, tabloid journalists, even teachers: all would like to tell girls what music they should like, and how they should behave around it. This encourages secrecy and the anonymity they are afforded online allows for both free expression and a global audience of like-minds, for the frst time in fandom. This is a story that deserves to be told, albeit with careful attention to ethical documentary practice, which foregrounds the needs of the flmed and recognises the subjectivity of the flmmaker. Documentary theory has dispensed with the idea of objectivity and a single authoritative truth in recent years, and it may be most accurate to say that Crazy About One Direction is simply a documentary about what happens when you make a documentary about 40

Directioners. Representing the identity of an entire fandom to their satisfaction may be impossible, but the One Direction fandom is a story of creative female sexuality and international networking that has given 20 million teenage girls a voice, and to ignore it would do them a great disservice.

In this chapter I have unpicked the circumstances and context of the initial trigger for this research project - the mass rejection and contestation of my documentary by the

One Direction fandom globally. The conclusions I have drawn indicate a complex interaction between documentary representation and the social context in which it lands. Identity and self-image and our perceptions of the way others see us can be infuenced by many factors, in this case patriarchal disapproval of teenage girls’ sexual desires being a prominent player. I had great power in the way they were represented and my subjectivity was in play in the fnal storytelling. The large number of participants diluted the trusting relationship I would normally build with those I flm, compounding the sense of the fandom in general that they were being represented as a whole. In chapter two I look at the way people in documentaries try to infuence and please their audiences with their performances and what it means to record and represent behaviours that are unperformed. 41

Chapter 2 This is the Real Me Performance, Reality and Reception

This chapter looks more deeply at the way performance interacts with reality in documentary, and what the role of audience is in performance. I will investigate the meanings hidden in performing for the camera, and analyse the relationship between the acted self and the true self. Comparing the public and private personas of the people I have flmed, I attempt to embrace both the way they wish to be seen and the way I see them, as parallel subjective truths. I take as case studies Holocaust survivors and gay fathers, both past participants of my own documentaries. I look at the way stories change according to our memories and identities and interact with what our audiences need to hear. Does the truth, or the ‘true self’, become irrelevant when the purpose is to warn the public of the extreme cruelty possible in human behaviour for example? Or to attempt to alter public opinion on the rights of homosexuals to have families? How do audiences impact upon the stories they receive by privileging and welcoming the heroic, cathartic and heartwarming versions of history over the disturbing, challenging, inconvenient or shameful?

Holocaust Survivors and the Unperformed

After the Holocaust (2012)69 was a flm inspired by research rather than the other way round. Under the excellent supervision of Dr Cathy Bergin I was writing a research paper on representations of trauma after political violence when Channel 4 called for pitches for a new flm about survivors for the anniversary of the liberation of

Auschwitz on 27 January 1945. I wanted to make a flm about the way the trauma of the concentration camps had continued to play out in the rest of their lives, and it

69 retitled Britain’s Holocaust Survivors by Channel 4 42 was commissioned over the telephone. I had only 5 months to make the 48 minute documentary in time for the planned broadcast. All the research I had already done was indispensable. But the research and the reality didn’t necessarily get along, which gave me an opportunity to engage with the way practice and theory can work together and enrich each other.

Holocaust survivors are keen to be flmed. They are on a mission to communicate their experiences so that the Holocaust is not forgotten. It is an uncomfortable message they have and complicated by being misunderstood or mistranslated by audiences, hijacked by Rabbis and politicians in service of their own causes, labelled unreliable by historians due to failures in memory and by the awkward fact that some survivors feel the need to romanticise, embellish and imbue their stories with false heroism.70 Audiences are to blame for needing happy endings when they hear these tough talks and survivors are adept at responding to the need. Over 70 years they have learned to perform their testimony in a cathartic way for the audience, which requires stories of heroism, faith, friendship etc, rather than their more disturbing experiences of human nature. My intention with After the Holocaust, was to try and get behind the learned performance and be allowed to understand the un-neat and un-inspiring side of their experiences.

Freddie Knoller was 91 when we met in 2011. He told his wife and two daughters nothing about his life in the camps for 30 years after he was freed. In later years he had become a self-confessed Holocaust obsessive, meticulously documenting his own desperate journey

70 Hassan A House next Door to Trauma 2003: ch2 43 through Europe as he tried to escape the

Nazis; his betrayal by a lover while hiding in the hills with the

French resistance and the eighteen months

fg.8 Freddie Knoller, still from documentary he spent in Auschwitz and Belsen. “I was determined to survive, I had to survive, and I did survive. This was my attitude. I’m pretty sure this optimism saved my life. Because I saw so many people who gave up, and they didn’t last long... they just couldn’t go on.” His family told me they suspected his optimism was sometimes “an act” but Freddie frmly refuted this charge.

Gena Turgel was 89 and living in Stanmore, at the far northern end of the Jubilee line.

She was always beautifully turned out, with freshly blow-dried hair and long painted

fnger nails. Her

appearance was

signifcant. In the camps,

looking ft and healthy

could make the difference

between being selected

to live or die. She said fg.9 Gena Turgel, still from documentary

“the stench of Belsen followed me” for years after liberation and that 44 she had to “use perfume to try and get rid of that”. Gena had always had a fear of being vulnerable, and pushed herself hard to be as perfect as possible in everything she did. When we frst met a three course meal was served by her housekeeper in the dining room. Gena told me that she believed God saved her life. When asked why

God would allow so many others to be randomly slaughtered she replied “Who are we to judge God? We are not worthy.” Her story was characterised by religious and spiritual notions of divine justice, faith and destiny.

Zigi Shipper was 82 at time of flming and living with his wife Jeanette in Bushey, where they were surrounded by their two daughters and six grown-up grandchildren. Zigi was extremely charming and funny, and claimed to have never stopped joking, even in the worst times. “Well it was no use moping - you’re not going to get any bread so you might as well get on with it... my joking got me in trouble but I didn’t care.” Zigi had many friends who were also survivors and they knew how to enjoy life, throwing parties for each other and eating out. His wife said he had been “dreadful” to live

fg.10 Zigi Shipper, still from documentary with though, particularly when he was younger and had problems with drink and gambling. Zigi didn’t display the optimism of Freddie or the faith in God of Gena. His attitude to his own survival was a harder one for a survivor to live with and possibly for an audience too, who prefer heroic stories, but it rang the truest: “We were lucky, 45 that’s all. Nothing saved us but pure, pure luck.” His performance was about making everyone laugh, and love him, knowing charm was his greatest asset in being heard.

Holocaust survivors are as prone to performing the role society gives them as anyone else. Zigi, Gena, and Freddie were all used to giving talks on their experiences. While this made them confdent participants in the documentary, it also presented the challenge of getting “under the skin of memory”,71 as Delbo describes it. Those who record testimony have particular imperatives, the biggest challenge facing being installation of confdence in the survivor that the unbearable is welcome. But Holocaust survivors are acutely aware of their audiences. Their silence until the 1980s was partly due to the knowledge that no-one was ready or willing to hear the truth. Gena Turgel illustrates the lack of an audience with the following anecdote: “I tried to tell a lady I knew once how I suffered, how I was starving... she responded by telling me “You’re not the only one who suffered you know - we also couldn’t get oranges.” A distinct lack of perspective prevents ordinary people from hearing the testimony correctly.

Most audiences want some catharsis in the story. The commissioning editor in the history department at Channel 4 would consider it her job to be aware of the expectations of the audience for a Holocaust survivor documentary. The request made by her was that the flm should not be “too depressing... make it cheerful, otherwise people will switch it off.”72 The job of the commissioning editor is, after all, primarily to gain as large an audience as possible for their programmes, thereby winning as much advertising revenue as possible for the channel overall. When commercial pressures such as this infuence the representation of survivors of the

71 Delbo in Langer 1991: 6

72 Channel 4 History commissioner 7th Oct 2011 46 worst atrocities in memory, there are uncomfortable compromises and difficult moral ground to navigate. Interestingly though, the attitude of survivors to the way they should be represented is remarkably similar to that of the commissioning editor.

They do not wish to be sacralised, held on a pedestal, feared, or avoided in case they are too upsetting. The Holocaust survivor colludes with the interviewer to give the audience what they want. This can be a happy ending - a liberation story or a wedding, in Gena’s case, to one of the British soldiers that liberated Belsen. Or it can be a moral lesson: “Do not hate!” is Zigi’s favourite. Or it can be a heroic story, such as

Freddie’s, full of wit and resistance. The testimony is tailored to the audience.

Humour is used in a surprising way that grabs the attention of an audience, particularly a young one. Cracking jokes about the Holocaust is the last thing teenagers expect from a survivor and therefore it is incredibly effective. Rather than make the Holocaust light or palatable, it makes it real and accessible. Freddie Knoller manages to begin his testimony to a room full of teenage boys, by making them all laugh at the fact that the reason he was deported to Auschwitz was that his “moody” girlfriend betrayed him to the Nazis. Gena Turgel laughs at her own food obsession, teasingly interrogating everyone around her about how many sandwiches they have had: “Come on, eat now! You look underfed!” Zigi Shipper is king of the one-liners:

“That was no holiday camp!” he says chuckling to himself. Care must be taken though, that this humour remains the property of the survivors. It doesn’t give permission to the listeners or the audience to make such jokes. What Holocaust survivors do give us is permission to laugh, which actually makes us more receptive to their message. As Aaron Kerner writes: “To deny humour is to deny yet another aspect of humanity.”73 Humour is used as a tool in their survival, assisting them in taking back some control of their memories, owning them, integrating them with

73 Kerner 2011: 80 47 their present day lives and getting their story told. And the bigger the audience, to their minds, the better.

In many documentaries about the Holocaust, survivors are allowed to add detail and emotional colour to the subject, but never to be the subject. Their life stories and the ways they impact on their testimony aren't confronted. Because of this, behaviours and gestures which could illuminate so well what it meant to be in a camp, are ignored. Behaviour can sometimes transmit unspeakable truth better than the verbal. K Zetnik, the Holocaust survivor that fainted at the Eichmann trial, perhaps communicated his feelings best of all. The signifcance of his fainting for the poet

Haim Gouri was very important: “In fainting, he in fact said it all”74. When a survivor panics because their lunch is late, they communicate so much more about the hunger they felt in Auschwitz, than when they attempt to describe it verbally. All three of the survivors flmed for After the Holocaust were obsessed with food, the single most enduring legacy of the starvation they experienced in the camps. It became clear that eating with them was as important as listening to their stories; that the way the food was constantly being prepared, recycled, squirrelled away and enjoyed in abundance, was a resounding piece of testimony itself. A hugely generous and ever-present platter of smoked salmon sandwiches, never allowed to run out, transmitted the experience in a way that words could not. Other traits which are common amongst survivors are nightmares, gallows humour, fear of hospitals, dislike of bureaucracy, mistrust of authority and uniforms, fearful parenting, anxious saving of money, refusal to retire, smart appearance, “relentless, driven productivity.”75 All these behaviours are linked by survivors to their loss of control in the camps, of their total loss of agency, dignity and humanity. In After the Holocaust I managed to flm a few behaviours that reached beyond performance and offered a greater insight to

74 Hirsch/Spitzer in Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates 2010: 394

75 Laub 1991: 73 48 the reality of the camp experience. Zigi wanting his whole family around him, hating to be alone; Freddie needing his meals at exact times to stay calm; Gena overfeeding her grandchildren and being so meticulous about her appearance. These were the most precious moments in After the Holocaust, and I was lucky to fnd three survivors brave enough to allow me to record them and allow themselves to be represented as fully human, rather than sacralised as heroic other-worldly beings.

Performing Gay Parenting

Finding a commission for a television documentary about anything seen as gay- themed has been difficult for the past 20 years, due to the accepted shared wisdom amongst executives that “gay doesn’t rate”. I heard this phrase repeatedly in response to my ideas about the culture of camp, coming out, gay muslims, civil partnerships, gay parenting and gay icons as subjects for documentaries. When I pitched the

Drewitt-Barlows story though, it got through, on the strength of the unusual IVF arrangement they had set up. And probably also because of their willingness to perform a wildly camp and famboyant version of their own lives, which amused

Channel 4 executives and ftted their simplistic sense of queerness. They called the flm My Weird and Wonderful Family. The Drewitt-Barlows understood this transaction perfectly and traded publicity for a fun performance. My challenge was to know how much to get the real story, and how much to tow the line in their performance of themselves. I wanted very much to represent a happy family with two fathers, and their performed version I feared would be counter-productive in improving the public attitude to gay dads.

Barrie and Tony Drewitt Barlow were living in a bungalow in Essex when we met, with their 10 year old twins Saffron and Aspen and 6 year old Orlando. Saffron and

Aspen were the frst British babies to have two gay dads genetically and be carried by 49 a surrogate. Their biological mother was an egg donor, chosen for her looks and intelligence, according to Barrie. They were each related to one of the dads and carried together as twins by a surrogate mother. No-one was supposed to know which was which, but it was physically obvious that Barrie was Saffron’s biological father and Tony was Aspen’s. Orlando was Aspen’s identical twin, frozen and born to a different surrogate four years later, perhaps leading him to be interestingly different physically from his twin brother. It was this process which attracted the interest of

Channel 4’s Head of Documentaries at the time. Barrie and Tony were planning another set of twins, using a new egg donor, chosen from a catalogue, and paying a surrogate around $50,000.

My frst impression of the family was a really good one. My own kids came with me to play with Aspen, Saffron and Orlando. They all roamed in and out of the garden, enjoying swings and bikes, and followed by various friendly dogs and chickens. They were watched in a relaxed and loving way by Barrie and Tony, who laughed together about the difference between their public and private personas. Barrie told me that people give him abuse in the supermarket, and the school playground. It had made the family retreat somewhat into their private world, not wanting the children to grow up with any sense of shame. The importance of showing the reality of this good, loving, incidentally gay family was clear to me. We started flming straight away that Summer, with the idea we would continue until the new babies were born in the new year. But I wasn’t able to flm what I had seen on that frst day.

Perhaps due to his bad experiences with public opinion, Barrie became defensive when the camera was on. He performed a famboyant and extravagant version of himself, which I never felt was his true self, and was actually much less likeable than the relaxed private him. It felt to me like a challenge, almost a pre-emptive strike on 50 those that might criticise him. He would describe the money he had spent on

Saffron’s wardrobe, including a mink coat and Vuitton luggage. He talked about private schools, cars, Rolexes. He claimed he wouldn’t want a disabled child, only a beautiful one. He said vaginal birth made him feel sick and he hoped the new babies would be born by caesarean. It was like a sitcom about an outrageous gay father; an uber-camp performance to play into the expectations of his perceived audience.

fg. 11 Barrie Drewitt-Barlow, still from the documentary

Camp is perhaps a way of hiding from the political or moral, as Sontag explains, it values the aesthetic over content and seriousness. “Camp refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness, and the risks of fully identifying with extreme states of feeling.”76 In this way Barrie’s camp performance can be seen as a defence mechanism; a way of not confronting the issues and emotions he faces just for wanting to be a father, and taking refuge in mink coats, designer labels and the bitchy queen persona. As with One Direction fans, projected shame is important. The reactions he has experienced from previous audiences, telling him repeatedly to be ashamed of his sexuality and his desire to have children, inform his performance. As

76 Sontag Notes on Camp 2018:24 (1966) 51 with Holocaust survivors, comedy is important: a camp comedy. “The whole point of camp is to dethrone the serious.”77 It is also a way of releasing frustration and anger at the way he was treated in public.78 The camera allowed Barrie to perform a version of the private that he wanted the public to see. He performed someone who didn’t care what anyone thought; provocative and unashamed. I knew this was counter- productive and despite my efforts to tone it down in the edit (which I felt guilty about), the press was predictably moralistic:

This was all about Barrie, clearly the driving force of the Drewitt-Barlow house. ‘We

just went on looks in the end,’ he chirpily replied when asked about the latest egg

donor. ‘The frst time there was a bit of intelligence as well.’ It was said in such an

offhand manner, you could almost kid yourself this was how things were supposed

to be. But what it boiled down to was this: if you’ve got the cash, then it’s your

entitlement to genetically engineer the world to your own template. It stuck in the

craw, not least because Barrie’s world was a stereotyped universe of consumerism

and ego. He bought Saffron a mink coat for her tenth birthday and cackled: ‘I don’t

care who throws paint on yer.’ Just as Big Brother’s Steve is ably showing that being

disabled doesn’t stop you being a creep, so Barrie put anyone’s gay-friendly

credentials to the test.

- Metro 21 July 2010

Weedon writes: “As individuals inserted within specifc discourses, we repeatedly perform modes of subjectivity and identity until these are experienced as second nature”.79 The discourse that gay dads Barrie and Tony were situated in was that of a suspicious and heteronormative public opinion, characterised by Eamon Holmes’

77 ibid: 27

78 see Alexander Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer 1993: 131

79 Weedon on Butler’s theory of performativity Identity and Culture 2004: 7 52 interview of them when Saffron and Aspen were born. “It’s not natural, is it?”80 I hoped that in including this original footage in my documentary, the audience would see how projected shame had affected the family and stop projecting it. But this may have been rather optimistic. Still, it was hard to deny that the kids were perfectly happy with two dads, and I fnally had to accept the advice of a close friend… “queers are allowed to behave badly too.” As with One Direction fans, the sense of responsibility at this dangerous game of having a whole range of different members of a community feel they are being represented by just a few, was uncomfortable.

Playing the Self

The idea of performance in documentary is constantly re-theorised, with its frst recorded conceptualisation in the flms of Flaherty and Grierson, where Nanook and

The Man of Aran reconstructed their lives efficiently for the expensively-rolling flm cameras. Joris Ivens also regarded his documentary participants as (non)actors that he would direct in only a slightly different way to real actors81. Waugh points out that

Ivens “refers to ‘acting naturally’ in reference to ‘not looking at the camera’, the code of illusion by which… (non)actors should ‘perform’ unawareness of the camera.” This illusion was of course perpetuated by Direct Cinema, undermining its fundamental claim to observe reality without impacting upon it. This representational mode has now been rejuvenated by flmmakers such as Roberto Minnervini (The Other Side, The

Trilogy) and Alma Ha’Rel (Love True) who collaborate with their participants and arrange for them to play themselves in an explicit way which requires none of the manipulation Joris Ivens admitted to.82

80 see My Weird and Wonderful Family 2010, this footage is included.

81 see Ivens in Waugh The Right to Play Oneself 2011:75

82 ibid 2011:81 53

Stella Bruzzi’s work on performance in documentary resonates best with the experience of relationships in the flming process. She writes; “documentaries are performative acts, inherently fuid and unstable and informed by issues of performance and performativity.”83 Bruzzi applies Butler’s theories of gender performance84 in thinking about the layers of real and imagined existing within documentary and creates a more subtle and affective way oPERFORMATIVITYf approaching each flm, than the rigid or cautionary approaches of Nichols (2000) or

Winston (1995). The idea that imagination and fantasy are part of reality and as much of value to document is still relatively dangerous in the documentary industry, but it is becoming more acceptable as the form matures creatively. In The Act of Killing85

Joshua Oppenheimer willingly records the inner fantasies and re-written memories of his subjects, despite their distastefulness and horror. It is through this courage in allowing people to perform the self that they wish, which leads a documentary to reveal emotional depth and truth, rather than just facts - “facts exist without meaning” as Lanzmann says86. This creative evolution also allows flmmakers to unpick the space between reality and imagination, which is after all the space humans tend to inhabit each day. As Bruzzi writes: “it’s a fne line between the real and fake, and what is of far more interest to documentarists at the moment it seems to me is the complexity and productiveness of the relationship between the two.”87

She also argues very effectively that audiences are better at understanding this subtle interplay than theorists perhaps: “the spectator is not in need of signposts and inverted commas to understand that a documentary is a negotiation between reality

83 Bruzzi, Stella New Documentary ****:1

84 Butler, Judith Gender Trouble 1990

85 Oppenheimer, Joshua The Act of Killing Dogwoof 2012

86 Lanzmann 1964

87 Bruzzi ****:5 54 on one hand and image, interpretation and bias on the other.”88 Winston’s claim that

“the supposition that any ‘actuality’ is left after ‘creative treatment’ can now be seen as being at best naive and at worst a mark of duplicity” seems to betray a fear of any ambiguity. Audiences prefer to read for themselves into the relationships they see on screen and not be told what to think or that the factual truth is indisputable. The truth is in the eye of the beholder and exists subtly in the encounter between flmmaker and flmed, rather than in bullet points, or carved into stone.

In this chapter I have investigated the performances for television audiences of both

Holocaust survivors and gay fathers. The performed realities they offer the camera are the ones they choose to share, according to their own identity and self-image, an idealised projection of the self and ideas about the way others see them. Although it is sometimes possible to represent alternative truths about their lives, these are the result of a subtle negotiation between flmmaker and flmed and are sometimes rejected by one or the other for social or political reasons. What is represented is the relationship and the negotiation which takes account of the predicted response of the audience in its offered performance. In chapter three I analyse the way that long term flming relationships impact on the identity of the flmed participant and their ability to resist projected shame.

88 ibid: 6 55

Chapter 3 This is Me Now Identity, Refection and Longitudinal Relationships

This chapter looks at two more case studies from my own documentary work, both longitudinal studies that have resulted in long lasting relationships. The frst is

Kimberley who I have known for 20 years, and made two one-hour flms with for

Channel 4: the frst about her love for a pirate radio DJ at 1589; the second about her fght to prove she was a good mother at 2590. The second case study is Josephine, the mother of Marshal, who I started flming 13 years ago when he was an 11 year old boy and the family came to live in the UK as a refugee from Zimbabwe. I made three flms about the family’s new life in Newcastle91 and then a fourth about Josephine’s experience of relative poverty in Africa and North East England92. I will analyse how these long-term flming-friendships impact on the identity of the person flmed, how they use the documentaries for refection, and how the relationships are negotiated and sustained.

Kimberley: Between You and Me

The day I met Kimberley was different from the day I met anyone else I have flmed, as she approached me. I was trying to make a flm about an Iraqi teenager who had claimed asylum in the UK after stowing away in a truck with his father. He was not particularly keen to be flmed. I thought his story was so important that I should perhaps persist. But Kimberley interrupted me in the street in Stockwell, South

London. She got in the way, demanding I flm her instead. This is extremely unusual

89 15: This is Me Channel 4: 2000

90 Kimberley: Young Mum, Ten Years On (This is Me Now) Channel 4 2009

91 Britain: My New Home Channel 4 2005-2011

92 The Queen of North Shields (Why Poverty?) BBC1 2013 56 behaviour as there is a shame in British culture about demanding too much attention, or pushing oneself forward. There is also a sense among documentary makers that those that want to be flmed are not somehow the right people to flm.

Perhaps it is a leftover from direct cinema; the idea that we should flm reality as if a fy on the wall, that those that wish to perform the self may perform too much. It was the frst flm I had approached independently and I was not yet aware that performance is an important version of reality. In this chapter I will interrogate that idea and question the notion that documentary ever records anything that would happen identically were the cameras not there. The frst day I flmed with Kimberley she very frankly and entertainingly narrated to me the story of how she frst met the pirate DJ she had fallen in love with:

fg. 12 Kimberley, still from the documentary

“One of the days I musta heard “This goes out to all the sexy ladies round London

town!” and I went wheyyy! Yeah! I was just like woah! And started going mad! And

my friend goes “You’re not sexy…” and I go “So? I don’t care.” So I rang up and I

goes… “Yeah can I send a massive massive shoutout to all the Supreme family 57

yeah? And that’s coming from Kimberley in Camberwell yeah?” I goes “You’ve got

the sexiest voice” and he goes “Thankyou.” This is me: “What’s your name?” and

this is him: “DJ Paul Edwards.” This is me: “Oh, my names Kimberley and I’m from

Camberwell.” This is him: “Yeah I just gathered that.” This is me: “There’s no need to

be rude.” This is me: “You’re black innit?” This is him: “No…” This is me: “Don’t lie!”

This is him: “Nah, nah, nah… I’m white.”93

I was an inexperienced 22 year old and accepting her performance was a challenging concept to me. By the end of the day however, I realised instinctively she was right to play a provocative version of herself. She took me home to the fat where her family lived, which happened to be the block of fats next door to where my sister lived with her baby. She was 15 and the second of four children. Her dad was an alcoholic and her mum was long-suffering and no longer felt she had any control over Kimberley, who hardly ever attended school. Kimberley was hard to parent, hard to teach, hard to even keep track of, as she would disappear on a whim from Brixton to Croydon in pursuit of DJ Paul Edwards, sometimes returning 24-48 hours later.

What I realised quickly was that Kimberley and I understood each other perfectly. We communicated quickly and with complete understanding. She was familiar to me, the opposite of an Other, never exotic. Filming her was effortless because of this, and also because she wanted to be heard more than anything. She needed me to be a sounding board so she could listen to her own thoughts, experiment with who she was and wanted to be, to play with her performance of self. Stuart Hall’s concept of identity as “an ever-unfnished conversation”94 is extremely helpful in understanding what was happening. For Hall identity is “a tricky concept, requiring both identifcation and recognition’ and “a production, which is never complete, always in

93 15: This is Me, Channel 4: 2000

94 Hall, Stuart, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices 2013 58 process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation.”95 The camera allowed Kimberley to have that conversation about her identity aloud, to try out different hats as it were. I wanted her to express herself freely and spontaneously and with total honesty, so that I could make a flm about her inner motives, the way her mind was working and the trap she found herself in as a teenage girl growing up on an estate in South London. I also saw the flm as being about frst love; the infatuation that can take over your every waking moment and desire. The flm was about the idealistic fantasy of love. That fantasy and the performance of the self it inspired was what was most interesting to flm. I was documenting less reality and more imagination and the idealised projection of self. Through that projection though, always seeps reality:

“I goes to him yesterday… I was walking down the street… I goes “I’ve missed you

a lot.” He goes: “D’you know something? I’ve missed you too.” He goes “I really

have missed you.” And his eyes started going all watery and everything. I goes:

“You alright?!” This is him: “Yeah.” He goes “ You got any money?” This is me: “Why

what d’you want?” He goes: “Cigarette.” This is me: “Oh alright then.” I never come

home did I? Stayed with him. Cos we got stuck in Battersea didn’t we? And I

couldn’t get a train home. Had to get a night bus. And I was meant to be in by 9

and I didn’t turn up. Come in at 1 o’clock this morning… my mum and dad were

going mad. I don’t care though. Well, I do care, but I don’t… if you know what I

mean.”96

Looking at 15: This is Me after 20 years, two things about its style are notable. In the late 1990s the semi professional Hi-8 camcorders that were acceptable for TV broadcast at the time, had just got small and simple enough for a person with no

95 Hall in Weedon Identity and Culture 2004:5

96 15: This is Me, Channel 4: 2000 59 training to use. We built our own accessory to feed both a radio mic and directional on-board mic in to the camera, recording both tracks of sound on the tape. There was an opportunity to flm solo, which allowed much more time spent with the person we were flming, and a much more intimate relationship. The relaxed interactive style of flming that was characteristic of my work with Kimberley and others, was not implemented with any understanding of what had gone before. But it was affected by the opportunity to be alone with the person I was flming for many hours, days and weeks, building genuine trust and friendship while we collaborated in telling their story. It felt fair and clear and honest. It was the most effective and simple way of starting to flm, without making a participant too self-conscious, or defensive perhaps. It was also the only way to afford to spend a whole year with them, rather than spending the whole budget on six days of crew. The frst observation I make looking back at This is Me is the absolutely natural way that Kimberley and I interacted on camera, in a way that I am not sure is any longer possible, now that documentary participants are so ultra conscious of the way they are representing themselves and will be mediated for television. The second notable element is the sparse use of voice over on the flm, which at the time I wasn’t keen to record at all. It feels stiff and out of keeping with the rest of the documentary, detached and reluctant. It seems to me now that it is an awkward leftover from the style my producers were accustomed to in the previous two decades, a shadow of the old way.

Later, when voice over was emphatically required for effective storytelling, I recorded it in a more personal register, embracing my own subjectivity.

DAISY VO: Two weeks later. Kimberley knows she’s not pregnant. DJ Paul’s still got

her phone, but he isn’t calling her and she hasn't seen him.

KIM: Hi is Paul Edwards there please? See what I mean? See how hard it is to get

hold of him? His mum’s not there. He’s not at the fucking… You know… every day, 60

every hour, every night, every second… I’m thinking about him. And my heart’s

breaking, for real. I feel fucked up. I feel proper fucked up That’s why I ain’t been in

school for about 3 weeks. My mum said that my schooling’s gone down. I’m just

fucked… dunno.97

Marcel Ophuls said in an interview “as a flmmaker... you are always exploiting. It’s part of modern life.”98 But in the contract between flmer and flmed, the exploitation can fow easily both ways, and I have relationships that have lasted more than 20 years to prove it. There is a need as a flmmaker, as well as a flmed person, to continue a relationship that has contained such intensity. In some cases it is the flmed person that chooses to move on and abandon the relationship frst. In this way

Piotrowska’s comparison with psychoanalysis is extremely helpful. The need of each protagonist for the other is equally strong. Piotrowska compares the relationship to the transference-love that occurs on the analyst’s couch, arguing that this relationship is far more important in the decision to allow oneself to be flmed than any narcissistic notion of celebrity. 99 It is about fnding out how someone else sees you. The need for an audience, for recognition. Echoing Lacan on recognition, Judith

Butler writes: “To ask for recognition, or to offer it, is precisely not to ask for recognition of what one already is. It is to solicit a becoming, to instigate a transformation, to petition the future always in relation to the Other.”100 It could be argued that teenagers are particularly used to inviting and offering recognition to and from each other. Weedon writes: “As individuals inserted within specifc discourses, we repeatedly perform modes of subjectivity and identity until these are experienced as second nature.” As a result of all this, the many hours of tape I

97 15: This is Me, Channel 4: 2000

98 Ophuls, Marcel in Rosenthal & Corner 2005: 196-7

99 Piotrowska, Agnieszka 2014:87

100 Butler, Judith 2004:44 61 recorded with Kimberley are not a document of her reality at all, but a document of our relationship, as well as a flm about what happens when you make a flm. Her refective comments would have been heard only in her own thoughts if I had not been there to listen. Her image of herself evolved as she saw herself through my eyes and the eyes of the future audience. The camera gave her a mirror in front of which to question, re-imagine and transform herself. So her performance, as Butler and Stuart

Hall would have it, was a dance between real experience, how she saw herself, how she felt others saw her and how she wished to be seen.

DAISY: Would you like to marry him?

KIMBERLEY: Yeah man! I imagine myself with a white little skirt, white belly top, a

white little jacket and knee high boots, bopping down the aisle, like “C’mon then!”

But I dunno, I dunno! We’ll just have to wait and see. Twenty Mayfair please. I

started smoking from the age of 7 or 8. I don’t smoke because my friends do it or

nothing. I don’t think I look good doing it or anything. I dunno why I do it, I just do.

Ooh you tooting at me?! Take me, take me!101

My own performance has also been a part of the flms I have made about Kimberley.

The listener, the antagonist, the friend, the nagging big sister, the godmother. These roles come naturally, and are not faked, but they are also performed to the best of my abilities, with self-awareness. Am I good friend/ a bad infuence? “If you keep doing this Kim, you’re going to lose Harvey!”102 We deal with these dualities in daily life - the endless contradictions within personalities that mean no two people are alike.

Filming the performance of certain selves may exclude other selves or simply amplify a part of the whole. Kimberley at 15 chose to amplify her romantic self, her adult self, her sexy self, to the exclusion of her troubled self, her childish self, her fears. The latter

101 Kimberley in This is Me 2000

102This is Me Now, More 4: 2010 62 seeped through, but only via the performance of its opposite. Waugh writes of observational documentary: “The genre offers as one of the pleasures of the text the deciphering of borders between social performance, flm performance, and so-called private behaviour and the discovery that the borders are both culturally encoded and imaginary.” The choice of self that we make when being flmed contains a lot of information about us. Our fantasies and dreams are all made up, but they are a truth about us. When these coincide with the unperformed behaviours that I described in chapter 2, the audience is left with a rich and complex language to decode.

Josephine: Give Me a Voice

Josephine and I met when she was in temporary refugee accommodation in

Tyneside, awaiting her children arrival from Zimbabwe, which had been stressfully delayed by the theft of their passports. She was understandably upset and angry and had little patience for anything but the opportunity I was offering her to have her voice heard about her predicament. Her voice was powerful and as long as I just listened and didn’t question her, I was allowed to record the situation. Questions reminded her of the arduous process she had gone through to be granted asylum and I didn’t want to be another white interrogator. I allowed Josephine to give me whatever version of her story she was most comfortable with. When we met her children off the plane, her son Marshal didn’t remember her. There was no need to make any comment, only to record the sadness of it, that they buried in hugs and optimism. I never asked Josephine to talk about it, only letting Marshal tell me from his innocent child’s perspective. Josephine used the camera to make intelligent observations about British life - everyone works too hard, mothers are slaves, schools are too lenient, the streets are unkempt, everyone wastes money all the time and the weather is appalling. Apart from this the camera only viewed her through Marshal’s 63

fg.13 Josephine, still from the documentary eyes, as the person who would not allow him to get his ear pierced for example, as it was un-African for a boy. I also allowed myself to be a protagonist where it helped the story. On one occasion Josephine tested me from her revision book for the British

Citizenship Test, delighting in my failure to correctly answer her questions, and brilliantly demonstrating the petty pointlessness of the system.

JOSEPHINE: Who is the head of the Church of England today?

DAISY: Um… the Archbishop of Canterbury?

JOSEPHINE: No! The Queen! (laughs loudly) Right. How many MPs make up the

cabinet?

DAISY: Um…. twelve?

JOSEPHINE: No! Twenty! When was the Welsh Assembly established?

DAISY: I don’t know.

JOSEPHINE: 1999! Ha!

DAISY: Oh my god… 64

This adept use of the camera as a political tool to attempt to raise awareness of the tough treatment of refugees arriving in the UK made Josephine much more a collaborator than a subject. We discussed the purpose of the series we were making, what its impact might be and how the sacrifces she was making (time and privacy) to do the flming balanced against the benefts of being heard. When she decided to do another flm with me a few years later, it was even more a joint endeavour.

Josephine talked a lot about her experiences of poverty in Zimbabwe as compared to her experiences of poverty in Tyneside. She understood that poverty is relative, but wanted to use her African experiences to try and compel her friends in Newcastle to deal with it better. The BBC were looking for documentaries for a strand called Why

Poverty? instigated by Storyville commissioner Nick Fraser, so I pitched the idea to them and they liked it. Josephine became partly a presenter at that point, rather than an observed documentary participant, a role she embraced and is extremely proud of, going to this day by the nickname I gave her in the title: The Queen of North

Shields.

I’ll Be Your Mirror

Longitudinal documentary has a distinctive impact on its participants’ identities. A review of 7Up in the Evening Standard in 1984 described the series as “television as a magic mirror, a crystal ball in reverse, able to show people their previous forgotten selves, undistorted by tricks of memory.”103 Until 28Up when Claire Lewis joined the production team, no-one maintained relationships with the ‘children’ they flmed and

Lewis found she had to spend considerable time tracking them down. Subsequently she has kept in touch and considers them ‘family’104. But Peter dropped out after

28Up saying “The problem we have is when the camera portrays people maybe

103 Grove, Valerie 1984:25 in Bruzzi Seven Up 2007:3

104 Lewis, Claire 2006 65 accurately, but doesn’t match people’s perceptions of themselves.”105 Longitudinal studies since Seven Up have been largely made by women, perhaps because of the necessity to maintain intimate relationships. Marilyn Gaunt’s Class of ’62 revisits the classmates she flmed 33 years earlier. Annie Goldston’s Sheilas: 28 Years On also revisits previous flmees and Gillian Armstrong’s Not Fourteen Again is the fourth flm in a series about the same three working class Australian women growing up over 20 years. Robert Winston’s Child of Our Time is an exception, but takes a much more scientifc standpoint, and undoubtedly relies on a team of female researchers to liaise with the families, as very many documentary series do. The strong female friendships between Kim, Josephine and I were the very basis of each flm, both the subject and the means to completion.

The complex cocktail of a real friendship and a professional commitment to representing it is not straightforward to navigate. As Bruzzi writes: “Documentaries are inevitably the result of the intrusion of the flmmaker onto the situation being flmed… the truth comes into being only at the moment of flming… through the encounter between flmmakers, subjects and spectators.”106 That encounter can be warm while the camera is on, and in some cases it remains warm when the camera is returned to its bag. Kimberley and I have genuinely remained friends in between flming. Many things have happened in our lives that have gone unrecorded. I was at

Kim’s bedside on Christmas day when she gave birth to her frst child. She was there to support me when my relationship broke down. I helped Kim move house when she needed to start afresh in another town. She came to visit me when I was broke and gave my daughter the courage to swim in the sea. I visited often when she was in hospital having chemotherapy. She trusted me when at her most vulnerable and honoured me by making me godmother to two of her kids. We are those rare people

105 Lewis 2006 in Bruzzi 2007

106 Bruzzi 2006:11 66 for each other that have been constant with support and love for twenty years, and I expect another twenty. Returning to the camera after ten years without it was odd, but not difficult. We used it as a way to talk about things that life usually deters. We used it to think about motherhood and relationships and our friendship. In a way it triggered us both to be better and Harvey aged two, was the benefactor. Without the camera we might have been lazier, less thoughtful, more selfsh. On the frst day of flming Kim said to me “I can’t believe you’re a mum.” I replied “I can’t believe you are.”

The camera gave us space to step back and look at ourselves in a way you don’t when doing laundry or making a toddler a meal that you know will mostly end up on the foor. When she was 15 and I was 22 there was an age gap, but at 25 and 32 it seemed to have shrunk. Our second children, both boys were born a week apart. Their relationship was starting to take shape and as two three year olds they began to have a lot of fun together, as well as some feisty battles. SO in the making of the second flm there was no point even pretending there was a professional line between us.

Josephine and I stay in constant touch using Facebook and Whatsapp. Although we live 300 miles apart we see each other a few times a year, both of us travelling for important events. I attended her graduation and her frst community Culture and

Diversity event. She attended my birthday party and my PhD exhibition. We behave like family and she initiated us calling each other sister. Our sons are close too, often spending holidays together skating and breakdancing. There is an understanding that we might do more flming in the future and we occasionally mention it, running ideas past each other, or refecting on how things have changed since the frst flm.

The convention in the mid 90s was observational camerawork - a “fy on the wall” as opposed to what flmmaker Sean McAllister has more interestingly called “a fy in the ointment”107. Kimberley made me realise that I needed to be present and involved. It

107 McAllister in masterclass at Goldsmiths January 2016 67 was both a storytelling technique and an ethical decision. I knew I couldn’t simply watch as she became upset or got into trouble. I had an elder sister role in her life, regardless of the camera. I knew that I was a part of the story as Harvey’s godmother and Kim’s friend. Even the relatively tiny budget of £60,000 from More4, was enough to buy us both some time to refect on her situation. My relationship with Kimberley meant the power balance in the production process was somewhat disrupted. The access I offered to More 4 was entirely dependent on this long term relationship, which bought a degree of autonomy in the edit. The pervasive unspoken idea that documentary participants are a resource to be harvested for factual television held no weight in this edit. The production adhered more to the rules of a very personal project, similar to that made by a flmmaker about their own family or personal journey. I was both director and participant myself, as the relationship between us was very much the subject of the flm. More 4 allowed a frst person voice over and some control over the title - their frst suggestion, the reductive and sensational “Teen

Mum, Ten Years On” being strongly rejected by Kim and myself. The press was also handled sensitively, with Channel 4 appointing a PR person known for managing sensitive stories. This led to Kim and I being invited onto the Lorraine show on the day of broadcast, together as a mother/godmother flmmaking team. Lorraine was requested to be sympathetic rather than judgemental as is her usual style anyway, and the interview was remarkably insightful, far from dwelling on the mistakes

Kimberley and I may have made. This treatment as a human being, rather than a media commodity, reinforced Kim’s confdence and expectations of empathy. My own role, as godmother and flmmaker was also accepted as a natural, useful and therapeutic one, from which important lessons about the way young single mothers are viewed by society could be drawn. The parallel universe I feared, whereby Kim’s life became another example of how teenage mums fail and deserve their own failures, did not materialise as a result. 68

Kimberley’s positive clear-eyed and empathetic experience of reception by the media meant she was willing, and is still willing, to share her intimate life with the outside world. This extract from our 2017 interview for this research project exemplifes her sense that the more and better an audience got to know and understand her the more they would empathise and the less they would judge:

“I wanted to connect with the people watching me. I wanted them to know me,

the person I was. I wanted them to get to know me when they were watching me

and really get that connection and think yeah I get that girl, i understand where

she’s coming from and I get that. I think I always try to get that. For me it was just

about being real… keeping it real.”108

Josephine too took a very philosophical attitude when her documentaries were broadcast, despite plenty of bigoted hatred from EDL members against her and her kids on Twitter:

DAISY: Did you ever regret letting me flm you?

JOSEPHINE: No, not at all. I don’t regret… not one thing.

DAISY: There must have been moments when you regretted it?!

JOSEPHINE: You know the moments that I regretted it… well the last thing I

wanted was to put my children at risk. That was the moment when I wished that I

had not done it. Wishing otherwise, it could have turned out differently. But it

wasn’t a very easy choice. Cos not saying anything was also wrong in its own way.

I wanted people to know the real truth about life and what happens.109

108 Kimberley interviewed for This is Not Us, 2017

109 Josephine interviewed for This is Not Us, 2017 69

Nash has described the way that “power fows between flmmaker and participant, with both actively infuencing the documentary text… in a constantly negotiated relationship.”110 This collaborative, relational process and rolling consent, is key to maintaining positive long term relationships. There is also a sense that in these one- to-one scenarios individuality is clearer and better respected, avoiding Cooper’s central problem in flming an other: “the privileging of universality over particularity111”, which was certainly one of the problems One Direction fans identifed. Nash’s four key requirements for flmmakers seeking an ethical encounter are very helpful112:

1. acknowledge the contribution of the other

2. acknowledge the limits of one’s own understanding

3. become vulnerable in the flming relationship

4. admit the limits of one’s own power

I would like to add a ffth requirement, which is unpopular amongst risk-adverse production companies, but I think:

5. allow participant input into the fnal representation

Nash uses a Foucauldian perspective to foreground the contest between flmmaker and participant, focussing on the mode of engagement as the most important limiter of risk. But the idea of participant as active creator113 is not simply an ethical choice, but also a creative one. It opens up a more interesting realm within a flm, of how the participant actively wishes to be seen. Joshua Oppenheimer succeeds at this

110 Nash Documentary for the Other 2011:230

111 Cooper 2006 in Nash ibid 2011

112 Nash ibid 2011:238

113 see McDougall in Nash 2011 70 marvellously in The Act Of Killing114, allowing his participants to co-direct the scenes which reconstruct the murders they committed. Errol Morris says the flm is about

“the lies we tell ourselves.”115 Documentary is at its best when it contains a tension between the perspective of the flmmaker and the performance of the flmed person.

In this chapter I have analysed the impact on identity of being flmed, refecting, being flmed, refecting as a regular longitudinal experience. Since flming the documentaries, Kim and Josephine have both chosen to continue sharing their experiences on social media, flming themselves on their phones and broadcasting live on Facebook. The intimacy and unmediated access that Kim gives others to her thoughts and decisions has been a powerful tool in resisting the shame she once felt about her situation. Josephine uses her broadcasts to talk about the politics of race and class, and to inspire her extended family with her latest exploits. They have both developed a pragmatic habit of taking negative comments with a large pinch of salt, choosing instead to refect thoughtfully on the self and make their own decisions about what to change or not. As a number of those I have flmed have also continued to self-represent, chapter four looks at the difference between being represented and self-representing in more detail.

114 Oppenheimer The Act of Killing 2012

115 Morris in Vice 2013 71

Chapter 4 This is Me Unmediated Representing the Self

YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr have swept in a new phase in storytelling where each person can own and publish their own life story if they wish.

Jerry Rothwell calls this “the continuous rise of the subject, towards a participatory utopia in which everyone is broadcasting their own ‘unmediated’ stories.”116 Now that everyone flms, edits and represents themselves, how has the role of the documentary flmmaker changed? The reservation Rothwell expresses about this trend is key to my practice: “What space does this leave for a critical flmmaking in which material is taken at more than it’s surface value?”117 Bill Nichols has described documentary as occupying “a complex zone of representation in which the art of observing, responding and listening must be combined with the art of shaping, interpreting, or arguing.”118 As Rothwell says: “The flmmaker is not just a collector of images. As a flmmaker you try to get underneath your subject’s performance, which may include putting the material in a context different from that originally intended by the subject.”119 Ultimately the intention of the flmmaker is all important; are they trying to faithfully represent the story, if through their subjective viewpoint? Or are they deliberately misrepresenting the subject, due to pressures which are likely commercial? How much mediation is too much? My research, both theoretical and creative must engage with the new fashion for self-representation and investigate what it means to the documentary flmmaker, when as Tommy Tickle asserts in his

116 Rothwell, Jerry in Austin & DeJong 2008:155

117 Rothwell, Jerry in Austin & DeJong 2008:155

118 Nichols, Bill 1997

119 Rothwell, Jerry in Austin & DeJong 2008:156 72 interview for this project: “Everybody’s a fucking documentary-maker nowadays… everybody’s got a phone haven’t they? Everybody’s got one of these nan!”120

In 1998 Cheryl Harris wrote “Television is our most pervasive representation of a shared cultural space.”121 But 20 years later it has been slain by YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, which have left television looking distinctly old-fashioned and undemocratic. There are many ways and mediums now by which we circulate meanings in everyday life, represent the world to each other, and represent ourselves to the world. YouTube is represented itself in the media as a lawless... amateur…free- for-all, the home of an exuberantly creative and dangerous exotic youth, addicted to the new technology and possibly ruined by it. They are seen as savage and undisciplined, sometimes even referred to as “the YouTube generation”, and combining anxieties about youth morality and new media, they are frequently the subject of moral panic; a problem amplifed in the public imagination. Burgess and

Green note that this panic mirrors all panics at new technologies, particularly those that put cultural production in the hands of the masses, or lower classes, like the introduction of the pauper press in the early nineteenth century.122

Youtube

One Direction fans used Youtube voraciously between 2010 and 2016, to represent themselves and share their thoughts and feelings with other fans. Leader fans such as thatsojack, Lottie tommo123, Tyler Oakley and Caspar would also gain huge followings for One Direction related vlogs. Tyler Oakley has made a Youtube career of his

120 Asquith This is Not Us, University of Sussex 2018

121 Harris *******

122 Burgess & Green 2013: 14

123 sister of Louis Tomlinson 73 fandom, getting retweeted by Harry in July 2013, cheered by a stadium full of fans that August and even drawing the attention of One Direction’s management who allowed him to interview124 them in September 2013, with a rather limited range of allowed questions, but managing to ask them if they “don’t wanna see fan fction” holding on to his status as an insider as well as a leader fan. The interview got 5.7m views on his Youtube channel and took him to 1m followers. The “One Direction effect” has apparently meant a huge increase in subscribers for white male Youtubers in the last four years, particularly the British ones.125

YouTube gives ordinary people access to the media world, to a voice that can be heard by anyone in any country, and if sufficiently interesting, go viral and reach enormous audiences. When Chris Crocker became globally infamous for his “Leave Britney

Alone!” video in 2007126, which in at time of writing in 2018 has had nearly 50 million views, it became clear that anyone could become a YouTube star just by having a strong opinion on something. The YouTube “rant”, the genre of video that I am about to investigate, was born. In the 2010s it is possible to be a professional YouTuber, and earn a wage from the advertising revenue. The understanding of amateur bedroom video producers as to how public or private their videos are, varies. For the most part, the sheer scale on which YouTube operates now protects individuals from over- exposure. Jenkins asks “How many visitors to the site move below the most visible content, especially if they don’t already have a stake in the topics or communities involved?” But take the example of Lonelygirl15, a YouTube vlogger whose emotional post about her religious parents ruining her relationship with her boyfriend attracted half a million hits in 48 hours. That the video turned out to be a flmmaking

124 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teg6qTE9Hjs Tyler Coakley’s Youtube channel

125 Denis Crushell, vice president of Europe for Tubular Labs in BBC article 2015 http://www.bbc.co.uk/ news/uk-england-34504053

126 https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=kHmvkRoEowc 74 experiment did not detract from the fact that such a seemingly intimate teenage space combined with the confessional genre had a powerful draw on an audience. It is unclear what amateur YouTubers expectations are of who else might see their videos. Certainly their parents are not supposed to. But this will be the last generation of Western teenagers with parents who are not digitally literate, who are on the other side of Jenkins’ “participation gap”127. Perhaps they are the only generation ever who won’t expect adults to enter their space online. The anonymity that is afforded YouTube participants means the comments sections are routinely flled with ‘hate’ and ‘trolls’ being provocatively unpleasant. Lange states this is accepted “as part of the game, taking the bad with the good. Learning how to manage ‘trolls’, both practically and emotionally, is one of the core competencies required for effective or enjoyable participation.”128

For the One Direction fandom YouTube is yet another social network, a way of communicating with each other. The vlog is technically easy to produce, requiring little more than a webcam and basic editing skills129 - jump-cuts being the tradition - and the direct conversational style inherently invites feedback. The comments area below the video is a central feature of this genre, often physically pointed out from within the vlog, inviting critique and discussion. Lange notes that YouTubers then respond to and address the comments they receive in their next vlog.130 Those that merely watch, without participating have earned the dismissive name ‘lurkers’131, or more recently ‘creepers’. Arguably, says Henry Jenkins, people are using YouTube

“because they feel the emotional support of a community eager to see their

127 Jenkins, Henry in Burgess & Green 2009:116

128 Burgess & Green 2009:96

129 Burgess & Green 2009:54

130 Lange 2007a

131 Burgess & Green 2009:82 75 productions... YouTube transforms all consumers into potential authors.”132 Before

YouTube however, fans were more cautious about who saw their fan productions. The

‘vidders’ featured in Jenkins’ Textual Poachers in 1992, did not want to be identifed for fear their videos would be misunderstood by the world outside their fandom. For example “when a Kirk/Spock vid, set to Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Closer’ leaked onto YouTube without its’ creator’s permission, its queer reading of the Star Trek characters as lovers was widely read as comic…”133

Facebook

Facebook Live has allowed video diarists or vloggers to be selective about their audiences. I will look at three sets of videos broadcast on Facebook by previous

participants of my documentaries. Kimberley

uses Facebook Live to flm her kids and allow

her Facebook friends to see how they are

getting on, with an intimacy which she may

not wish to share on Youtube. She also uses it

to sell a range of items, from bath bombs to

Ann Summers lingerie and vibrators.134 Most

days it is possible to spend 20-30 minutes

listening to her talk about a product and/or

share a story from her life with partner Dan

and four kids. Barrie from My Gay Dads uses fg.14 Kimberley, Facebook Live 2018

132 Jenkins, Henry in Burgess & Green 2009:116

133 Jenkins, Henry in Burgess & Green 2009:117

134 https://www.facebook.com/groups/1519544428135288/ Kim’s BeYoutiful Boutique on Facebook 76

Facebook Live to update his friends and fans

about his move from Essex to Florida, posting

every time there is a family event or weather

situation, for example Hurricane Ophelia. He has

made his family famous for gender selection,

using egg donors and surrogates and freezing

embryos for later use. He has a following of

123,000 followers on Twitter at time of writing.135

Josephine from My New Home uses Facebook

Live to inspire her friends (3,001 of them in March

fg.15 Barrie, Facebook Live 2017

2018)136 to keep ft and achieve their dreams.

Many of her posts appear to be aimed at family and friends back in Zimbabwe. All three are in control of the way they represent themselves and their families, performing the self that they wish to share with the outside world. This control does not mean the audience necessarily get the impression that is intended however.

fg.16 Josephine, Facebook Live 2018

“… I’m just popping on to say that I am literally super excited because we’ve got 20% all toys this weekend, so I’m really really excited… Who is going to wa†ch the Fifty Shades movie tonight? I’m s excited about it. Well if you are going, screen shot your cinema ticket

135 https://twitter.com/Gaydads Barrie Drewitt-Barlow Twitter account

136 https://www.facebook.com/josephine.siziba Josephine Siziba Facebook account 77 and send me it over and I can give you 15% off all orders until 10am tomorrow morning.

I’ve read all the books so literally I’m super excited. Please feel free to add your friends, family, work colleagues to my group and they can get the offer too. What’s everybody up to this weekend? We’ve got loads and loads and loads of amazing offers… I’m just going to show you a few of the amazing items we are launching, amazing colours. A lot of my ladies love the Ellen non-wired bra…. mags how are you, hope you’re doing well. These are £10. £10 for such a lovely bra, they sit lush, honestly. Match em up with our mix and match bottoms as well…. a thong or a Brazilian or… Hot pink, the green, honestly ladies these do look amazing on…. I’ve always been quite reluctant to wear a non wired bra but these pick you up in all the right places and they wash really well too. All you’ve got to do is pop me your address and I’ll pop you over a catalogue….”137

Zigi Shipper from After the Holocaust has also taken control of his own representation since I made a flm with him. In 2017 his grandson Darren Richman fnished a documentary that exclusively told Zigi’s story, and in the way he wished it to be told. It was a simple and beautifully made project that allowed Zigi to tell his life story without having it compared to anyone else’s, juxtaposed or mediated in any way. Zigi was a very supportive collaborator on After the Holocaust, but even so he understood that the documentary was about more than just his rehearsed story. The power to control that story and offer it without the subjective viewpoint of a flmmaker must have been important to him.138 Even my cousin Johnny Browne has now embraced Facebook. After I printed and posted to him all the reviews of the documentary we made, and all the messages that were sent to me on Facebook, he began to take an interest in the conversation he couldn’t access, fnally persuading me to take him to buy a tablet, which he now uses with some guidance, in the library, once a week. Johnny is interested in his online image and how he can represent

137 9 Feb 2018 1pm Kimberley Walker, Facebook Live

138 84303 by Darren Richman https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/84303-doc-film/8-4-3-0-3-doc-film 78 himself with photos and stories, as well as videos others tag him in when he sings

Irish ballads in the pubs of West Clare.139

Jerry Rothwell notes that “the use of self-shot footage of intimate moments is becoming part of documentary language and one of the ways that new technologies

- digital video, internet distribution, home recording and editing - are transforming documentary practice.”140 This new prevalence “opens up different kinds of relationships between flmmakers and subjects, raising new questions about where the role of the flmmaker starts and ends.”141 The frst appearance of the confessional video diary was in the 1980s, when Hi8 camcorders made it possible for people to flm themselves, and it is now the dominant form on YouTube. Rothwell describes the attraction of the diary format as being that “it plays into our fantasy of seeing what really goes on when we aren’t there, of getting closer to how life might be without the cameras present at all.” He quotes Vertov here on the impulse to “show people without masks, without makeup, to catch them through the eye of the camera in a moment when they are not acting, to read their thoughts, laid bare by the camera.”142 But the modern video diarist has a strong idea of the audience they are performing for. The difference is in the subjectivity of the flmmaker being bypassed. “what makes this material distinctively different from other material captured by the lens is precisely its mix of private and public, its ambiguous combination of intimacy and performance.”143 Rothwell goes on to describe the video diary as “an experiment with the borders of public and private.”144 More and

139 https://www.facebook.com/johnny.browne.71697 Johnny Browne’s Facebook page

140 Rothwell, Jerry in Austin & DeJong 2008:152

141 Rothwell, Jerry in Austin & DeJong 2008:152

142 Vertov 1984:41 in Rothwell, Jerry in Austin & DeJong 2008:153

143 Rothwell, Jerry in Austin & DeJong 2008:153

144 Rothwell, Jerry in Austin & DeJong 2008:154 79 more the documentary maker’s subjectivity is removed from the equation at the shooting stage - fxed rig series in which cameras are placed all over a hospital (One

Born Every Minute), a school (Educating Essex) or even a family home (The Family) are immensely popular, because they offer a view of an institution that doesn’t appear to be authored by a journalist. However the decisions that are made during an edit shape the tone and message of these flms far more than is evident on screen.

Perhaps using YouTube footage rather than shooting one’s own documentary footage is a logical progression in a movement that has seen cameras get smaller and lighter and less intrusive - what Chanan calls “the invisibility of the camera”145and more able to capture reality faithfully. Subject-shot footage is the next step a flmmaker can take into their interior world, into their private space and into their thoughts. Although it could be argued that being in charge of the camera themselves may actually increase the performance of the self. Pennebaker answered criticism of the ‘acting up’ in his flm “Don’t Look Back” about Bob Dylan, by saying that of course Dylan was performing - “he was playing himself, and doing it very well”.146 In Chapter three I explored the idea that we all play ourselves in everyday life, not just when a camera is pointing our way. However, Butler suggests that pressuring a witness to speak may lead to ‘falsifcations’147 due to their desire to please. Could this section of the ethical documentary minefeld be avoided by making a flm entirely from YouTube videos? Could the flmmaker be removed from the flming part of the process, so it can not be said that they infuenced it in any way, particularly when the producers of the videos did not know when they made them that they might be used in this way?

145 Chanan, Michael in Austin & DeJong 2008:124

146 Chanan, Michael in Austin & DeJong 2008:125

147 Butler 2004:45 80

Twitter

The voice that the One Direction fandom worked together to amplify on Twitter, and that I began to explore in Chapter One, was the only way they could be heard - en masse. They would encourage each other to retweet certain hashtags over and over, in some cases hundreds of times in one sitting, to get it trending and noticed around

the world. One Direction’s management

latched onto this powerful resource in

the shape teenage girls’ thumb-time, by

creating competitions and votes that

involved their choice of publicity-

friendly hashtags. But the fans also used

it to promote their own ideas,

fg.17 Twitter Worldwide Trends 15 Aug 2013

Larry being the prime example. The ideas could involve picture themes like

#HarryBodyShots which was very popular, or requests to the and such as

#NiallTakeASelfeWithTheo which begged for a photo of Niall with his newborn nephew. #StrandWatch chronicled Zayn’s haircut and which bit of his quiff was falling forwards at any given moment, while #HarryWeKnowWhatYouDid let Harry Styles know that the fans had busted him for favouriting a sexy photo of a naked girl. He responded to this global Twitter trend by immediately favouriting as many cute animals as possible. The voice Directioners found collectively was also used to raise money for charity, vote the band into award success and request their choice of next single off the album. It gave the girls a sense of being part of a ferce community. It also reinforced the sense that they were stronger together as a unifed group, which gave rise to much internal policing of any divisions. Twitter also was the hub for 81 sharing other media - fan art on tumblr, fan fction on Wordpress or fan vids from

Youtube.

fg.18 Graph showing spike in followers of @daisyasquith by TwitterCounter

The collective voice that Twitter affords the fandom came into its own when Crazy

About One Direction was broadcast. A huge spike occurred in mentions of “larry” in the 24 hours after broadcast. As fg.19 shows there is also a sharp spike in followers to

@daisyasquith. Getting hashtags to trend frst in the UK during broadcast, and then worldwide, meant the Larry Shippers were heard and acknowledged by mainstream news journalists as well as famous vloggers and bloggers all over the internet. Mike

Willis (7.5k subscribers) got 13,328 views for his vlog #RIPLarryShippers Did 42 One 82

Direction Fans Commit Suicide Over Documentary? (Liam Payne Responds).148

AbnormallyAdam (77k subscribers) got 17,431 views for CRAZY ABOUT ONE

DIRECTION DOCUMENTARY.149 The hugely popular Youtube Shane Dawson (12m subscribers!) also made a video about Larry Shippers, which attempted to persuade the fandom that the suicides were a hoax, getting 730,072 views.150 Many fans didn’t appreciate his suggestion though, that Larry might not be real.

fg.19 Tweet claiming Larry is real

Found Footage

The frst site of my creative and critical practice is YouTube, and the response videos that fans made to my documentary in the few days after it was broadcast. They turned to YouTube to “reassemble (themselves) in their own likeness.”151Their Youtube rants are autobiographical and work as sites of resistance against the dominant representation of the fandom (my documentary). This resistance is powerful and shouldn’t be underestimated, as Jenkins writes: “Human rights activist Ethan

Zuckerman argues that any platform sufficiently powerful to enable the distribution of cute cat pictures can also be deployed to bring down a government under the right circumstances. Right now, people are learning how to produce, upload and circulate content. What happens next is up to us.”152 I downloaded and analysed a

148 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWoFAHYhc-o

149 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysu8R9qwEP4

150 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogwZvVbzS1I

151 Gusdorf in Piotrowska 2014: 180

152 Jenkins, Henry in Burgess & Green 2009:114 83

large number of these videos and took a core sample of 40, which includes almost all the videos available with the hashtag #ThisIsNotUs, only rejecting a few of them during the edit for either technical reasons, usually sound problems at the recording stage, or ethical reasons if the girls appear to be under 16. All the Youtube videos in my sample are transcribed in Appendix 1, and many are available on the website for this project https://daisy-asquith-xdrf.squarespace.com.

The videos offer an opportunity to allow the fandom to represent themselves in the way they feel is appropriate, and to give them a chance to critique my documentary.

They passionately criticise the choice of fans for being too extreme, not normal, too intense, not representative of them. The true Directioner documentary that they say they would like to make themselves is not visible on any of their YouTube channels and may have proved too difficult to complete. The temptation to help them make this flm is strong. Could this new flm serve the fandom’s desire to set the record straight and let the boys know they aren’t all crazy? Should this be part of the intention of my practice? By setting out to help them make their response I would also be making a documentary project that interrogates the ethical issues in documentary representation. The form and content both ask questions about representation.

Of the 40 videos in my sample, thirty-six are made by US teenagers, two are British, one German and one Danish. Their superfcially observed ethnicities are as follows: twenty-fve white, six Hispanic, fve black, four Asian. There are thirty-eight girls and two boys, both boys identifying as gay within their channels. Their ages appear to range from 13 to 20. The videos last between three and nine minutes and have many features in common. They are all flmed on either a computer webcam or a mobile 84 phone and they all feature one teenager addressing the camera directly, almost always from their bedroom. The videos share content as well, sometimes seeming to chime together, occasionally using almost the same words to make the same arguments. The frst part of my practice involves the purposefully minimal editing of this material to create a new flm, which allows the fandom to contest my representation of them while simultaneously questioning the shame that they have internalised.153

fg.20 ‘Casey’ contests the documentary on her Youtube channel, August 2013

Twenty-one fans were critical of the girls who were flmed and said the documentary should have been about “normal fans who have never met the boys and have boring lives” (justalyssa)154. Eleven of the videos expressed the idea that Larry shipping and fan art should not be on television: ”that stuff doesn’t go on television!” (alanagrace).

Nine said they were ashamed of the fandom “Right now I’m ashamed to show my face!” (6directionerxo) and eight said they were afraid of what the band would think:

“The boys are gonna see that! Aaargh!” (iwannabeaunicorn). Seven YouTubers worried that Larry shippers may commit suicide and fve admitted that fans are

153 https://daisy-asquith-xdrf.squarespace.com

154 see appendix 1 for transcript 85

“sometimes crazy.” Five of the videos were extremely critical of Channel 4, but three admitted they had not seen the documentary yet. It was completely acceptable to join the protest against the documentary, in fandom solidarity, without having actually seen it. The actual sequences in the program do not get specifc mention.

The Larry section is considered most offensive, but in the fandom response the noisy fact of its simple existence overwhelms and drowns out the actual content.

Working with found footage has now become a genre in itself, with festivals such as

Jornadas de Reapropriación in Mexico and Frames of Representation at the ICA giving a platform to flms made entirely from footage found on the internet, CCTV, or home videos. Adam Curtis has made it his speciality, using masses of BBC archive, much of it from the 1970s, to demonstrate and illustrate his polemics.155 Xu Bing’s recent flm

Dragonfy Eyes ignores the original intention of the footage entirely, using randomly sourced CCTV images to construct a love story.156 Maxim Pozdorovkin’s Our New

President157 takes yet another step into this danger zone of reappropriation, by embracing the lies told in the found footage. Using Russia Today broadcasts intercut with Youtube representations, the flm allows Russians to tell us why they want

Trump to win the election, and disturbingly, why they know he will, because Putin will fx it. My refexive practice for this project investigates the possibilities for telling a story using only the footage found on Youtube.

In this chapter I have engaged with the ways in which self-representation has altered the territory of documentary and the role of the flmmaker in representing reality.

The possibilities for broadcasting the “unmediated” self are increasingly more popular and I deal here with just a few of them. These representations however are as

155 see http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis

156 Bing Dragonfly Eyes 2018.

157 Pozdorovkin Our New President 2018. 86 performed as mediated ones and infuenced by the many factors described in chapters one to three. What is missing again here, is the space between flmer and flmed, the actual subject matter of a documentary. Found footage seems to offer an opportunity to delete the relationship from a flm, but is it preferable to reduce the sense of mediation? In chapter fve I describe, analyse and refect upon my practice work with both found and flmed footage for this PhD. 87

Chapter 5 Refexive Practice

The creative research for this project has fnally resulted in three different modes of practice apart from this written thesis: a gallery installation, a curated online space and a linear narrative flm. All three indications of the research are titled

This is Not Us, and they answer the same enquiry in slightly different ways. They purposefully employ different degrees and style of mediation, in an experiment of both ethics and aesthetics. The linear narrative flm is the closest to the type of documentary making I am familiar with, where editing is designed for clarity and entertainment. The installation has been constructed with the viewer in mind as an interactive and active participant, challenged more directly to think about their own role as audience. The online space is designed to free the source material from as much of my own mediation and juxtaposition, what Tommy Tickle might call

“mischief”(!)158, giving the audience a chance to explore, uncover and curate a story for themselves. These three modes of documentary work all enquire after the impact upon flmed participants of documentaries; they all investigate performances of the self; they all challenge the ethics and limits of representation and they all ask the audience to consider their role in meaning-making.

This is Not Us

The frst element of my practice is intended to both interrogate my previous practice as a flmmaker and challenge an audience to think about the way they see the fans in my work. Working with their self-shot footage removes many of my usual opportunities for mediation of a story; all those that occur during flming. Any desire to please the flmmaker is removed from this footage, but there is undoubtedly still

158 Tommy interviewed for This is Not Us, University of Sussex 2018 88 an element of performance, as they are playing to the fandom, a different crowd, but just as demanding of certain language, tone, passion, content. Their sense of community is evident, with some validating of others, echoing and supporting other

Youtubers, to create a shared voice, which is exemplifed by their use of Twitter hashtags as described in Chapter 4. The authoring of an edit is not removed by my use of this footage, and this is also investigated by the edit itself. Is it admissible for me to make cuts in their videos? Or should I play them uncut for an audience in the way “open space” documentary might? In service to this idea I have presented their videos uncut on the website for This is Not Us. At the same time I ask: is there a way to make the questions raised by their videos more accessible, and therefore more effective, by editing? How does juxtaposition of videos by different fans create new meanings? This question is explored by the editing of a 22 minute linear flm, designed to be watched in full in one sitting.159 The arguments are grouped thematically so that the fans voices chime together, and the flm has a sense of progress. The jump cuts that were part of the creator’s original videos remain, but I haven’t created any new jump cuts. If there is a cut in a video, it is clear where it is, as it cuts to another speaker. There are no cutaways available anyway. In editing I was aware that I was making the fans more succinct, possibly more coherent, but I accepted this level of mediation of their material as an unavoidable side effect of making the material accessible. If the videos played back to back uncut the flm would be around 3 and a half hours long and extremely repetitive and slow-moving, as it would include every diversion, re-emphasis, interruption and pause that occurs in the recording. My mediation exists in the flm nonetheless, in the choice of participants, although I have represented them evenly across the group and only rejected some for technical issues. The initial 22 minute flm contains no titles, music, voice over, exteriors or cutaways. It rejects all the aesthetic tricks of television and

159 https://daisy-asquith-xdrf.squarespace.com/youtube/?p 89 attempts to cut as infrequently as possible. However it does contain cuts in the service of narrative and also to a comparatively small degree, of entertainment. This is not to say that the cuts ever mislead as to the meaning that the creator of the video intended, but they allow the meanings to be transmitted more succinctly. The flm is designed to be viewed at a festival or in a gallery space, more on which later in this chapter.

This is the Real Me

The second part of my practice takes in participants from fve of my other self-shot documentaries: Kimberley from This Is Me (2000)160 and This Is Me Now (2010)161, who I have known for 20 years now and is subject of chapter three; Marshal and Josephine

from My New Home162(2005-10), a fve year documentary project about refugee families settling in Britain; Johnny and Mary, my family members from the flm about my mother’s secret adoption from Ireland After the Dance (2015)163; Vegas from Crazy

About One Direction (2013), who is now 16 years old; Zigi Shipper from Britain’s

Holocaust Survivors (2014)164 and Tommy Tickle aka Gary Lawford, from the flm

Clowns (2008)165 who has been an on-off friend for 10 years since flming.

In This is the Real Me I set out to make a flm about being flmed. I asked the experts what the impact of being in a documentary is on their lives. I asked them eight core questions:

160 Asquith 15:This is Me, 48 mins, Channel 4 2000

161 Asquith This is Me Now retitled by channel Kimberley: Young Mum Ten Years On, 47 mins, 2010 More 4

162 Asquith Britain: My New Home, 5x47 mins 2010 More 4

163 Asquith After the Dance retitled by channel My Mother the Secret Baby, 77 mins, broadcast 30 March 2015 BBC4

164 Asquith After the Holocaust retitled by Channel 4 Britain’s Holocaust Survivors 47 mins, broadcast 14 January 2014 Channel 4

165 Asquith Clowns, 58 mins broadcast 7 April 2008 BBC2 90

1. Why and how did you decide to allow me to flm you?

2. Do you think you were your true self during flming?

3. When you saw the flm did you like the way you were represented by me?

4. What was the audience reaction to the flm?

5. What has the impact of being flmed been on your life and identity?

6. Did you ever regret your decision to be flmed?

7. Can you describe our relationship?

8. Would you be flmed for a documentary again?

Question one took each participant back to the moment we met, before they understood what it meant to be represented by a documentary flmmaker, and long before they became known, and recognised in the street for an aspect of their lives.

The remaining questions are designed to challenge them to think about what aspects of their selves they were performing when flmed, and whether that matters.

I gave them all an opportunity to talk about the way the flm was mediated by me and whether they felt misrepresented at any point, to refect on the way they were received by an audience and to describe the way being flmed has changed them. I encouraged expressions of regret or ambivalence about the decision to be flmed and whether they would make the same decision again. I also asked for an honest appraisal of our relationship and what it meant to them. The full transcripts of these interviews are in appendix 3 and the interview videos and original documentaries are available online at https://daisy-asquith-xdrf.squarespace.com/vegas-lola

Kimberley admits she had no idea what she was getting herself into, but just craved the attention, “for someone to listen to me”. She never let go of the value of that, despite receiving criticism when the flm was broadcast. She talks about using the 91 flm to refect, watching it regularly to help her work out what was going wrong in her life. She expresses happiness that our friendship has sustained twenty years of ups and downs and she says she has used the critical comments of the audience to re-evaluate her relationships with men, some of which were violent, and to refect on her own behaviour and emotions. Kim’s clear-eyed understanding of the range of reactions from the audience enables her to flter the helpful from the unhelpful and the constructive from the meaningless:

fg.21 Kimberley in 2000 (L) and 2017 (R)

You learn from it. It was a very big learning curve for me in my life and years down the line when I’ve watched it back it’s helped me in so many ways, not to be the way that I was, if that somehow makes sense in some way. And it really helped me move on, how can I explain it? I think it bettered me as a person as well. I think it helped me calm down and I’m a mum now so things are very different for me now.166

Kim also talks about the difference in her attitude between the frst flm we made together in 2000 and the second ten years later. She is frank about her innocence going into the frst documentary:

“I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for. I didn’t know what the reaction to me being flmed was gonna be. It was all fun and games to begin with, you know I was quite young,

166 Kimberley interview August 2017 https://daisy-asquith-xdrf.squarespace.com/new-gallery-87/?p 92 bit out there, quite inquisitive and I suppose I just wanted to be like everybody else at the time. But it’s only after the documentary’s actually made and edited and then you sit down and actually watch it back that it really hits you and it really sets in, like wow, this is what we’ve been doing for all that time. Then you get yourself all geared up cos you know it’s gonna go on TV and I think that’s the most nerve-racking part is knowing that night it’s going live, being aired and then it goes to the public and that their reaction is gonna be and you’re always gonna get good and bad. I did get a negative response from it but i also got a positive response so you have to weigh it up.”

Her overall attitude to having chosen to live her life in public is a pragmatic and positive one:

“…with television and documentary making i always think it’s better to just be yourself and make that connection and let people get to know you the way you are. I personally think it’s better to just be that way. It was defnitely a challenge put it that way, and very enjoyable as well the fun we had doing it!”

fg.22 Marshal in 2005 (L) and 2017 (R)

I met Marshal when he was only 10 years old and had arrived in Britain three weeks earlier to be reunited with his mum Josephine, a Zimbabwean refugee who had been living in the UK for fve years. For Marshal I was a fun distraction and someone to talk to about rap music, earrings, hairstyles and girls, when he feared upsetting his mum. I 93 also irritated him with my camera, asking too many questions about “boring” stuff.

But mostly he enjoyed the experience. When the documentaries (fve of them made over 5 years) were broadcast on Channel 4 he was embarrassed, in the acute way teenagers are, by the image of himself as a child, with a Zimbabwean accent, that couldn’t read well. This was a mighty challenge to our relationship but Marshal’s nature being happy-go-lucky and his wide popularity amongst his peers meant he didn’t let the shame of others get to him, and was never angry with me. He instead decided to learn to read well and following an eye test that showed he needed a strong prescription, the root cause of his struggle with literacy was found. He also says his behaviour was altered by being flmed.

“Yeah I guess I’ve changed myself after watching it cos I get the chance of seeing myself on TV and seeing what I’m doing wrong and what I’m doing right. Not everyone gets that opportunity like… they just do what they do. Whereas if you get the vision of somebody else seeing it, it’s like wow, that’s what you actually look like? You don’t wanna be too embarrassed about how you come across… if that’s you, do you, 100 per cent.”167

Thankfully Marshal was not aware of the appalling response on Twitter from racist white nationalists who don’t merit recording here. I discussed it with Josephine whose courage was far too great to be visibly shaken. When I ask her if she ever regretted taking part in the flms she is very reluctant to admit it, but on being pushed by me she says the racism did scare her. But that it was worth it.

“Did you ever regret letting me flm you?

No, not at all. I don’t regret… not one thing.

There must have been moments when you regretted it?!

167 Marshal interview July 2017 167 https://daisy-asquith-xdrf.squarespace.com 94

You know the moments that I regretted it… well the last thing I wanted was to put my children at risk. That was the moment when I wished that I had not done it. Wishing otherwise, it could have turned out differently. But it wasn’t a very easy choice. Cos not saying anything was also wrong in its own way.”

This exemplifes Josephine’s approach to being flmed. She has taken confdence and dignity from the experience and used it as a platform to speak out about injustice:

fg.23 Josephine in 2006 (L) and 2017 (R)

“Yes it has changed our life in many ways. On the negative, when people think that what we have done or said is wrong, they will just literally hate us for no apparent reason and we wouldn’t even be knowing. And sometimes on social media they can actually try to attack and things like that… so that was a negative. But um… on the positive it has actually… I can see it through Mento. She stands out and she likes to speak out. And she wasn’t like that when we… I think confdence. Everybody has been boosted in their confdence. It didn’t happen like hey here is your confdence coming! It happened gradually, when we were living and experiencing and talking and hearing the feedback and everything. I think… it was a good outcome. I kind of felt that your flming is very eloquent, and different. It make you feel at home. You don’t feel pressured to do anything and I think that way you actually get more out of people than if you would be questioning them…” 95

Josephine has campaigned for asylum seekers under threat of deportation and made speeches at marches in Newcastle against Brexit, austerity and the treatment of asylum seekers. Josephine interestingly doubts whether I had any infuence on the way she and her family came across:

“How did you feel about the way that I represented you? Did you like the way I made you look? Or did you think that’s just the way she sees me, it’s not how I really am?

Er… did you have any infuence on the way we seemed? I don’t think that you did.

Because the way you flm is totally different from other things as I said… because you just allow people to be themselves. So it wouldn’t be… you were allowing us to be what?

Everyone was just being what they were, and that is exactly what the flm was intending to be.”

For her the flm is a simple mirror that refects - perhaps the documentaries about her succeeded in matching up with her identity, or perhaps she found the version of herself that she saw pleasing.

fg.24 Johnny & Mary in 2014 (L) and 2018 (R)

Johnny and Mary are my relatives in County Clare, on the far West coast of Ireland.

They live largely like their family did a century earlier, in a broken down farmhouse surrounded by the cows, donkeys, horses and chickens they raise for a small living. I met Johnny and Mary when my mum and I went searching for the story behind her 96 adoption as a young baby. I was flming our trips to Clare, unsure at the time whether it would ever be comfortable or permitted to make a documentary that anyone else could see. Johnny and Mary were not keen on the idea of being on television, but I put no pressure on them at all. They were ashamed that their Uncle Tom had got my grandmother pregnant in a hay barn, and didn’t relish the world fnding out about it:

“When I was frst asking you to make a flm, what did you think of the idea?

J: Sure, when we frst heard the story that Tom was the father, we kinda felt ashamed, cos we always looked up to Tom kinda, as a pillar of society. We’d kind of preferred if it would never have went on television or anything. We thought we were blackened and we didn’t know what kind of reaction we’d get - would people look down on us? But we were kind of surprised that people seemed to, you know, were happy that we’d done it for you. They encouraged us for doing it, you know, it brought our families together. And everywhere we go we meet someone that’s seen the flm, and we’re kind of happy with that. They say how love the flm and how natural we were in the flm and that if you paid actors to do the flm it wouldn’t have come out as natural. We took no notice of the cameras - we just spoke from the heart and that got across to the people.”

We travelled to New York looking for trace of my grandfather Tom’s escape from

Ireland. The journey released them from the strict attitudes of the Catholic community back home and once they saw the flm I had made, they loved it and got right behind it (many of my family did not, and some still do not talk to me as a result of the shame I unleashed on them). Their experience of the festival screenings and broadcast on BBC4 has been extremely positive, when rather than the shame they imagined, the audience respond jubilantly to their open-minded and loving attitude.

They were widely hailed as heroes, causing other families to seek out their relatives, lost in the fog of shame imposed by religion: 97

“J: We’ve met with people and they tell us they had much the same story you know, or they knew of people that had the same story, that was kind of brushed under the carpet like, long ago. And they were happy that they got encouragement from the documentary to look for their relations you know, and we were happy that we got to do good for other people. We were happy with that like. At the start we didn’t think things would turn out so good and we’d get so much reward from the flm. We thought it would be the other way round after doing the flm, that we’d be looked down on, you know. But we didn’t… I feel we were looked up to.”

fg.25 Vegas & Lola in 2013 (L) and 2018 (R)

Vegas appeared in Crazy About One Direction when she was only 12, alongside her friend, Lola, 11. They are now 16 and 15. Vegas is not necessarily representative of all the fans I flmed, just as they weren’t representative of all fans. But she has a bold and articulate analysis of the experience of being flmed as well as the reaction of fans.

There was one fan in Manchester who regretted taking part in the flm at the time and still wishes she hadn’t. The Twitter hate affected her and she needed a lot of support from me and other participants at the time of broadcast, to encourage her not to listen to the trolls and be proud of herself. There were fve participants to the documentary that celebrated their inclusion without doubts, and three that had mixed feelings - liking the flm, but hating the attention on social media. I was in touch with all of them after the broadcast and repeatedly over the following days, and in the case of those that needed my support, much longer. Vegas has some 98 interesting comments to make about the relationship a documentary maker has with their participant though, and challenged me more than anyone else to think about my motives and how my personality structures the flms I make.

“V: You just encourage everyone to be as cheeky as they can. And then you just laugh at them when they do it.

So I’m sort of like that as a person you think?

V: Yeah, as a person though. Like with anyone. You’ll just encourage anyone to do whatever you think… like, whatever’s funny!

That sounds so irresponsible… oh god…

Why weren’t you kinda mad at me that I put you in that situation?

V: I don’t know. Cos… it’s never actually affected me, like, being in it, or… what happened… I never got any hate for it, like, I actually… it was really enjoyable when we did it. / Nobody would really recognise me from it though. No-one would see that, unless they knew me, no-one would watch that and say That’s defnitely Vegas! Literally you wouldn’t even know it was the same person unless you knew me well enough.”

This one comment contains a cutting analysis of the space between reality and entertainment that documentary flm inhabits. It shatters the idea of the impartial observer, and simultaneously that of the uncaring and irresponsible flmmaker, fnding a grey area where documentary is naughty but fun. Tommy (Clowns 2008) expresses a strong sense that the flm was a collaboration between us as performer and flmmaker:

“So did you feel like you were performing a role for the flm?

There was an element of performing a role for myself, because I was making the kind of television that I would actually want to watch. And I’ve gotta admit to ya, I made lots of… 99

It is a decade old that flm and it’s still spoken about in very fond terms and people who still see it remark about how timeless it is, how we just managed to nail the zeitgeist of what was happening at that time… drunk parents, uptight parents, cheesed-off children’s entertainers, the state of society as it was at the time.”

fg.26 Tommy in 2008 (L) and 2018 (R)

Tommy’s knowingness about the process of documentary flmmaking, which partly comes from our friendship and partly from other encounters with what he calls

“media-types”, means that he is in some ways more suspicious of the decisions made by the flmmaker, and in other ways less suspicious, as he understands clearly the purpose behind. He is quick to assume more deviousness and plotting than actually exists though:

“The only thing that I got cheesed off about, which you later told me, which is the classic thing that documentary flmmakers don’t tell you…. They can be as honest and as doe- eyed and as batty-eyelidded as they want, but when it come to certain things they do… like you deliberately made me late to a party! So that we had to…

No I didn’t!

Yes you did!

It wasn’t deliberate!

You said that you deliberately held back! You were drunk at the time!

I accidentally made you late by suggesting we went on the coast road. 100

Well there was that as well but I did… if you remember I was doing 90 in a 30 and that was in one of the fnal edits and I did say Do you mind just taking that bit out? While you were flming down there… I mean that was just… you know. Yeah it was thrilling, but anyway. It happened years ago so it doesn’t matter. they never hired me again! / Right lets backtrack. Ask me the question again.

Are you asking for fnal edit in this one as well?

I already sent you the text saying I want a fnal edit in this…

Oh yeah.

And you just said Yessssss.”

Both Tommy and Josephine felt they should have been paid for their appearances in the documentaries, expressing the frm belief that as collaborators they had a working role. Josephine describes this as being comparable to writing an autobiography, perhaps with a ghost writer, whereby she should have the rights to her own story. Rangoon’s work on immaterial labour is interesting in thinking about this transaction. She argues with specifc regard to Born into Brothels168 that “a coercive cultural logic underpins the invitation to subjecthood mediating… autoethnographic labor”. Bascially, the privileged flmmaker commodifes the willingness of their participant to share their private life, or at least perform a version of it, in an exploitative neoliberal project. I always wondered if there would be a way to pay people for being flmed, but was never allowed to pay as broadcasters feared it would undermine the integrity of the documentary if anyone was paid. There are so many ways in which the integrity of a documentary can be undermined, or fail to exist at all, that it seems very convenient that this is the rule that is enforced. I broke it anyway, by dishing out expenses, which could total £1000 over time. Not a lot

168 Rangan, Pooja Camera Obscura 2011 101 compared to what I was paid (approx £20k for a TV hour including an 8 week edit), but at least something.

Vegas and Tommy comment on the mischief they perceive in me as a documentary flmmaker. These comments are made in humour and fondly, but they are very important, as they acknowledge the devilishness in documentary flmmaking. The stories we tell are the ones that resonate with us and that we fnd entertaining or revealing in some way. Or most dangerously, that we fnd funny or dark. The power to entertain can slip unpleasantly into a laughing-at, rather than a laughing-with, and even horribly into a sneery bullying, which regularly occurs in some factual television.

Nash’s analysis of the trust in the documentary relationship between participant

Molly and flmmaker Tom Zubrycki, echoes this sense of naughtiness: Molly says “I think he’s naughty, but that’s because he’s a flmmaker”.169

Marshal and Kimberley resiliently used the response to the flm to work out how to change life for the better. An increase in confdence is reported by Johnny and Mary,

Josephine, Marshal and Kim. A sense of knowing oneself which grows and gradually demystifes the idea that we can never be understood, is reported by all participants.

169 Nash Exploring Power and Trust in Documentary 2010:26 102

Installation at ACCA170

fg.27 Installation at Attenborough Centre for Creative Arts, 21 April 2018

The medium of art installation as opposed to linear narrative invites a different way of thinking about all the material. I was aware in designing the installation that the fan videos could be projected simultaneously on adjacent walls, with headphones attached to each, allowing the viewer to choose, and reducing the sense of mediation for a second time. They could also be played in random order so that a

“chat-roulette”171 effect is in play, more ftting to their original medium. Determining the way the videos demand to be seen is crucial and experimenting with that was revealing. I settled on a grid effect, where 9 fans could be seen all at once, but only one heard. It gave the Youtube footage a feel of cacophony and collective voice. I

170 The Jane Attenborough studio at ACCA Centre for Creative Arts in the University of Sussex was the venue for the installation.

171 “chat-roulette” is a website that randomly connects users to each other by webcam www.chatroulette.com 103 attempted to have a different grid square speaking at any one time, but the clips were too short and the eye didn’t fnd the clip before it was over. So I prioritised the middle screen and enlarged it.

fg.28 This is Not Us grid, installation at ACCA, 21 April 2018

The timeline pictured communicates that it was a very complicated project. When the videos were allowed to appear randomly, there were regularly 3, 4 or even 5 screens in the grid featuring the same person at one time. This was not aesthetically

fg.29 This is Not Us edit timeline in Premiere Pro pleasing, and spoiled the feel of the collective voice. So I engaged with the concept of ‘pseudo randomness’. This is the technique used by Spotify and Itunes to make sure 104 the same song doesn’t keep repeating. It gives an illusion of randomness that appears to be more random that true random appears to be. It created a lot more work. It is fascinating that true randomness is so displeasing, but that investigation is a distraction from this thesis.

fg.30 Mike Nicholls and Tommy Tickle in the bedroom of a fan, ACCA April 2018

The alcove was the perfect space in which to re-construct the bedroom of one of the fans, Becky (with the pink hair), who appeared in Crazy About One Direction. I purchased from her the contents of her bedroom in Manchester in 2016, when she decided to take down all her posters and merchandise. The single bed and a couple of the smaller items are not original from her room, but the majority of the items were hers. I reconstruct the room in an attempt to collapse the space between participant, flmmaker and audience. As Tracey Emin reconstructed her own bed at the Tate in 1999; Adrian Goycoolea reconstructed his uncle Quentin Crisp’s bedroom in 2010, and Jeremy Deller reconstructed his childhood bedroom at the Hayward in

2012. The reconstructions offer a powerful experiential possibility to the audience, 105 offering the chance to “feel, not see” as Emin describes it172. Visitors to the This is Not

Us exhibition were able to sit or lie on the bed, gaze at the posters and watch the original documentary from the perspective of a One Direction fan. This was designed to create empathy and identifcation, rather than contempt and derision, the default societal response to teenage fans. It was interesting to see complete outsiders to the fandom, by way of gender, age and taste in music, put themselves in the position of a fan.

There were two more projections onto other walls in the studio - one a loop of all the angry tweets from fans after broadcast and the other a loop of their beautiful Larry

fan art. Installing the practice at ACCA

strikes a happy medium in many ways

between the distilled linear flm project

and the open-source style curated

collection of the online space. The two

can be combined in installation,

allowing both the controlled, time- fg.31 Twitter loop at ACCA specifc storytelling that I am used to, with the satisfying deeper dive on offer for those that want to immerse in the surrounding material. Building a physical space for refection offers another layer of investigation into the space between them and us.

What impact does being in the bedroom of a One Direction fan have on our reception of this story and of the original documentary. Can the audience empathise better with the fans’ complaints, when sitting in their bedroom? How does it impact on the way the audience think about fans - is it possible to create empathy using this space? The comments in the visitors book seem to argue the case that it is indeed

172 Emin in Tate interview 2014 106 possible. One visitor notes: “Sitting here watching the flm I was struck by how much of a family you build with your flms. The fans are a family. Johnny and Mary are family and you have built us all into your family. <3”

fg.32 From comments book at installation

Linear Film

My fnal video project was to try to answer the fans concerns in a linear flm. I initially planned to combine the arguments of fans against my representation, with some space for critical analysis from those that were actually in Crazy About One Direction, and then extend the analysis to other collaborators and participants. The trigger for this investigation was the Youtube response of fans though, so they would start the flm and reappear consistently throughout it in small groupings of clips. The effect was designed to be unsettling and uncomfortable, combining their rage with the more measured discussions from within long term relationships in many cases, sometimes critical, or gently scolding, sometimes movingly supportive and appreciative of the documentary process. The editing brought the issues into sharp focus for me, highlighting aspects of my practice which I had been oblivious to. When 107 focussing on the fnancial, legal and practical challenges of making each documentary, it is easy to forget the fun bits. Being reminded that I am mischievous and cheeky and possibly slightly irresponsible when flming was good for me in two ways. It pulled me up on my behaviour, made me question whether it is ethical to chase comedy in any and every scenario in the way that I do. It also made me realise that the people I have flmed have overwhelmingly enjoyed the experience, whether they have received difficult feedback afterwards or not. But the flm didn’t work as a story. It was too dense and too diverse in meanings. The two types of footage - found and flmed - worked well in contrast to each other in the installation, but clashed badly in the linear mode. I decided I needed to flm a response to the fans in their own style.

The form of flming I settled on employed the style of the Youtube confessional in order to bring my own voice and perspective into the flm. Writing a letter directly addressing the fans that were so angry with me was a way of avoiding an authoritative voice, and expressly announcing my subjectivity. It was also a way of creating more of a balance of power; using the technology that they had access to, rather than giving my own voice a professional grandeur which was out of their reach. I wrote the letter as follows, only altering it on recording where I slightly mis- remembered what I had planned to say:

Dear One Direction fans. I want to say sorry for what I’ve done. I always loved you

and found you spectacular. I love fans. I love your secret codes and subversive

attitudes. I love your passion and stamina. One Direction fans are the best of all

fans. You have built a global girl power network on Twitter and created

thousands of beautiful fan productions to share amongst yourselves. 108

While making a documentary about your fandom for Channel 4 I immersed myself in your online Narnia. My favourite of your fan productions is the Larry fan art which gorgeously depicts Louis and Harry of One Direction in a homosexual relationship. I think you clever fans were very perceptive about this relationship.

Your intense and sustained scrutiny of the boys meant you probably knew them better than they knew themselves? Louis has always denied it but Harry is less, er, straight laced.

Harry has always said gender wasn’t an important factor in who he was attracted to, and now he has pretty much come out, so it looks like the Larry

Shippers had a point. Maybe it was just about Harry crushing on Louis. But it doesn’t really matter to me whether it is real or not.If it’s just a fantasy that's just as good. Taking Harry and Louis as a blank canvas, millions of of you have been able to project your own desires onto their androgynous bodies with gay abandon. In these fantasies no one gets pregnant, or has to stay at home doing housework. No one is compelled to be passive or pretty. It is an erotic space free of the limits of gender.

Some of you hardcore Larry shippers are queer, and use the Larry ship as a campaign for gay rights. I loved it when you set up a fandom subsect called

Rainbow Direction to implore Louis to apologise for being so angry every time someone so much as hints he might be a gay. Some of you are straight girls that just fnd it hot to see your favourite boys together. Some of you like to ship different combinations of the band members according to your current mood.

The sexiness of Larry is freeing as you can shift your desire as you wish between objectifying their beauty, to imagining yourself in the picture, to projecting your own queer fantasies on them. 109

However you approach the artwork and fan fction, it is basically soft porn made

by and for teenage girls. This is hugely threatening and causes adults, particularly

your fathers, to freak out and want to repress your teenage sexual urge. None of

them believes it is their daughter that creates or enjoys this stuff. Perhaps the

shame projected by fathers, and by boys in your lives, often disguised as derision

at your taste in music, has pushed you underground into dark corners of Tumblr.

And you didn’t expect me to be looking.

I’m sorry One Direction fans that I found your Larry fan art. I’m sorry that I loved

it. I know it wasn’t meant for me. And I’m sorry that I told the TV audience about

it. I was genuinely thrilled by your creativity. I had no idea you would be this

upset. I’m just so relieved that none of you actually committed suicide. I

understand why you threatened me with it - it made your voice louder on Twitter.

#RIPLarryShippers stayed in the top 10 trends globally for 48 hours. I’m glad you

made yourselves heard, as mostly people just ignore and dismiss you. For the

record, I’m a hardcore Larry Shipper too.

I used the full length version Dear One Direction Fans as a basic Youtube apology video. I also edited my video into a new linear flm RIP Larry Shippers, which combines the original Youtube fan protests with my apology, the section of Crazy About One

Direction that deals with Larry shipping, some tweets and plenty of Larry fan art.

Interestingly the linear flm works less well for me than the installation, and was far more frustrating to create. It is more self-conscious, didactic and rushed, leaving little space for the viewer to interact with the material. It is a quick and effective way to tell the story, but over-simplifes it and offers nothing experiential. 110

Online Space

Creating an online space was an extremely rewarding project. It was also totally new to me. Providing the raw material, virtually (though not entirely, for reasons of discretion) uncut was not something I had ever before taken any interest in doing. It relinquishes some control on the part of the flmmaker to share rushes in this way. It possibly affected to a degree the way the interviews were flmed, although it was not what was on my mind during flming. It also limited the level of mediation I could apply to the found footage I worked with. It offered a transparency to the project which in many ways deepened and enriched its meaning-making. Editing is by defnition reductive. It is a process of distillation, of simplifcation, at times rather a brutal slaughter of individual loved sequences that don’t work well as a team.

fg.33 Screen shot of This is Not Us website

Allowing the many symbols, signals and signs that exist in uncut material to also be shared with an audience is liberating. Whether those elements are discoverable in such a large collection of video is unclear. My instinct is that an audience will not explore the website thoroughly at all, but just dip in briefy and take away a sense of a body of research existing, without really understanding what or why. It would be 111 hugely rewarding to hear someone respond with critical practice of their own, creating a analytical conversation about performance, relationships and shame in documentary. The artistic process of making an explorable archive is satisfying and appealing, but I wonder if a total lack of engaged audience would soon send me back to linear narrative.

The creative practice research in pursuit of the question of how and why shame is produced in documentary has taught me many things. I learned the uncomfortable news that at least some of those I have made flms about believe me (and perhaps all documentary flmmakers) to be mischievous in nature. Acknowledging this is challenging to the identity of documentary practitioners, who have positioned and themselves in history as trustworthy, objective assistants in the business of giving voice to others. This is of course far too simplistic and in my own case studies the humour and crafty editing applied to my documentaries betrays to the audience the mischief and also power that a television storyteller possesses. A refexive feminist approach, in which the voice of the participant interacts with the voice of the flmmaker protects against the damaging power that the faux-objective “voice of

God” might wield. 112 Conclusion

This PhD in creative and critical practice has taken a logical step forward in refexive feminist theory-led practice research. Taking as a trigger the furious reaction of the One Direction fandom to the broadcast of my documentary about them, I frst explored the reasons they rejected it. I took into account my own subjectivity in the representation, the flming process, and the way the flm interacted with the views of patriarchal society on fans. Thinking about the way that fan identities were performed in my flm according to the way they expected to be received then initiated research in performance and playing the self. I took as case studies two further participants to my past work; Holocaust survivors and gay fathers, who had in common a set of defensive reasons which impacted on the performed versions of reality they chose to share with me. This work led me to investigate how repeated performances over a number of years, in the longitudinal documentary projects I have produced, further impact upon the identity of the participant. Many of the people I have flmed for documentaries have continued to broadcast themselves over social media after the flming is fnished, aware that in this way they can take control of their own representations and no longer require mediation. I analyse the way this builds on or clashes with the mediated performance and conclude that mediation has an important place in documentary. My creative practice explores the mediums and methods of fans in self-representation in order to unpick the ethical and aesthetic challenges in storytelling for television. My conclusions follow.

Documentary meets the reaction of its audience in an intangible space which is best represented by the detached and unaccountable world of Twitter. The response of the viewer to the flmed person is judgemental and blunt. A television documentary 113 crashes awkwardly into the context of the current fashionable views of society, and is often designed by broadcasters to chime with those views rather than challenge them. As a result, shame is often produced for the person who shares their life on television. This is a shame which Kimberley felt, confronted and used to change her life. It is the sense of shame that Tommy rejected, choosing rather to have the flm flter out those people that tried to project shame onto him for drinking and swearing in clown clothes. My cousin Johnny wildly over-estimated the shame he would feel about his uncle making my grandmother pregnant in a haybarn, instead becoming a hero of honesty and kindness in West Clare. This shame was discovered by Josephine when her flm was broadcast, but challenging racism and jealousy in her local community and on social media gave her family great confdence. Zigi has spent a lifetime thinking about shame - the misplaced shame about surviving and being unable to save others. In his flm he powerfully expresses that shame and counter to so many Holocaust stories, refuses any heroism or catharsis and instead embraces his own fawed humanity.

The One Direction fandom was not in a position to stand up to that shame. It is of course impossible to represent all fans at once. They are “not an amorphous mass of hysterical bed-wetters”173 as Robinson rightly points out. But neither are they all sensible thoughtful citizens. Fans vary wildly and it is the interaction between them that constitutes fandom. The fans are perpetually re-writing their communal rulebook and trying to pin down their collective identity and own it, and my documentary trespasses on and meddles with that delicate process. Fans are of course a problematic source on themselves and not a source of “pristine knowledge”174. As Hills writes: “personalised, individual and subjective moments of

173 Robinson 2014 in a paper at Sussex University Queory March 2015

174 Hills 2002a: 68 114 fan attachment interact with communal constructions and justifcations without either moment over-writing or surmounting the other”175. In representing them we should not treat “the ways in which fan identities are legitimated as authentic

‘expressions’ of a group commitment”176, but explicitly allow each fan to perform their personal individuality simultaneously alongside their communal fan identity.

The individual and the communal are both important parts of Hill’s defnition of fandom as a “cultural struggle over meaning and affect” of which contested descriptions, identities and representations are a large part. Perhaps it was difficult for fandom to accept the individuality of the performances in Crazy About One

Direction. When Natasha says she got braces because Niall got braces and that Zayn being from a Muslim family has helped her deal with her own identity issues, she is not speaking for the whole fandom. When Pip cries because she can’t afford tickets to the stadium tour, or gasps in comedy performance at the hotness of Harry tweeting

Louis, she is not speaking for every fan. But because the fandom have committed themselves to the labels that outsiders use to identify them i.e. Directioners, they feel as if they are being universally represented, and sadly their expectations of representation are dominated by the internalised shame that a derisory patriarchal society, fearing the sexuality of teenage girls, has projected on them.

Larry shippers took the brunt of the shame after Crazy About One Direction. Moving

Larry from Tumblr to television decontextualised it and had a destabilising effect on the fandom, who were already arguing about its signifcance - the Christian right wing girls in the Southern states of the US were particularly appalled by it, disapproving of both the sexual explicitness and the homosexuality; while the girls from more liberal or permissive backgrounds, or those escapees from the former,

175 Hills 2002a: xiii

176 Hills 2002a: xii 115 were revelling in the erotic fan art and fction and celebrating the queer pride that went along with it. The mainstreaming of Larry may have destroyed some of its subcultural authenticity for some fans, who wanted to keep it their little secret. But the various negative responses to its inclusion also importantly highlight the taboo around expressions of teenage female sexuality and the shame that is projected onto

One Direction fans. Girls making porn for girls is something they only want each other to know about, aware as they are that the idea is unacceptable to adults. A fandom that is repeatedly shamed and derided by the media will have low expectations of any representation and therefore respond defensively regardless of the content.

Piotrowska suggests that our efforts should lie in “creating true fctions that people we make flms about can live with.”177 Perhaps as a result of their powerful desire to be noticed by “the boys”, not one of the girls in the flm expressed any regret over their decision to take part, even when the resulting “hate” on Twitter was ferocious. I was grateful for their continued positive attitude to having been flmed, and I hope it was also partly due to their sense of having been faithfully and affectionately represented. It was in fact the only time I have ever failed to show people the flm I have made about them before broadcast, due to the number of people featured in the documentary and the lack of time available. It is important to note, that in British law a release form is worth nothing if the flmed person changes their mind about appearing. They may not always realise how much power they have over the flmmaker, but if they were unhappy with their representation, it would take little effort to fnd out. In the case of Crazy About One Direction the girls had to trust me to edit their interviews fairly. But they each had a strong indication from me of the spirit

177 Piotrowska, Agnieszka 2014:207 116 and tone that the documentary would engage, and that held true in the fnal cut. As

Piotrowska notes, making sure the people you are flming continue to want to be flmed, and remain happy to be edited and broadcast is “almost as valuable as any creative, artistic or aesthetic qualities one might have”178 and lasts for months, if not years, even decades in some cases. This straightforward trust is at the centre of ethical practise and perhaps the most important factor in the avoidance of shame.

Trust between flmer and flmed is also a fundamental indicator in the editorial quality of a fnished flm. It is sometimes necessary when flming for a documentary to flm silence, or the behaviours that I called “unperformed testimony”179 in Chapter

2. Unperformed testimony refers to those behaviours that the flmed person displays which communicate their emotions, experiences and character unwittingly. Filming such intimacy requires much patience and time. Time spent with the camera in its’ bag is a much undervalued part of making ethical engaged documentary. At other times it is necessary to push the flmed person to speak. There are times when pushing is the only way to do justice to their story, to avoid doing the participant a disservice by allowing them to be silent or misunderstood. But the necessity increases proportionately to the importance of the information being pursued. In the case of flming survivors of an atrocity, there is justifcation for pushing (e.g. as Claude

Lanzmann did) in order that the testimony is not lost forever. When making a documentary about pop culture, or other fascinations and distractions, for entertainment purposes on television, I would argue the justifcation for pushing is signifcantly less. Unfortunately this suggestion of forcefulness proportional and appropriate to the subject is not in general use. Filmmakers are so keen to show their strength of authorship and their dogged persistence that they will interrogate and confront for the most banal of revelations. Much television currently encourages a

178 Piotrowska, Agnieszka 2014:105

179 Asquith, Daisy Filming the Shadows 2012 117 horrifed, distanced gaze, a superiority on the part of the viewer who is encouraged by commentary to be both appalled and amused by what they see. Entertainment should not preclude the application of warm, respectful authorship, which in turn does not preclude humour.

Zizek has said that the relationship between flmer and flmed is too intimate - that it produces a form of “emotional pornography”180 and that flmmakers become obsessive, immoral characters in pursuit of this intimacy. There is certainly an obsessive desire to know, to understand the Other. But it can be argued that this desire is a loving act, towards both the flmed persons and the audience that may beneft from new insight into the lives of others. Zizek shares with Kieslowski a squeamishness about emotion, the inner worlds of human beings. Kieslowski famously wrote “I am frightened of real tears. In fact, I don’t know if I have the right to photograph them. At such times I fnd myself in a realm, which is in fact, out of bounds. That’s the main reason why I escaped from documentaries.”181 Zizek, in his article of Kieslowski’s escape from the genre, writes “the only proper thing to do is to maintain a distance towards the intimate, the idiosyncratic, fantasy domain - one can only circumscribe, hint at, these fragile elements that bear witness to a human personality.”182 Piotrowska has written of a falling in love between flmer and flmed, which is not the exact experience I have had but I become obsessed each time I make a flm; the intimacy is addictive. As a flmmaker, if not as a person in general, we fall in love with the story, with the idea we have in mind of who the person is. As Lacan says

“I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you - the object petit a - I mutilate you.”183 Crazy About One Direction for example was made in a style

180 Zizek, Slavoj 2006:30

181 Kieslowski, Krzysztof in Cousins & MacDonald 1988:316

182 Zizek, Slavoj 2001:73

183 Lacan, Jacques 1998 (1973): 268, emphasis in original 118 that I felt suited the fandom, rather than a style that was recognisably my own. It was relatively fast cut, fairly noisy, full of pop songs and included plenty of nods to the style of their own homemade fan videos. It is a brightly coloured documentary, with a backdrop of posters in bedrooms and crowds of girls in neon. This aesthetic was demanded by the environment of course, but also served the subject well. However it may have contributed to the rejection of the flm by the fandom, as no-one likes to be imitated, least of all teenage girls. Perhaps my imitation - the greatest form of fattery - was in fact taken as what Lacan would call a mutilation.

fg.34 Meta representation: Vegas and Lola in front of the flm in which they discuss representation

The choice of who to flm is the most powerful decision a documentary flmmaker makes, but often it is more circumstantial than creative. Barrie and Tony were the only gay dads that were willing to share their lives in such intimate detail, albeit a rather defensively fabulous version of the real. Gena, Zigi, and Freddie allowed the camera to witness varying forms of unperformed testimony, the shadows in their present, 119 including difficult behaviours, while resisting any shame attached to their fallibility.

Kimberley shared her most intimate thoughts and feelings on camera at the ages of

15 and 25 and took a pragmatic attitude to any shame projected upon her by the audience. Her approach of total honesty allows for Zizek’s notion that when there is

“transparency…the very notion of shame will be rendered irrelevant.” 184 It is this resistance of shame that is most important in those that allow their lives to be flmed.

In A Brief History of Shame by Peter Stearns, shame is explored as an emotion that some are more prone to than others. In particular, marginalised groups experience shame more readily.185 There is a way of preparing to resist this shame, which involves a warm and validating attitude in the edit of a documentary, with a collaborative approach that confronts and discusses the sources of shame. There used to be a word for this in English; shamefast, which described making insurances against the onset of shame. Perhaps it used to refer to secrecy about such things as homosexuality, abortion, adoption, adultery, disability etc. But it could have a new emotional use if it were reinstated in common language. There is a shame resilience theory, which the popular social worker Brené Brown (of Oprah fame) calls “speaking shame”186, the act of drowning shame in openness. And documentary does have the effect of drowning shame for the flmed person. The same confessional relief is found on Facebook and Twitter and there is a very modern sense that once the shameful fact is shared, it is no longer shameful. It may be that the shame is actually a good way to fnd communities of like-minded people… “to use shame to help defne and bolster identity”187, and translate their shame collectively into pride and solidarity.

184 Zizek The Fright of Real Tears 2001: 73

185 Stearns, Peter A Brief History of Shame 2017: 97

186 ibid 106

187 ibid 98 120

“Whatever the intentions of the creators of this shit were, it clearly didn’t work,

because its helped us to become stronger as a family in this fandom. Yes it did

cause a lot of harm, but because of it, Beliebers are backing us up… and we’re

always fghting with them… but they still have our back. Even the fans of The

Wanted are with us on this. It’s bringing Elounour and Larry shippers closer

together, because we are part of the same fandom, even if we ship different

people together, we’re all still part of the same fandom. So whatever this

documentary thing was, what they were trying to prove… it didn’t work.

We’re strong, we’re stronger than all of you.”

- Vanney G on Youtube

I have shown how dangerous the potential for shame can be in the production of a documentary, particularly when it represents a collective identity rather than an individual. I have also described the approach that makes it least likely shame will be produced. A collaborative process, in a relationship of genuine warmth and trust is the best way to create a positive experience of being flmed. Performances should be allowed, as they represent a part of the flmed person’s identity. Participants in documentaries must be able to respond to their representation and be heard, before it is transmitted, in order that they share in the power of the storytelling. It is with this strength and pride in their performance that any projection of shame by the audience will fail. 121

Index of Creative Practice

All the flms, artwork, documentation of the installation, sources, written work, appendices and past documentaries referred to in this thesis can be found online at https://daisy-asquith-xdrf.squarespace.com, the website hosting this PhD.

‘THIS IS NOT US’ https://daisy-asquith-xdrf.squarespace.com/this-is-not-us-flm/?p

‘THIS IS THE REAL ME’ https://daisy-asquith-xdrf.squarespace.com/20-min-flm/

‘RIP LARRY SHIPPERS’ https://daisy-asquith-xdrf.squarespace.com/20-min-flm/

‘DEAR ONE DIRECTION FANS’ https://daisy-asquith-xdrf.squarespace.com/20-min-flm/

Installation at ACCA, University of Sussex April 2018 https://daisy-asquith-xdrf.squarespace.com/installation/

Josephine (from My New Home 2005-11) interview 2 July 2017 https://daisy-asquith-xdrf.squarespace.com/josephine/?p

Marshal (from My New Home 2005-11) interview 2 July 2017 https://daisy-asquith-xdrf.squarespace.com/marshal/?p

Kimberley (from 15: This is Me 2000) interview 31 August 2017 https://daisy-asquith-xdrf.squarespace.com/new-gallery-87/?p

Johnny & Mary (from After the Dance 2015) interview 4 November 2017 https://daisy-asquith-xdrf.squarespace.com/johnny-mary/?p

Tommy (from Clowns 2007) interview 12 January 2018 https://daisy-asquith-xdrf.squarespace.com/new-gallery-13/?p

Vegas & Lola (from Crazy About One Direction 2013) interview 13 January 2018 122 https://daisy-asquith-xdrf.squarespace.com/vegas-lola/?p

Zigi (from Britain’s Holocaust Survivors 2008) interview 26 March 2018 https://daisy-asquith-xdrf.squarespace.com/zigi/?p

Past Documentaries

Those in bold are available on the website for reference.

Queerama, 70 mins, broadcast 31 July 2017, BBC/BFI http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/ p057n8sz

After the Dance, 77 mins broadcast 30 March 2015, BBC/IFB http://www.bbc.co.uk/ programmes/b05psdvz

Velorama, 70 mins, broadcast 6 July 2014, BFI/BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/ b048wqcc

Crazy About One Direction, 47 mins, broadcast 14 August 2013, Channel 4 https:// www.channel4.com/news/one-direction-directioners-channel-4-crazy-about-documentary

The Queen of North Shields, 29 mins, broadcast 22 May 2013, BBC1 Why Poverty? Strand http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01xt726

Britain: My New Home, 5x47 mins 2005 - 2011, last broadcast 22 March 2013 http:// www.channel4.com/programmes/britain-my-new-home/on-demand/40282-003

Britains Holocaust Survivors, 47 mins, broadcast 14 January 2013, Channel 4 https:// www.thejc.com/community/community-news/survivors-featured-in-channel-4- documentary-1.40478

My Weird and Wonderful Family (My Gay Dads), 47 mins, broadcast 21 July 2010, Channel 4 https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2010/jul/22/my-weird-and-wonderful-family

Liz Smith’s Summer Cruise, 58 mins, broadcast 12 July 2009, BBC4 http://www.bbc.co.uk/ programmes/b00lpjw6

Kimberley: Young Mum Ten Years On (This Is Me Now), 48 mins, broadcast 22 April 2009,

Channel 4 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1423567/

Clowns, 58 mins, broadcast 7 April 2008, BBC2 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b009r2kf 123

The Oldest People in the World, 48 mins, broadcast 20 August 2007, Channel 4 https:// distribution.channel4.com/programme/the-oldest-people-in-the-world

The House Clearers, 48 mins, broadcast 13 July 2005, Channel 4 https:// www.theguardian.com/media/2005/jul/14/tvandradio.comment

Whatever: A Teenage Musical, 50 mins, broadcast 5 May 2004, Channel 4 http:// www.imdb.com/title/tt0417260/

Marrying a Stranger: Shabba and Sabeena, 2 x 50 mins, broadcast 2002 Channel 4 http:// www.windfallflms.com/show.aspx?program=1128

Fifteen: This is Me and Looking for My Mum, 2 x 50 mins, broadcast 2000, Channel 4 http:// www.windfallflms.com/show/1231/Fifteen.aspx

The Decision: Dodger and Jermaine, 2x50 mins, broadcast 1998, Channel 4 http:// www.windfallflms.com/show/1180/the-decision-series-2.aspx

Presentations of this research

May 2014 Doctoral Research Group, University of Sussex

June 2014 Pop Life conference, University of Northampton

March 2015 Catalyst Club, Brighton

April 2015 Popular Music Fandom and the Public Sphere, University of Chester

June 2015 Paper - Student Research in Popular Music, University of Westminster

June 2015 Paper - Fan Studies Network conference, University of East Anglia

July 2015 Paper - Fandom & Religion conference, University of Leicester

August 2015 Talk - Wilderness Festival, Odditorium Tent

Feb 2016 Paper - Goldsmiths, University of London

March 2016 Paper - Lets Hear It for the Girls, University of Warwick

April 2016 Paper - Society for Cinema & Media Studies conference, Atlanta

Feb 2017 Lecture - Representing Reality, Goldsmiths, University of London

July 2017 Publication - Seeing Fans, book edited by Paul Booth & Lucy Bennett

April 2018 Exhibition - Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, University of Sussex 124

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Press & Articles Online

Bafta Guru interview: http://guru.bafta.org/daisy-asquith-interview

The Conversation - Why One Direction Fans are Smarter than You: http://theconversation.com/thats-what-makes-them-beautiful-why-one-direction-fans-are- smarter-than-you-17186 130

Dangerous Minds Review of Crazy About One Direction: https://dangerousminds.net/comments/crazy_about_one_direction_must- see_documentary

Dorian Lynskey, Observer article on fandoms: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/sep/29/beatlemania-screamers-fandom- teenagers-hysteria

International Business Times on #RIPLarryShippers: http://www.ibtimes.com/did-42-larry-shippers-commit-suicide-over-one-direction- documentary-liam-payne-acknowledges-1388289

Jameson Starship blog on #RIPLarryShippers and Manufactured Outrage: https://jamesonstarship.wordpress.com/2013/08/16/what-the-hell-happened-last-night- riplarryshippers-and-twitter-nonsense/

Lucy Robinson blog on One Direction: https://profrobinson.com/2015/03/26/ripzayne2k15-thoughts-on-being-the-hot-one

Odditorium talk on Larry shippers at the Catalyst Club, March 2015: https://soundcloud.com/corneliuszg/odditorium-episode-30

Sam Wollaston Review of Crazy About One Direction: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2013/aug/15/crazy-about-one-direction-tv- review

Screen Daily interview: https://www.screendaily.com/features/doc/fest-daisy-asquith-talks-queerama-and-100- years-of-gay-flm/5118871.article

SurveyMonkey for this PhD that only 4 people answered: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/9HMQFB5

Tumblr Most Reblogged Ships on: http://yearinreview.tumblr.com/post/134751774307/most-reblogged-ships

Vox article on Larry Stylinson: https://www.vox.com/2016/4/18/11384118/larry-stylinson-one-direction-conspiracy-theory

Wattpad Fan Fiction about watching Channel 4 with your boyfriend Louis etc: 131 https://www.wattpad.com/77710225-one-direction-preferences-you-watch-the-channel-4 Art Installation & Filmography

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Gunn, Jon, and Brian Herzlinger. My Date with Drew. Documentary, 2005. Klingemann,

Mario. Like This Facebook Button. Ultra Social, Munich, 2010. https://www.trendhunter.com/trends/mario-klingemann-like-this-facebook-button

Goycoolea, Adrian. Personal Effects. Mix NYC, 2010. http://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/crisps-effects.html

Heyn, John, and Jeff Krulik. Heavy Metal Parking Lot. Documentary, Short, Music, N/A.

Leveugle, Lucy. Wacko About Jacko. Channel 4, 2005.

Oppenheimer, Joshua. The Act of Killing. Cut for Real, 2012.

Parry, Owen. Fan Riot! Jerwood Gallery and Tumblr, 2016. http://fanriot.tumblr.com/

Pálf, György. Final Cut – Ladies and Gentleman. FICM, 2012 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVzr9rV59fs

Rotman, Michael. Star Wait. Comedy, Documentary, Sci-Fi, 2005.

Rouch, Jean. Chronique D’un Ete, Documentary,1961. 132

Spurlock, Morgan. One Direction: This Is Us. Documentary, Music, 2013.

Uhlmann, Tai. For the Love of Dolly. Documentary, 2008.

Walsh, Baillie. Springsteen & I. Documentary, 2013.

Wiseman, Frederick. High School, Documentary,1968.

Slash Videos

Hot N Cold - Kirk/Spock https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic1w2rnL0jo&index=10&list=RD3uxTpyCdriY Star Trek: Tik Tok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZWaWrvJ7nA&index=2&list=RD3uxTpyCdriY I Will Be (Kirk/Spock) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH46BlgfC8Y Down - Larry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdohIOeseuc I Will Go Down with this Ship https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkFmAPeJ3tk We Found Love https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MqcR3HPlts Wrecking Ball https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QW11LM5klc Same Love https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgrBXFhoyiU Come With Me - Larry fan art https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jucDFApsGg They Don’t Know About Us https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nFpbZxWlEM Johnlock - I think I love you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcl6X4KD_xk Sherlock & John: Happier https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeCIemtfa0A John & Sherlock: don’t wanna fall in love https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CriI6zr8R40 Don’t Let Me Down https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbD4g9jwd-M 133

Appendix 1: Transcripts of Youtube Videos made by One Direction Fans

These videos were transcribed from Youtube within a year of the time of their posting in the summer of 2013. Only the Youtubers who appeared to be aged 16 and above were included in the video installation. The names given are altered where they would have allowed identifcation of the original poster, and if the original poster was not reachable for permission to reproduce. Age, nationality and ethnicity are estimated. Sections used in the flm are marked in red.

1 5Secsofmahomie (black female, southern US, 15)

Hi my name is Ashari and I just wanted to say that of course I deeply love One Direction and I am a Directioner... a twitter one at that, ok? That documentary was embarrassing to us, like why couldn’t they get real Directioners on there? Like the ones who spend, dedicate their lives every day, 24/7 you know, for One Direction. The ones who vote for them every day, the ones who never met them? What about those people? Why didn’t you have those people Channel 4? I wanna know that. But, can wee just talk? Yeah we might be mean sometimes but it’s because people push our buttons until we explode! * Can we talk about things like most of us wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for One Direction? Like me, I wouldn’t know what to do with my life okay? Because my dad died this year and One Direction kinda helped me through that, even though they don’t know me, even though I’ve never met them, never been to their concert, nothing. They still helped me, because I love them and I know that they love me, even though they don’t know me okay, like. I just love them and thank them for that and I just wish that I could meet them one day to tell them that. (Tears). Directioners are like my family, like my second family? I come on twitter every day just to talk to them because I have no people in my life to talk to, and they just help me. So, don’t believe Channel 4, because they’re psycho a-holes, and that’s not us, what you saw on that show.

2 6directionerxo (asian female, Texas, 16)

I am a Directioner, but right now I’m ashamed to show my face, thanks to channel 4. I’m kidding I’m here. I wanna start by saying guys - I am a Larry shipper, guilty as 134 charged. It’s weird. But let me just say on behalf of pretty much every Larry shipper out there that they do not agree with what we just witness, whatever we just saw. That was just no, no, lines were crossed big time. It’s not allowed, it shouldn’t be allowed, who, who says it’s okay? I read all kinds of stuff, fan fction, but you know, when somebody goes out of their way and reads that stuff to just some strangers with a camera in your face… knowing that you’re gonna be on a TV show reading that stuff? You have issues. You just bullied the whole fandom. Second, you all should know that adults, as in Harry’s mom, mom, was watching that. Who thinks that’s a good idea? Who thinks that’s okay? These people were expressing their opinion, okay, that’s on you, but for somebody to make a documentary and post it, make a TV show out of it, for so many people to watch it, you have problems. I don’t think anybody agreed, er no not at all. Another thing you know those girls were going out of their way, looking for hotels, stalking the boys, following them. Honestly if I could I would. There’s those chances where One Direction are in the same city as you, you’re not just gonna sit watching everything unfold and happen in your bedroom. As for me and my friends we go out of our way as well to go and look for the boys and try our hardest even to get a glimpse of them. i went to a concert a few weeks ago in Houston with my friend. I’ll be honest we went all over Houston. Houston is huge. We found their hotel and we waited outside for hours. if thats what it takes to meet the boys then thats what it takes. I understand that part of the documentary. Eventually the boys did come out and they did wave at us and we did see them and that was insane. You know we got that and we are grateful for that. it is seen that harry and Niall, they do come out and they do sign and take pictures with fans outside the hotel but it wasn’t our time. Doesn’t mean that I’m gonna be mad - that’s not what it’s about. You get what you get and you be grateful for that. These boys are the biggest boy band in the world. Those girls outside the hotel in Houston were so icky just to get a wave from them, Niall and Harry, it was amazing. I mean I’m lucky - I don’t get front row seats or meet and greets. i’ve never met them, I’ve never had a conversation with one of them. And it is my dream, you know, these boys mean so much to me, but this is not where I get braces because Niall has braces, that does not make you a true fan, that just makes you weird. It just makes you a little weird. But if you’re outside waiting for two hours and you get mad because the boys just go by you and don’t say Hi, then do not tell, especially these TV people, How Dare they not come out and say Hi to us? We’re dedicated…. NO! They’re tired, they do not have time for that, or maybe they don’t want to come out and meet 10 year olds?!! I did 135 not fnd that amusing at all. It was disgusting. It was horrifying. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing through that computer screen. And I don’t want to hurt anyones feelings, that’s defnitely not what I am doing, I am just putting my opinion out there. If you don’t agree with it that’s fne, it’s my opinion. That’s just how I feel. Let me know what you think - make rant videos! And I’ll watch them! And I’ll agree with you. Or disagree. But no hate, and please don’t kill me. I love you guys, I love this fandom, but I have been so ashamed today. Oh God!

3 abnormallyadam (white male, New Zealand, 16)

Hola my bitches! Okay so I have woken to chaos on twitter because of this ridiculous documentary that has aired in the UK on Channel 4. Erm I haven’t watched it because I don’t want to because it just apparently embarrasses the One Direction fandom, it portrays them in such a negative light, it’s just disgusting in general, which I actually have to, you know the stuff, the gifs and stuff I’ve seen I would have to agree. Seriously I don’t know what Channel 4 were thinking when they aired this. Basically this documentary is called Crazy About One Direction I think, and it just displayed what they thought One Direction fans do and what the One Direction fandom actually does, which they basically got all the wrong information. I mean most of that, half of it, 99% of that information is untrue. It applies to the ten Directioners who are mental in the head. Those girls in that video were obviously either paid for saying all that stuff, or they’re one of those rich people who have met them so many times and think they’re all top shit and everything and it’s ridiculous.mi mean, come on, some girl read Larry fan fc on this documentary! Are you fucking crazy? I don’t mean to swear, but are you crazy? First of all, okay, let me give you a secret. let me give you a bit of fandom 101 stuff. Fanfcs are not to be broadcast on national television okay? They are for the fandom, to read in private, to enjoy, have a little giggle, get a bit you know woohooo, they’re for our secret pleasure. You don’t need to display them on the fucking national television. Because of reasons. And if you were a fangirl you would know not to, that is just a big NO, get out of the fandom! Get out, just leave. Okay so that was one thing that happened, I’m not even gonna repeat the rest, they just displayed these girls as the most craziest One Direction fans. They probably went to a mental asylum and got these girls, I’m not even kidding. And apparently Channel 4 had made secret twitter accounts to spy on the fandom and their tweets and stuff. Now this is the fun bit, because if they actually did that they 136 would have a completely different documentary to the one that they had, that they aired on Tv. First of all Channel 4, the One Direction fandom is not like that. We don’t send hate. Most of us okay, like 95% of us don’t send hate, to the boys or their girlfriends, or boyfriends. We might not like, or approve of the girl they are dating, but we don’t send them hate okay, you don’t send hate, you don’t do that. We respect the boys, we respect their choices, we may not approve of all their choices sometimes, but we stick by them cos that’s what we do. We respect them, we defend them, if someone talks shit about them, like when the football stars were saying Louis is gay and he shouldn’t be on the football cos he is gay and he’s the frst openly gay footballer. We defend the boys like there is no tomorrow cos frst off the information is wrong. We vote for the boys like there’s no tomorrow for the TCAs, the MTV Hottest, the , we vote. Like seriously, 60% of the fandoms tweets are voting because we care so much. And you know how happy the boys are when they win, because we put the effort in, okay. We don’t all say follow me or I’ll die and stuff. We don’t say that because we’re poor okay! First of all we’re poor. We’re lucky to even have wif. Si if Channel 4 even bothered to research into this One Direction documentary they would have got completely different results, and I’m really disappointedand disgusted and appalled at the behaviour and what Channel 4 has aired. because it’s completely inappropriate and just puts shame to all Directioners. I mean it’s hard enough being a Directioner, because, especially being a guy Directioner, because if you admit it in the real world, people judge you. And after watching this? I mean, people think the One Direction fandom is all made up of twelve year olds and all teeny boppers. that’s not true. There are people who are over 16, 17, 18 years old who like One Direction. Not because of the attractiveness but because of the things they do for charity, okay, their music is actually good. So think twice before you judge us and make a documentary and air it on national televison okay because you will get backlash, not hate okay but you’ll get some pretty nasty tweets. You know you’re wrong, I know you’re wrong,Jesus knows you’re wrong, Obama knows you’re wrong, Gemma knows you’re wrong, everyone knows you’re wrong Channel 4, (middle fnger) so that is it. Oh and Channel 4 I hope you lose your wif connection! Ciao for now! 137

4 Alana Grace (asian female, US, 15)

Hi my names Alana and I’m ******* on tumblr and twitter. Today there was a documentary in the UK about One Direction fans. First off I have not watched this yet, because one: I do not live in the UK, I live in New Jersey, and two: I do not want to. But from what I’ve heard, some of the key points in this is, they talk about fans knocking on their hotel room doors at 4am, getting into their hotels. They put Larry fan fction and fan art, pornographic fan art, they show that on TV! I don’t know who had the bright idea to do that?! You’re gonna hate me okay but I ship Larry. I know a lot of people are gonna be like Ugh but I ship it. And they do make stuff, it’s on tumblr or wherever, you can fnd Larry fan fction, and I’m not kidding I read it. But you don’t put that on television! That stuff doesn’t go on television. Okay? And frst I don’t know how it goes in London, or England or whatever, but you don’t put stuff like that on television! I think it’s family television. Not all fans who go stalking are, they’re not stalkers. If they’re waiting outside the hotel I understand cos they’re in your city, but over there, if you wait outside their frickin house at 4 in the morning, they’re not gonna come say hi to you okay? I don’t understand why they interviewed these fans. I don’t know if the people on that channel go on the internet? They might, cos I know they talked about twitter, and I saw clips of girls on laptops. That’s what I think are Directioners, those with the usernames Directioner 24560 or whatever, not the whole fandom at all. I really hope that the boys don’t look at this documentary they put together and think this is what all of my fans are like. I know cos in one interview Zayn said, and I quote, I’m not scared of getting attacked by 12 year old girls. That’s not the whole fandom. We are 13, 14, 15, 16, I have a friend who’s 22. I have 22 year old friends, they’re in college and they love One Direction. The boys do acknowledge that there are other people, older than the age of 8 years old who like their music and like them as a band, but in the media they obviously don’t talk about that and I really don’t understand why cos thats most of their fans, other than the little girls who run around Claire’s and buy all these t-shirts and necklaces and stuff. I specifcally think that this documentary about One Direction fans should have portrayed us as how we really are, mostly on the internet, and you go on twitter and tumblr and facebook. We are friends, well sometimes. We are crazy, not really, but we are, cos we fght with ourselves... I don’t even wanna talk about that. Okay but we are supportive of the boys and thats all that matters, we vote for them 24/7, we watch their videos, we broke the vevo world record for them. So, we’ve brought them, from where they were 138 on the X Factor, they could have been so much less. i don’t see Matt Cardle okay, sorry for the Matt Cardle fans or whatever but we don’t see him like we see these boys now. If it wasn’t for us they’d be nowhere and the way they portrayed us does not make me happy. So now we know how the boys feel when the media portrays them how they aren’t. We know how it feels to be lied about in the media, or not lied about... portrayed badly in the media. Yeah. We always help our boys and we always talk about that’s not how they really are. So now I feel they should help us and say that’s not how our fans really are, they’re not all crazy. We stand up for them, they should stand up for us. Thats it thats how it is. We’re a family, we should be a family, family sticks together. Well I’m really sorry that I just wasted 5 minutes of your life talking about something that shouldn’t have aired, or should have been put differently. So thanks.

5 awesome 321231 (white female, southern US, 14)

Aaaah I’m sorry if my voice is a little shaky. I was watching a One Direction documentary, what’s the time now, let me see… I’m a couple of weeks late, a week, I don’t know. But it’s just not us. They think this is all of us but it’s not. And I don’t care if you’ve met One Direction 64 times. I haven’t even met them once. You don’t have to be all bragging about it. You don’t have to be all like that. I don’t care if you think they’re gay - they’re not gay. One Direction’s Larry, er Harry and Louis, er, Harry is a ladies man. Sorry if this has offended anybody by the way but, and Louis has Eleanor. Eleanor fts with Louis - they’re like a puzzle piece. It’s perfect for them. And Eleanor’s beautiful. She’s perfect for Louis. I’m not perfect for Louis cos I’m not beautiful and all that. I have short hair, I look like a dude. I don’t care what you think. It sucks. I get hate enough for being just a Directioner. This is not helping my case, God. Well, anyway, hmm, you guys in the video just need to give One Direction a break. And it’s a little stalkerish like, Oh I just saw Zayn sleeping. That’s so stalkerish, and I would never be like that. And I know a whole lot of you guys would never be like that either. It just needs to stop. Now. This frickin Channel 4 crap. I’ll go over there, I mean they’re sued already thank goodness. But I will go over there and kick their asses, until they’re off their body. I’ll kick their asses for you guys. I’m not scared, it’s just messed up. It sickens me looking at all this hate we’re getting now, I mean One Direction’s family hates us. They ruined Harry and Louis’ friendship. And, my god it’s messed up. But let me see. I mean I’m happy for them, I’m happy that they got a girlfriend and their 139 happiness is all… All I want is them to be happy, nothing else more and nothing else less. And I would never want to ruin their happiness between their girlfriends… and I’m getting death threats. We’ve had 50 suicides just between the time they posted that and today. I’m pretty sure there’ve been more suicides since then, and it just needs to stop. I’m sorry if you are hating on me… yeah go in the description, call me fat, call me ugly, call me a stupid fucking Directioner, oh yeah call me I’m a stupid Directioner, I’m obsessed with One Direction. It’s not an obsession, it’s just taking the time, the amount of time to love them. Because I honestly love them. I have posters on my wall. It doesn’t mean that I’m obsessed with them. Obsessed would be knowing their exact exact location at the exact time, it would be knowing where they sleep. I’m not that crazy fangirl that you’d fnd fngerling over One Direction every single day. I’m not like that. I’m a guy. I’m acting like a guy. I act like a guy. I mean I love guy sports. I love skateboarding. I also love girl sports and now the song ended but… I guess that’s it for now guys, see ya, goodbye.

6 Bitofafangirlx (white female, UK, 15)

Hey guys! So I fnally watched the Crazy About One Direction documentary... I know I’m about a week late, but in my defence I was abroad, couldn’t watch it. I fnally watched it on my laptop yesterday, wow! Ok if you don’t know what it is, Channel 4, this channel in the Uk did a documentary about Directioners and it was such a big stir on twitter, so many people were tweeting about it, they got some statistics out and it was the most tweeted about programme on Channel 4 ever! Cos it was just so controversial and so many different things people had to talk about it. And the thing was I read all the things about it, I was like okay I need to watch this, I like have to watch this. And so they talked about lots of things, they mainly had the fans, they interviewed different fans and things. But I don’t know, these fans they chose were really crazy, like crazy crazy like CRAZY! I must admit I was looking at this girl and I said she’s got so many posters woah! And then I realised, I looked around my room and like, oh yeah okay that’s kind of normal, but some people it was like crazy woah, like some of the things they were saying, like this one girl she went and stalked and she went to louis and harry’s house, she was saying how Louis’ family were alright with it but Harry’s family weren’t alright with it, and then the next thing she says was well they call me a stalker but i don’t really care! And then you fnd out, she did a separate interview outside the programme and she was saying you know what they 140 edited that, and it was really what do your friends think? So it seemed like she didn’t care what the family thought, but really she didn’t care what her friends thought, and so it made the fans on the show look even worse. And there was so much about Larry in it and in general I think Larry’s a really controversial kinda splits the fandom in two kinda thing. But this was... it made us... well can I just say not even all of the fandom even ships Larry. When you do a retweet for Larry, fave if you ship Larry, those kinda things, it’s kinda 50/50. So this documentary made it seem as if everybody shipped Larry and it made it really intense shipping and it was really scary, and I was even like wooooah, woah is that even suitable? It was shown, is alwya shown after 10 because it’s so graphic - is one word I would use, cos it shows fan art and fan fction which is defnitely meant to be shown after 10 ok? I was like woooah what the hell? Why is this being shown on TV sorta thing. And I found, not just me, but I think a lot of people on twitter found, was they were focussing on a lot of people who have met them a lot of times, and of course they’re fans, i’m not going to say they’re not fans, hell yeah you’re a fan that’s so much dedication. But I think you don’t have to be a fan to meet them, if you meet them you’re the luckiest person in the world and I’m so damn jealous. But I think even if you don’t meet them - does that make you more of a fan? I mean even if you’re like I’m not gonna meet them, I don’t like them anymore, whatever it means you’re still there, yeah you haven’t met them but you’re still determined to meet them, you’re still dedicated. I dunno but I found that... some girl was like oh i met them kinda 66 times now, kinda lost count and I was like woooow. At frst I was like okay your parents let you do this? Ok you’re a lucky girl, you’re really damn lucky. But literally I think, a lot of people are saying you know why did they choose those type of fans? A lot of people on twitter were saying what happened to the fans that just sit behind twitter just tweeting and blogging and eating food and not even meeting them, never been tweeted by them? You know just the girls who kinda don’t have a life, in some ways is how I’d put it. And another thing Crazy About One Direction made us look crazy, literally psycho, just mentally mad. This one girl was like Oh I’ll go to jail to be with them and it was a bit like, I was kinda like this is our generation wow, i was like woah. I would do a lot to meet the boys okay but I wouldn’t do, a lot of people are like oh I’ll just cut my arm off, you know I think it made us seem, not desperate, but all my cousins watched this, it was really awkward, cos i came back from holiday and they were like did you watch that One Direction documentary and I was like OH you know about it? Channel 4 is quite a big channel here, and they were like these girls are so mad, you guys are so weird, wow 141

Directioners are weird as hell, you’re so freaky. And I’m gonna use this quote... okay, don’t judge a fan by the fandom and don’t judge the fandom by a fan, okay? Just because yeah we do have a couple of crazy nutters, who are cool but kinda crazy, we’re not all like that. But then again if we have a reputation for being really crazy it doesn’t mean every single one of us are crazy. And another thing they did which a lot of people were like you guys are really weird, was the death threats, and a lot of it was to their girlfriends. I can put my hands up and say I’ve never sent a death threat to anyone let alone their girlfriends. Yeah I’ve probably tweeted damn it I’m so jealous of Taylor Swift, gosh she has Haryy she’s so lucky. Thats a lot different to I wanna kill taylor Swift right now, oh my god girl die. That’s really intimidating. This girl was like yeah I’ve sent death threats, yeah I was blocked by them. They need to realise that out of millions of fans there’s like 100 maximum. I know a 100 is like woah but out of all the fans that’s not much. I think the documentary just gave a bad look on us and shone a bad light. But it was really cute because you had a lot of the families, you had harry’s step-dad, Harry’s mum, Harry’s cousin, Louis’ grandad, er who else? I think possibly Liam’s sister, yeah possibly, I think Josh Devine the drummer, they all were tweeting like guys we know you’re nothing like that don’t worry, and obviously Liam tweeted about it like guys we know you’re nothing like that we love you guys, you know a documentary is just doing that to cause media attention and crap like that, and so it was kinda cute. But one of the things about the whole Larry thing, it might just be rumours or it might be true. Some people are saying 42 Larry shippers committed suicide. Some people are saying 18 people committed suicide. Even if it’s just 1 that’s terrible and that shouldn’t happen because, I can explain it further, there are people that ship Larry right? So after this documentary people were like ugh Larry shippers are disgusting, Larry shippers go kill yourself. You don’t tell people to kill yourself, they’re like go cut yourself, oh my god, you’re disgusting! And these girls did it. Apparently some people killed themselves. And I told my sister this and she was like nooo gosh, and apparently the person who made the documentary even was saying oh I can’t believe people are just trying to get attention and saying they killed themselves...nobody killed themselves, and it’s like, how do you know that? You know one hateful comment can drive you to do anything. So if people did kill themselves after this documentary, that’s really sad, and not sad as in oh my god you’re so sad, but sad as in thats, that’s really sad. It’s sad to think that and that’s why I’m hoping to do a video on Larry, maybe this week, possibly, maybe next week, and I’m defnitely going to do one cos I think it’s such a big thing. And I’m not against 142

Larry, don’t take it like that, cos Larry is really awesome. Obviously you’ll see my views and other peoples views in that video. But generally I think Channel 4 you totally messed up. Bye!

7 Chayna D (black female, southern US, 17)

So, as many of you already know there is a Channel 4 documentary called Crazy About One Direction, but it’s in the UK and I live in the US, so I caught it on youtube, and everyone on tumblr is like don’t watch it! Boycotting it. There was a lot of controversy as to this documentary, so i decided to watch it. i watched the whole thing, like the whole hour of it, and me personally I don’t think it was horrible, but there are defnitely things that I found really wrong with it. (watches video on laptop) Okay I’m offended by the use of the word cult and sect. By her saying we’re like a cult or sect it makes outsiders look at us like wow, we’re really crazy and the next thing you know they’re saying we’re putting out punchbowls of poison. She could have picked any other words but she picked those. (watches) They don’t put their every move on twitter. Obviously Louis tweets I’m in Miami bitch! They’re not gonna say where in Miami they are. You go on twitter to track their every move? No! We go on twitter to communicate and talk to each other about One Direction and we like to share and talk about them as a fandom, not to stalk their every move, only, hello? (watches) Okay I halfway agree with that, like, you do feel more special, if they reply to you or follow you you’re like oh my god they know i exist! I don’t think it’s like oh let me go worship my lord right now so i go on twitter, i don’t, no. I personally have my own belief on larry. Some people ship Larry Stylinson as a bromance, some people ship it as a romance, like they’re boyfriends. My own personal belief on Larry i could do another whole video on that cos it’s so long. So basically there’s this ongoing thing about Larry, oh my gosh it’s real, it’s not real, it’s real, it’s not real, oh my god oh my god oh my god. But at the end of the day we don’t know. There’s this old saying that’s like if you can’t believe what you hear, believe what you see. And I think Louis’ dad said that actually. What we technically can see is both. But the way we have displayed this is that beieving in Larry is completely ridiculous. As they kind of viewed waiting outside a stadium that they’re in is completely ridiculous. Stalking them in any way is completely ridiculous. The reason why I ship both is that I just want them to be happy. If Elounors’s real I will be extremely happy, like yay. If Larry’s real I will also be happy. I feel like noone shipped Haylor, I didn’t really ship Haylor 143 either. before One Direction i wasn’t really a fan of her, just because she went through so many guys and I just thought as a role model it’s not really a good look. I didn’t really do my research, get to know her as a person, so i’m not gonna lie when they broke up I kinda laughed. But a lot of people were extremely happy and sent Taylor hate until she had to delete her twitter and crazy stuff like that cos we always forget hey, she’s actually a person too. She’s not just like some chopped liver that we can just scream at and stuff like that. I’m not gonna lie, I did do my fair share of like not liking her, posting things on instagram like the recurring joke ‘Things better than Taylor’s British accent’. I participated in that, I mean I didn’t mean to hurt her in any way I just thought it was funny I don’t hate her, I actually like her music, I know... don’t kill me. I don’t hate her but I just wish Directioners would not be as mean to her, just because she dated Harry for a couple of months. I mean it wasn’t even a serious relationship, as in together for years and stuff. They didn’t even make it to like 4 months, well I don’t know how long okay, it was like nothing. They don’t have anything against each other so why should we have anything against her? I don’t hate Taylor Swift so I don’t think anyone else should hate Taylor Swift. They just showed in the documentary that we all hate her, we all want her to die. And one of the girls did say that she would kill her on the street. The average Directioner does not like Taylor Swift of course, but the average Directioner would not kill her. They just picked like the most extreme people to do these interviews, to follow all around, and be like yes, this is the average Directioner, and it’s not true. There is a group of girls on that documentary that said they met the boys 64 times, or 63, or some ridiculous number, and I just have a problem with that cos they make it seem like that is the average, like every Directioner has met the boys multiple times. I’ve never met them. because money, you need money to do things, and it sucks. Who knows when you’ll meet your idol you know? Who knows when you’ll meet your favourite musician? It’s kind of really disheartening. So yeah those are my opinions on the documentary, obviously people probably think of it differently, but thats just kind of how I saw it. I think it wasn’t supposed to entertain anyone. It was supposed to inform the general public of how Directioners are, and I feel like by using the word Crazy they already labelled us as whatever they wanted to. Thats what I had a problem with ultimately in this documentary, that they just put us, they just shipped us all in one thing, instead of trying to see what a real Directioner was they just labelled us whatver they thought we were and they found girls that ft that description, and then they just displayed it on TV. 144

8 Chelsey S (hispanic female, southern US, 16)

So I guess this could be the frst video. Today Channel 4 did this documentary about One Direction fans, homies and niggas... I’m a Directioner okay, just putting it out there, and those little fucks didn’t really put the fandom in like, I’m not, phew, I’m not even gonna start on the people they chose! That is like 2% of the fandom right there.Yes we do get over excited a bit, we do have our moments where we... yeah. They didn’t show the fandom where we are in our own little world on twitter or tumblr, they didn’t show that at all. They just showed the fans that actually got to meet them or in some way interacted with them like, you know dogs, not everybody is rich, not everybody gets to see them 62 times like, that doesn’t happen. A girl I don’t know frickin like, she had black magic to meet them 62 times. When I wet to their concert, by the way I was just like sitting in the 400 seats, like I was like in the way stands. I didn’t even get to see them like when they weren’t in their concert cos like they had the day off, I didn’t even get to see them, like, I got to glance at Niall, waved at me for like 0.3 seconds, 0.5 seconds, somewhere in there. But this is like a video, like a little rant whatever. But it’s also because me and another girl, all Directioners are my friends, she and I are managing an account, that is, we’re gonna make our own Directioner documentary. So I’m gonna give out an email on the link below and all you guys have to do basically is just send your fan video. Put like a minute to 5 minutes, don’t go all 20 minutes over here cos I know we all wanna talk about the boys and we can do that for endless days, I mean we’ve been doing it for three years and we still can’t get over it. But in the video you have to talk about what your daily life as a Directioner is, cos this is a documentary, we’re documenting what the Directioners do. And we don’t all have the time in the world to be stalking the boys, hello? No. Some of us stay in our rooms with a laptop in front of us, stalking them virtually. So, no music, don’t go away! Come back to me, love me! Yeah that’s all basically what I want you guys to do and just describe what you do on a daily basis like, I get up, I log on, well twitter is always logged on, I scroll past the tweets, just talk about what you really do. We don’t just hate, I’ve never given anyone hate or anything but we always vote for the boys and we’re always 24/7 on vevo and stuff trying to break records, and that’s the kind of stuff we needed on Channel 4’s show. We help to raise so much money like when Zayn or Liam talk about we’re gonna do this, like Harry and trekstock, we actually donate and get involved and Channel 4 did 145 not show that... they only showed the bad side and we’re not all like that okay? We’re actually normal human beings! So yeah I just had to get this out. Follow the account which I’ll put down there and send your fan videos and we’ll spread it around and hopefully it’ll get to the boys, and we’ll work really hard on it, so that’s all i wanted to say and i guess this is where i say goodbye, so adios.

9 Chelsey S 2

Okay, I have no idea if you guys can really, okay you can see me I think! Uh it’s so, I need to adjust myself, whatever you guys are okay with seeing like half my face. Um, so, my other video sucked ass like the quality is so horrible, like I wanna like kill myself because ugh so nasty! Thats what you get for doing it off computers like yo dog mom I need a Canon, hello that’s why. But not til Xmas guys. So basically I’m gonna be more specifc now cos I realise the other video is more of a rant than an actual like video video. So I’m gonna call this the Directioners’ Directioner documentary project, because that sounds so much better and official, and this is ehat it basically is, so I’m gonna start now. So the Directioners’ Directioner documentary project, that is like a tongus twister, is basically where Directioners from all over the world are gonna send in their fan video, and this fan video has to be around a minute or 2, or or 4 or 5 or 6 like that you guys you can’t be all like frickin 30 minutes trying to all like, `I don’t even know where that thought was gonna go but yeah you guys just need to make a video, send it in and our editing team will edit it like cool, but not that cool cos come on we’re not like your MTV producers here. But we will try. And this all started because of these dumb fucks of Channel 4 who can’t do their shit right and get the right fans because these little fuckers don’t know the fuck who One Direction fans are, like I’m not even gonna, no ssshh! Stop there! And take a deep breath! I think I’m calm now.

10 denise ariel (asian female, US, 16)

Hi guys my name is Denise. I’m going to be doing a rant on the recent documentary by Channel 4. Firest of all I’d like to imply something…Larry shippers do read write and make Larry fan art that is smutty, a little bit smutty, cos we have fantasies guys, we have fantasies that we’d like to have them live. Let it live, just let it air out okay? Just please. Let Larry have a chance. Give Larry a chance! And the girls, the girls in 146 those videos, I’m sorry, if you’re watching this - that was all wrong. My room is not covered in posters from top to bottom, from the ceiling to the foorboards in Larry fan art, One Direction stuff, I don’t even know. I know that the real fans are at home, on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook for gods sakes, Instagram just reblogging everything they see that dedicates their lives to the boys. I mean me, I know I dedicate every second of my day to those boys, because I love them so much and I want the to actually live their dream, like hopefully I want one day. So maybe just maybe if you just give it a chance, give everything a chance, and let us try something for once? Let us try to do something. Let us try to explain ourselves to the public. Just get some Larry shippers and Elounor shippers and all these fan people from One Direction and just kind of let us explain ourselves. Let us tell you how the fandom is. We are on Tumblr. We’re there, we’re just there. We’re waiting. We have fantasies and we wanna explain right now. I know as a Larry shipper I’d like to say that Larry is not always like that. I mean Larry is cute. I mean look at them! Have you ever seen two people look like they’re more in love? i think they’re lovely, I think they’re amazing. And true fans are the ones that stay home on the laptop and blog, blog, make all this stuff for them. We vote for the TCAs. We do illegal stuff just to get what we want, but, in the end it’s all worth it. We just want you guys to let us explain that the fandom really isn't like that. What you did Channel 4 was all wrong. And you know what else you did? You killed 42 girls. I hope you’re happy. Those 42 girls were Larry shippers, and those Larry shippers were part of my family. No matter how many fghts this fandom gets into, I mean we’re always there for each other. Do you even get that? I mean Channel 4 you’re in a bitch lot of stuff. You’re agh. Let’s just say the fandom hates you. Okay? That’s it, that’s my rant. See you guys later, bye.

11 DerekTheDominator (black male, US, 18)

Hey it’s Derek, so if you haven’t seen a big rant video from me then you’re. oh, you’re about to. So a little while ago I made this video called Larry documentary and I thought it was going to be a little documentary, on TV, about just how far Larry has gone in the fandom, but basically it was a documentary about One Directions fans and how crazy we are and how pyscho we are and how delusional we are, it was avery very biased based documentary from Channel 4 in the UK, who, I hope you see this because right now FUCK YOU, I mean literally fuck you. So yesterday I was on tumblr and I saw a preview of the documentary - it showed girls like knocking on 147 their door and running away, it showed girls like tweeting about their fantasies and what they want to do and how we always know where the boys are, it showed some Larry stuff about how people believe Harry and Louis are in a relationship and they’re in love, and it showed some graphic artwork, which actually made me really mad because they had to have asked permission to use that artwork… people were probably like yeah I’ll do it, I mean I get that you want to get attention but. some of that artwork was a little graphic, ugh I don’t know, I can’t really lie cos I read smut all the time but it just kind of freaked me out a bit when I frst saw it, I kind of got a different look at how crazy we are, but I was like Man we ARE crazy, but it’s for like a good reason, like, we love the boys! And then I go to a friend’s house and I see twitter and I see that Larry Shippers is trending worldwide and I’m like What the Fuck?! Holy shit. Cos usually that’s a really bad thing. And then, this is what got me, 14 Larry shippers committed suicide after they saw that documentary. Now that documentary was very biased based, and it was very cruel, and they made us look like we were freaks. Like, I get it, this fandom is fucking crazy, this fandom is psycho. We know so much, we are like CSI. Like, this is not us! They should have had someone who is a fan, and is in the fandom and can actually say a nice satisfed opinion on what this fandom is. Because honestly if you’re not a fan and you’re looking into the fandom we do look like psychopaths. Like they don’t have that heart part of it. Honestly Tyler oakley - if Tyler Oakley had made this documentary it would have been perfect, it would have been the best documentary ever, cos he knows what it is like to be a fan and he knows what it’s like to control it and balance it out and make it awesome. But a big part of it - 14 people, and then it went up to 28. 28 larry shippers committed suicide. I’m not that emotional because I can’t really believe it - I’m still in denial. I’ll say this - it could be a rumour, it could be a nasty rumour that someone made, to get attention, I don’t know, some people are messed up. It could be a rumour. But if it’s not… just think 28 families are affected, 28 moms, 28 dads, 28 friends, 28 extended family members, 28 teachers, 28 old daycare people, 28 neighbours, they’re all affected and their lives will never be the same. Because these people committed suicide. Do I think it was a right reason to actually take your life? No, but they did it, and that’s the point - it’s sad. Suicide is such a horrible thing because it will affect someone’s life. if my friend committed suicide, if any of my friends did my life would never be the same. Every day when I woke up I would think about that person. i would think about that person who committed suicide every single day. Even if someone from my school who I wasn’t close with and didn’t hang out with outside of 148 school, but you know I still talked to in classes, you know said Hi to in the hallway, maybe sat with at lunch…. if they committed suicide my life would be changed forever. Because I would always think about that, why do that? Why would they do that? What was the real reason? But you can’t ask them that because they’re gone and like, it’s really horrible. And the fact that… it just makes me really upset. And it’s really bad. And I really hope it’s a rumour, I hope it’s a rumour so much. I hope it’s a mean nasty rumour. And if I fnd it’s a rumour and I fnd the person that does this, you will be getting the rant. You’ll get the bitch. Yeah that’s all I really wanted to say, um, I’m really happy that Liam tweeted - he said Fuck the documentary, like really it made us look gross, it made Directioners look gross and crazy and ugly. Like no. We’re all psycho and we’re all crazy, but we’re good psycho crazy. We love the boys. Like this is a psycho fandom, but it really is a dedicated fandom. And we’re really funny, I mean we really are - some of the things people do in this fandom make me laugh so much, I just can’t help it, I really can’t, it’s just so fun. But yeah it makes me really upset um that’s all I have to say. I can’t really say anything cos I’m just like in shock that 28 people… at the end of the day I really just hope it’s a mean nasty rumour. That’s all I have to say. But one more thing - FUCK YOU Channel 4 Quatro kerching.

12 EleanorInspired (white female, US, 15)

True Directioners aren’t crazy psychopaths. True Directioners are the ones that are dedicated to the boys and not obsessed. And there are differences between obsessed and dedicated. Dedicated fans are the ones that don’t try to get their addresses, Dedicated ones are the ones that wait for the announcements, that don’t leak songs. We’re the ones that stay up all night and vote for them. Why was that video about the ones that are completely obsessed? The ones that stalk their hotels? Why wasn’t it about the ones that are dedicated. Channel 4 doesn’t realise…. in the video they asked why we were so obsessed? They’ve done a lot for us. They’ve saved millions of lives. They stopped me from cutting. Know that that video is just absolutely… it’s stupid. I think it should be taken down. That was shown on national TV and it never should have been. That showed the Larry drawings, and I can’t imagine what Louis and Harry are feeling right now. Any of the boys. They’re probably so mad, at us, at Channel 4. They don’t realise why we’re in their words obsessed. We’re not, we’re dedicated. The girls in the video are psycho, and this is all really stupid. I don’t know what else to say to Channel 4 - I think that that was 149 absolutely pathetic. And it never should have been shown on TV. So I think it should be taken down. This has just gone way too far. This is too much for us to handle. we’ve gone… we’ve taken death threats and hate for being a Directioner, death threats for anything we do. We stand up for them and we’ll get hate. I think it’s just all gone way too far. It’s all really stupid, really really stupid.

13 elizabeth g (white female, US Los Angeles, 15)

Hey guys, um so I just watched the documentary called Crazy for One Direction that they aired on Channel 4 which is a British TV station, and if you haven’t seen it I’m sure there’ll be YouTube links up to it soon if there aren’t already. But the way they portrayed the fans in it was really negative and I kind of felt the need just to rant on behalf of the whole fandom just because watching my timeline on Twitter you could just tell how mad everyone is. This is really going to be a rant about what they did and why it is so inaccurate, and what the fandom is really about. I guess I’ll start with… the fans they portrayed and talked about were not the majority of the fans. Not all of us like go to their hotel…. I mean I personally did go to their hotel, when they were in Las Vegas and I had the ability to go, just because I wanted to meet them. But I didn’t go up to their foor, I didn’t do anything of the sort. I just sat by their tour bus like calmly waiting. As did practically everybody else who was at their hotel, and that’s the only time I’ve had the opportunity to go to their hotel. They portrayed the fans as people who are like constantly chasing them, running around. Literally three of the boys are in LA right now and I’m here sitting at home and I haven’t even tried to begin to look for them. Not all of us are like running around constantly trying to fnd them like the girl who met them 64 times, like, most of us have never ever had the ability to like meet them, or anything like that and we would really like kill for it, like, we would love to meet them if we could, but we’re not gonna go to the lengths they go to, like what they talk about, that’s not what we’re about. Then at the end of the documentary they show girls singing along to their lyrics, like look they’re mouthing along to every word, like why is that a bad thing that we know their music? Anyone who loves an artist will know their songs to heart. Like if you really enjoy an artist you’ll know their music. It’s not just the boys that I know the music word for word… you can ask me like basically any song that plays on the radio and I could pretty much sing it back to you. I don’t know why they had to portray it as such like a negative thing. Then there’s the fact that they had to like show fan art about Larry 150 and someone was reading some smut… and I am a Larry shipper but I don’t in any way advocate them showing that on TV, because I personally understand that people have opinions besides my own like… I’m fne with whatever you ship, but I just kind of feel uncomfortable because their families are watching that, and like other band members. I mean for me I just keep it under wraps and silently read in a corner but like I feel weird having that publicised, especially like, imagine if you were them and like having your sexuality publicised on like national TV all the time, honestly? I just feel like it’s something, it’s their own choice and it’s whatever they want. I’m sick of it just being constantly publicised, like whatever they are, it doesn’t really matter. Whatever they are, great that’s what they are. i don’t know why there’s a constant need for the media to try to like enforce it on them, it makes me really mad. They also talked about fans that are like yeah I’m gonna marry the boys. But honestly they don’t realise that not all of us are really like that. I mean I’m completely realistic, and they say One Direction is like an addiction and I can get that. I can understand how they can be addicting and you want more and more because honestly, they take up a lot of my life. But it’s for a good reason, they mean a lot to me. I can’t even put how much they mean to me into words, honestly. But the fact that they make it out to be like this insane addiction, it’s just wrong. It’s not what they are trying to advertise, and a lot of us are real people, they pretend that our whole lives are One Direction but no the majority of us are in high school, we go to school, we do the best that we can, i do activities outside of school like i do debate, i sing and songwrite and the boys like serve as a huge inspiration for me singing and songwriting. You know, they pretend that we have no lives outside of the boys or outside of twitter, but in reality all of us do. And they also brought up the whole thing of Do you have a boyfriend in real life? I just found that completely rude. there are plenty of people that I don’t know idolise, whether it’s the Jonas brothers or any hot celebrity like say Adam Levine, but it doesn’t mean they can’t get a boyfriend, and for them to like completely generalise that just because you like this male artist you’re never gonna get a boyfriend which is completely rude. I’m just really mad that they way they portrayed the fandom is not even being there to support the boys but just being there to meet them or for the sake of being there, when that’s not what it’s all about, and that brings me to the fact of what the fadoms really about, and what it’s really about is supporting these boys. if any of you have twitter accounts you’ll know that we’ve been constantly voting for MTV Hottest, we helped the boys win like very single Teen Choice award they were nominated for. We’re here to support them. We’re noy just here to try and meet the 151 boys, we’re not just here for the sake of being here. To a lot of us the boys mean a lot, like I have made tons and tons of friends, I couldn’t even count how many friends I have made because of the boys, from all around the world and it’s just incredible. For a lot of people the boys serve as their reason to stay alive, and I’m really sick of having people pretend they’re just like obsessed with them, when for some people it’s what really makes them happy and it’s probably like the only reason that they’re still here today. The friends I’ve made through Twitter it’s just incredible and I’m lucky enough to have made some friends that I talk to like every single day, like facetime and video chat with and I’m lucky to have such amazing people like that in my life. Aside from being fans of the boys we also make tons of friends with people who are in the same boat as us and thats really really nice and I can’t even describe how amazing it is. Yet the documentary doesn’t show that at all. All it does is talk about the crazy fans who have you know met them 65 times by sitting outside their hotel every time they come to their city. The majority of you know just sit on our computers talking about how much we love the boys, as well as just making friendships that have lasted for years now. Some friendships that I’ve had have been there since literally over a year now and I’ve actually met people in real life from Twitter. The thing is we barely even talk about the boys, they were just awesome people who I got the opportunity to meet. It’s honestly just sickening to me how the media can even begin to portray us as these insane fans, just to make a huge generalisation of every single fan saying they’re all these crazy obsessed people, but that’s not what we are, and I’m really really sick of hearing that from the media, it’s just disgusting, when they don’t really know anything and the only people who do are the people inside the fandom. So I understand all of you are probably going to be mad like I am about this. I’m just sickened in a way that they make us look like this, but at the same time, if you’re in the fandom you know that this is not the truth and I’m pretty sure that although the boys may have seen this and their parents may have, I’m pretty sure that they know a lot of us aren't like this and we’re just simply her to support the boys. And I know a lot us have not had the chance to simply talk to them, but through things like Twitter they know that we’re not as obsessed and crazy as they deem us out to be. We’re just here to support them and love them because they make us happy. I’m just going to end this rant by saying that the documentary was just complete bullshit, I mean honestly, we’re not like that in any way, and I know some fans are, but the majority of us are just here to support the boys, and to love them and just you know be there for them when they’re on this journey that they’re rely enjoying. And whether you’r here 152 from the start or whether you’re just joining, it really doesn’t matter to me because like we’re just all a family and I’ve made some of the best friends I could have ever made here, and I’d really like to meet more in the future. i’d just like to end it off by saying thank you guys so much for watching and I really really do love you all as do the boys, and they know that this is just complete bullshit honestly. And we’re just like a family and I’m so glad that I’ve made so many friends and had so many good experiences with the boys. I don’t know if all of you are as mad about this as I am, but looking at my Twitter timeline there were a lot of really mad people, and I was really mad watching it too, even though i missed most of it. But yeah, and that’s my video. if you dont agree thats fne, if you agree cool. I hope you guys liked it and I hope you guys keep supporting the boys no matter what people think, cos honestly just forget about their opinions cos you guys really know that that’s not what we are. We just support and love the boys and I really hope this doesn’t push anyone away from supporting and loving them cos that’s what we do. Love you guys, thank you so much.

14 Erika P (white female, US, 16)

Hi guys, well I’m pretty sure most of you have heard about the documentary on Directioners on Channel 4. I actually just heard of it, just watched a video clip of it. I guess you could say I’m ashamed to be called a Directioner or to be put into that group. Most of us aren’t even like that - we don’t stalk the boys in real life, like, we can blog about them for hours on end, we love our boys, but we don’t invade their privacy. It’s like this girl who said Oh I’ve met these guys, our boys, 64 times and they’re proud of saying that they stalk them and that they were outside of their bedroom when they were sleeping. I guess most of the fandom is really riled up about this cos we’re portrayed as creepy stalkers and thats not what we really are, so on Twitter This Is Not Us is trending, I mean i don’t go out at 3 in the morning trying to fnd where these boys are. Mostly none does this. We’re also not these 10 years old freaks who write porn and try and ship them together, I mean, it’s kind of ridiculous. I don’t get why the media sees us like this. They just see the people that have stalked them so many times and invaded their privacy and just done all these awful things that labels all of us as awful directioners and awful people and psychotic when we’re really not. We just spend our time on Twitter and Tumblr trying to fnd out like, we’re not trying to fnd out exactly where they are but we’re trying to fnd out if the boys 153 are okay. We don’t death threat people, some of us do, but those are like the people they’re talking about on the newscast that actually sent death threats to people who are like One Direction are stupid… everyone has their own opinions. It’s kind of pathetic how some of the so called Directioners do that and i don’t know I wish I wasn’t classed as that cos it’s not us, it’s hashtag trending on Twitter This Is Not Us, thats just 1% of us. Most of us don’t have any money to go to the concerts. They don’t have enough money to like go out and fy to all these concerts. And we just wish for the day that we can just tweet them and they’ll tweet us back - that’s basically what we do. Instead of like the people on the commercial or on the documentary or whatever who are following them around the city. We don’t do that and it’s kind of upsetting that people think we do. But if you’re gonna view us like that power to you. You don’t know what we actually do. You’r actually ignorant title stupid people. And you can think what you want but it’s not true. Hopefully the boys know that, and if they don’t know that I guess I hope they someday fnd out that not all of us are like that. Not all of us think we have a chance to go there, fnd you and get married cos thats what these psychotic girls think. There’s 10 year old girls that think they’re gonna get married to. One Direction. Basically this video is about I think it’s pathetic that the media sees us like that cos that’s not what we do. It makes me feel ashamed, actually it makes me really upset. I hope the boys see this but I highly doubt it. Please don’t classify all of us like that. Okay, bye.

15 HallelujahAndEmerson (hispanic female, US, 15)

Hi there my name is Emily and you’re on my Channel. And based on what this video is called you’re probably aware that this video is about One Direction, but not just about One Direction - it’s about Channel 4. Now I am extremely… I got home from school today - the frst day of school and it sucked, and I go home to rest and I go on my Instagram and I see people going Oh my god Channel 4, Oh my goooosh. So then I go and check that out. And it’s about this Channel that doesn’t even exist, it’s completely irrelevant to America - it exists in the UK. And I once I actually watched it I was like okay this is bowing literally the 2% of this fandom that are extremely insane, have no regards for the boys privacy and personal space and they just want to be kidnapped. They don’t care about anything else besides kidnapping them. And that drives me insane. Basically Channel 4 they made a documentary about the crazy insane Directioners. I am a Directioner and I’m proud of it. I’m not proud of the stupid 154 people who give us a bad name. And people are giving us death threats because we’re so crazy - I’ll read some of them to you: If you like their music fair enough, but Directioners take it too far. No. Crazy Directioners take it too far. Directioners. Some people are dropped as a child - they were thrown at a wall. I was never dropped. I was never thrown against a wall. I’m a Directioner. I’m sane. But I’m not one of those people who is gonna go running up to them and be like AAAAAAAAHHH! I won’t go and stand outside their hotel for hours, I won’t do that, that’s a waste of my time. What do I think is gonna happen by that? Nothing! The hashtag Crazy About One Direction programme is a perfect example of why the rest of the population despises Directioners. That documentary just shows the bad part of Directioners. Directioners are really good people, not the crazy people like that one girl who put You’re terrorist Zayn on your poster. You shouldn’t be allowed to buy tickets. That’s really racist. That person should be very ashamed. That’s not a Directioner - i don’t know what that is. When are Directioners going to understand that none of the group care about their fans? Are you serious? if they didn’t have fans they wouldn’t be here. Niall would be some random Irish kid walking around with his guitar, with his own Crazy Mofo shirt. You Directioners are a crazy bunch. Yeah we’re a crazy bunch. But we’re not all psychopaths. There are also people out there who aren’t Directioners and they’re actually like that in real life. Directioners make me want to die. Here’s a thought - don’t put it on Twitter. All the Directioners sending hate to people aren’t exactly helping themselves, just giving another reason for people not to like you. Directioners don’t really send hate - those are Directionaters. They send hate to their girlfriends, they send hate to people. I don’t ship Haylor, I never did, but I don’t want her to die. She is really nice She seems really funny, she’s really pretty. I like some of her music. i don’t really know a lot about her. i don’t want her to die. I’m not crazy like that and neither are most of the people I know. I don’t know anyone who wants Taylor Swift to die. Well the programme on Directioners was pretty scary. If they think it’s okay to send death threats and laugh about it they have a problem. I agree, if people send death threats thats a really bad thing, they shouldn’t do it, that’s extremely just uncalled for. It’s lower than low and you can’t do anything about it, co people do that anyway - it’s not just Directioners who send death threats. Can we go all Hitler on Directioners or would society frown on such actions? Are you really asking that question? And you guys are complaining about our death threats? That only some of us are doing? I’m not even gonna say us - that only some of them are doing? And you just said Can we go all Hitler on Directioners? Are you serious? If I tell you I hate you and you should die, what 155 would you do? It’s so unrespectful Directioners that did that shame on you. It’s like you tweet something about a fandom and they all start hating on you hashtag Crazy about One Direction. Directioners are mad people Directioners. Look you need stop being aggressive and sort yourselves out. OMGGGG these girls need locked up or put into a padded cell. These Directioners are sick in the head! First of all you should go to English classes, because that defnitely, i got nothing out of that. That’s all I have to say about that. Can we put that on Your Grammar Sucks? If all Directioners got aids the world would be a far better place. And you guys are complaining about death threats? You are really hypocrites. Directioners need mental help, seriously. Really does it look like I need mental help? You’re the one expressing your pain about Directioners on Twitter. Get a therapist instead of putting all your problems on Twitter. I think Directioners should all die. to point out, should is spelt SHUD. And I’m gonna leave it at that. Let me just be clear - those people were not Directioners . And the real Directioners aren’t actually bad people. We don’t send death threats to people. We love their girlfriends, even Haylor - we dont hate her. So if you agreed with this video click the like button, so yeah byeee!

16 juliette k (white female, UK, 17)

Okay so, I didn’t really feel like doing a video but I’ve got to. These Larry shipper things… it’s all down to that Channel 4 video that was on last night. This is so wrong. That Channel 4 thing - that story of a Directioner, has just ripped this fandom apart now. I mean people committing suicide just cos of that. Channel 4 should think before they put stuff like that on. And… Channel 4 literally killed people, cos Channel 4 have made people kill themselves so. Now One Direction probably think we’re all loonies like they showed. They probably think that we’re crazy people who stalk them and go running to their hotel rooms and don’t give them their own life. That documentary was probably about 2% of the fandom, what they do. Not all the fandom does that. I hardly leave my own bedroom so… Every Directioner in the world is getting the blame for it now. Channel 4 should do something about it… say. I don’t know but. RIP all the Larry shippers that have sadly died, and we will always remember you. And there is going to be some sort of remembrance thing on Twitter for all you people, so we’re going to do that. And yeah this has been really hard to do this video. It’s been a quick video of how bad this Channel 4 thing was and RIP to all the Larry shippers and I hope this fandom can get back on track, cos it’s tearing us 156 part. And thank you to all the other fandoms that have been helping us through this. Bye.

17 just alyyssaa (white female, US, 17)

Hey everyone, today we’re ranting about Crazy for One Direction. Channel 4, I don’t even know what it’s called, oh my god I’m so spaced out today. i hardly got any sleep. i’ve been out all day so I’m just tired okay? I look like complete shit, but you know it’s okay! So this, I don’t even know what to call it okay, I am unbelievably angry, I was laughing through it, okay this thing is just like, okay, um… I’ll just start off with how disgusted I am with Channel 4 right now like it’s so disrespectful what they’ve done with this Directioner documentary, that’s what it is a documentary. if you don’t know what happened… Channel 4, this channel from the UK made a documentary about One Direction fans. And let me just say this is the most hilarious, disgusting, just fat out stupid thing I’ve ever watched in my entire life. Um I’m just gonna go on with the Larry thing for a moment - i am a Larry shipper. I’m a hardcore Larry shipper. You mess with my two babies and you are just going to be out, okay? The fan art? Okay can we just have a moment? Why would they put the fan art, Larry fan art in this video? That doesn’t make any sense to me whatsoever, like really? Like, oh my goodness. I probably sound really dumb right now but I am just so angry okay…The way they described the fans and the Larry shippers in this documentary is the most untrue thing. okay there’s maybe like a tiny part of this fandom that are like that, but let me just say they just put a bad out name to the entire country, okay all around the world, to Directionera. We’re not all crazy, we don’t all tell people to die. Let me just start with Taylor Swift… these 10 year old, 12, 13 years old girls are saying how they wanna kill Taylor Swift, they tweeted her that, this one girl’s patch got blocked by Taylor Swift. That is so, you can’t even call yourself a fan. That is the most rudest thing i’ve seen in my entire life. Why would you dedicate one whole part to hitting on Taylor Swift? She never dumped him ok? Harry dumped her. Harry ditched her okay? Taylor never did nothing to him, she never wrote a song about him - that one girl she was like about Never Ever Getting Back Together, that was about Jake Gosling I think his name was - it was about jake, it wasn’t about Harry! Okay?! The way they describe the Larry Shippers in this video, like honestly, like okay you have your opinion, but the way they just completely like rubbed it in everyone’s faces, like, so disrespectful. They describe us as crazy, rude, obsessive, yes some of us might be a bit obsessed 157 with the boys, but not all of us are proud when we scare them away and stuff. The boys even know that we’re not like that. I feel sorry for the girls in that documentary, like, I actually feel sorry for them. I wish it was never made, because they’ll probably look back at that in like 2 years and be like oh my goodness, like this Channel Four made a complete fool out of ourselves. I just can’t even come to describe how, like, I watched the whole thing. I watched the whole thing, because I wanted to be able to pinpoint what people were talking about. And lets move on to the Larry Shippers that committed suicide because of this? They were ashamed that they were fans because everyone all labelled us as these crazy psychotic people that should die, like people are literally saying like Directioners go kill yourselves. And you know what there are some depressed and some very sensitive people out there and they’re gonna listen to you and they did. I do believe that some people killed themselves, some people say it was a rumour, I am pretty much positive that some people did. And I know some people did, just from Twitter and stuff. And it’s so shameful to see that. I’m embarrassed as a fan, I am disgusted as a fan to see such rude, it’s like so disrespectful, completely disrespectful documentary I’ve ever seen in my life. And I do believe that they should get sued for it because they are speaking lies and they are using… I’m sure none gave them permission to put that fan art in there. The Larry videos, like, that is none of their business. I really do believe that’s kind of illegal - I think it’s illegal to put stuff that’s not yours in a video? So, fat out, I do believe that this documentary speaks so many lies, and people who are not One Direction fans are gonna be hating on Directioners even more than they did before. Because we’ve always been labelled as crazy psychotic bitches that have no lives. And you know what, okay, you wanna call us that I’m fne with that. But it just put through a lot of peoples heads that don’t know Directioners personally… they make us look very very bad and I’m just so ashamed and embarrassed about this. Um, I seriously want to break down and cry. Liam tweeted, I’m gonna read the tweet real quick cos my camera is about to die. Liam tweeted about it… and this contains swears because Liam is just, you know… and Liam is the only one who tweeted about it, but I’m fne with that because he said “the boys” The frst thing he said, he said “ Not really sure what’s going on right now, I hope everyones okay” and then he said “hearing some horrible things, really hope it’s not true” and then he said “Just so you know, we love you guys and we know how dedicated you are, to be honest we can’t believe that you guys spend all your time on us. We couldn’t give a fuck about what any documentary says, they’re dramatised for entertainment and full of bullshit. Anyway 158 we all know how hard you work for us, we see it every day at our shows. Lets all take a moment to think about what we/you have achieved. You should be proud.” So thats what he said - I started crying, because it’s just so emotional. They really do love us, they really do know exactly who we are and how dedicated we are, and what was said in that documentary is just for entertainment. Yeah so that was my rant and if you’re gonna decide to send hate just cos of my opinion, it will be deleted. I’m so used to it now though it’s just like whatever. So please leave your opinion below and I’ll see you guys soon. Bye!

18 kaitlyn h (white female, US, 16)

Hi guys, I’m in my little sister’s room right now. Okay so i was on twitter and guess what I found? The documentary Crazy About One Direction. I didn’t think much of it, until I saw the video. Oh my god! That’s what they think of us?! Okay, so they think we’re kind of crazy people who need to be locked up. Right, that’s one percent out of basically millions of other girls. So if none of you heard what happened, one of them said “I got braces cos Niall Horan has braces. I don’t really need them but who really cares?” She wasted her money on braces and Niall got his off. She’s kinda screwed. So anyway I’m just really angry because they… we’re not like that. Protective yes. Obsessive no. They’re like our idols. And we just wanna make sure they’re happy. And we show our love to them yes. But not like that. And… the whole Larry thing? They’re just bringing more drama than there already was. We’re over that and then they got to frag it right back in. Like, some of that …the stuff that was there? Oh my… I was so angry. Like, we’re not… That’s just… Anyway if you buys haven’t seen it, if you’re not overly sensitive you can watch it. But I kinda regret watching it, cos now I’m friction pissed. Cos, that’s not something we need to see. Liam saw it and he stood up for us. He texted “Saw a lot of stuff, I hope it’s not true” another thing was “They just make it overdramatic, I know you guys mean the best. I love you Directioners” See - they just see it as we just wanna show them that we care. Other people see us as hormonal crazy insane people, who just want attention. And we’re not, so I just made a little video to say how I felt about that and yeah well, bye. 159

19 kaitlyn h 2 (white female, US, 16)

Hey guys, so when I did the reaction video to the Crazy About One Direction video, I only watched part of the video. So I watched she whole thing, the whole documentary. And now I want to do my own documentary about how we actually are. So, the whole stalking One Direction, fnding every move they are… yes we follow them on Twitter, we check their tweets, that’s with any fandom. You wanna know what they’re doing, sure. But those girls go to the extreme - they follow them, stalk them, know what hotel they’re in. We get curious as to where they are in the world, sure, so we can maybe see if we can see them around, maybe. But we don’t go to that extreme basically so that we can know everywhere they are, everything they’re doing, that’s just not who we are. So now I’m going to go on to the tweets - yes we get excited and stuff like that but, to get them to notice us um, but what some of those girls were saying was, um, trying to fnd a nice word to say it, um, awkward.

20 Katrina L (white female, US Texas 17)

Okay I just watched the Crazy About One Direction friction documentary and it was a piece of crap oh my god. I have so much secondhand embarrassment right now. They only showed the crazy part of the fandom oh my god. It pissed every single person off, like, it probably even pissed people that are not in the One Direction fandom off. Like oh my god they made us seem so crazy and like One Direction’s family members are watching this! Imagine how they must feel, that is like so weird. I feel so bad for anyone that watched that. But they’re like saying it’s okay we know you’re not all crazy. oooooowwww, I am so embarrassed, I really hope the boys did not watch that - that is just embarrassing. They read fan fction! How creepy is that?! Number one rule about fan fction - never read it aloud! Second is… never share it with anybody. And third - don’t read it in front of national television! I think that’s frickin obvious! Like what the freak is going onnn? They said they would kill Taylor Swift! Like I don’t like taylor Swift but that’s for other reasons… I like her music, I just don’t like her. But don’t send a person hate just cos you don’t like them, or say you’re gonna kill someone… noooo you crazy people. No. And I ship Larry Stylinson, but I’m not going to go on a documentary and say I ship Larry Stylinson and they fuck each other in the ass, no. No! You crazies.Crazy. Why would you? Why would you let your daughters go on that? God! Why would you yourself go on that? I don’t care if you’re gonna be on 160 frickin TV. You just embarrassed yourself, that’s what you did. And like the whole fandom is just so embarrassed right now. It was just disgusting. And my link wasn't right cos it kept freezing and stuff so I didn’t hear it all, but what I did hear - the girl got braces cos Niall got braces! What the freak?! So since Britney Spears shaved her head, you’re gonna shave your head? I bet a lot of people did that! But oooooooohhhh, and they didn’t show the nice people in the fandom, they didn’t show the sane people. The people who ship what they ship in silence and keep it on Tumblr, and don’t send hate and ship it with kindness. They don’t ship it with aergh yeah they’re fucking each other in the arse right now yeah! And whoever says different should fuck themselves and kill themselves and whatever. No. We ship our stuff in silence. And even the people who don’t even ship stuff were so embarrassed. I have a whole bunch of links up of people who apologised to their friends, to One Direction’s friends and family and they’re like “It’s okay it’s okay we don’t think you’re crazy!” But I think they kinda do think we’re crazy. Cos we are - we’re all crazy. We’re all crazy a little bit, but we’re not like, that crazy. That just makes me so embarrassed, like i was gonna puke, for real. And what if the boys were watching that? That is so embarrassing. I felt so bad for them, I was like please oh please dear God, please don’t let them be watching this. But I think they were. And Harry’s mum was watching it for sure cos she was like tweeting about it and oh. Imagine watching TV while your son is being talked about in fan fction, and how he’s in love with another guy and stuff. No no! No sweetheart no, you don’t do that, no that’s a big nono. That’s all I have to say right now, I’m probably gonna be very mad later. Okay bye guys.

21 Katrina L 2 (white female, US Texas 17)

Today has just been a horrible day, um, as you’ve seen in my other video the One Direction documentary came out today. Fourteen or twenty eight, I dunno some people are saying fourteen, some are saying twenty eight, Larry shippers committed suicide today, because people were giving them crap about what those people said on the documentary and they were saying a whole bunch of stuff about “Go die Larry shippers” and I even got a few. You just can’t listen to them. You are way better then them. If they are sending you death threats you are way better than them. You cannot listen to people that send death threats. because they’re probably just losers that are obsessed with something that’s not even worth it. Or they’re just idiots in general and they have no life. Even if you have no life, you are way better than that 161 person anyway if they’re sending you hate. For no reason, you did nothing wrong, so don’t think you did anything wrong, cos you did nothing. Shipping something is apart of the fandom and it’s not wrong. If you ship Elounor it’s not wrong. If you ship Larry it’s not wrong, if you ship Ziam it’s not wrong, if you ship Ziall or whatever you call him, it’s not wrong. None of them are wrong - it’s your opinion. And you do not send people hate because they ship something. And don’t kill yourself please, you are important to this fandom. No matter if you ship Elounor or if you ship Larry, no matter what you ship, please do not kill yourself. You are important to this fandom, you are important to this world. No matter how much you think you’re not, you are. So don’t think you’re not, don’t think you’re not. Somebody cares about you somewhere. I know I care about you even though I don’t know you. if you are part of the One Direction fandom I care about you, I love you. So… rest in peace to the people that committed suicide. i really wish you wouldn’t… didn’t have…. but please none none commit suicide, it’s not gonna get any better if you do. Well it might get better but you don’t know that for sure. It can get better if you don’t kill yourself. You could have this wonderful life that you didn’t even know was there because you didn’t stick around to see it. You gotta stick around okay, cos I love you. Even if I don’t know you, I love you. Alright bye!

22 Lauren P (white female, NY, 18)

Okay so it has just been brought to my attention that Channel 4 news, or whatever, or another TV station, I think it was Channel 4 news, is apparently doing a documentary on just mainly Larry Stylinson, and their willy size. But we all know this is gonna be directed towards Larry Shippers and how we’re fucking crazy. Oh my god! You people are the one who are insane, because, if it was a normal relationship, just like, them being friends and people making up rumours and shit, a documentary wouldn’t even need to be motherfucking made. I’m actually, actually laughing. Internally I’m just like “What?!” First of all I think it’s rude, I think it’s rude that regardless of whether Larry is real or not these people are making us out to be the craziest people in the world… we’re psychopaths and actually really believe that Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson are in a relationship. First of all, I don’t have to tell you guys, bitches, at Channel 4 News, that it’s real. Obviously these people don’t look into it, they don’t look into it at all. They probably just look at their performances on stage and assume that we’re getting something out of that. And that’s what we’re trying to prove that Larry’s real. 162

They don’t even know half the shit, they’re not even 50 oercent right of the shit that they see. They probably see like I said, One Direction being famous, and us just making up shit. They don’t see, sorry I gotta walk around I’m getting mad now. They don’t see the things that we see. They literally are looking at nothing. they have no evidence to prove that we are right. If you think about it, they should have looked into this shit. They should have been like “Yo we know what we’re talking about, we know for a fact that it’s not real because we’ve talked to the boys.” That never happened, I can tell you right now that the boys don’t know any of those bitches putting on this documentary about them. I don’t think they know. I think their management probably knows and has told them “Go for it, try and prove these bitches wrong because we’re trying to get rid of them, they’re being annoying” Because like I always state in my videos, if nothing was going on, why would we have to prove so much that these two boys are just friends, and nothing more? It’s literally like dude, every band, every actor or whatever, literally jokes about it that they’re in a relationship and everyone knows they’re clearly not like, oh my god. Even interviewers with like famous actors, like those two guys from Star Trek, and I don’t like Star Trek, but those two , they’re being shipped, they know it, they laugh about it. The interviewers that interview them fucking laugh about it. I can say solo many people, you all know it already because you see it happening and you guys, this is why you ship them because you know it’s not actually real, but you think it’s cute or whatever and you like that the actors or singers or whatever acknowledge it and are openly out about it and okay with it. And that’s because they know what the fans want and they’re confdent, and they know nothing’s going on so they can openly joke and talk about it you know, and that’s what’s so great about these people. But then when it comes to Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson, who we actually do have more proof of being in a relationship than any of these other people, we get “These people are the craziest people in the fucking world, One Direction fans are crazy, they’re so ignorant and stupid, they know nothing, they’re all a bunch of twelve year olds. I am sick of people putting down One Direction fans, especially Larry shippers. Because even though a lot of us may not know, or we may start shit in this fandom, like we may think we know more than we do, we are still fans of this band. We protect our boys, we love our boys, we don’t want anything happening to them. We want their happiness. You know I can’t say that for every fan cos I’m sure there are some fans that are just Harry girls and just wanna get in Harry’s pints or like the girls that make signs and throw tampons on stage and stuff. Like what the fuck is wrong with 163 you? You are not a fan if you are doing that shit. You are a fan if you are protective of your boys, or you will jump down anyone’s throat who says shit about them or like insult your idols or whatever, like, those boys are peoples’ lives and they’re not my life. They haven’t saved my life - I know they have for other girls, but Larry is my life. Harry Styles is my life. And not in the hetero Harry girl way where I wanna get in his pants. In the way that he is my angel, and that if anyone ever messed with Harry Styles I would fucking slaughter them because he’s like my little angel, he’s my baby. And Larry, like Louis, don’t even get me started, I can’t even. So these bitches, on Channel 4 news, they are just making the biggest fools of themselves. They think they know shit. They think they know more shit than us, which is fne because they are in the media, but they haven’t talked to Harry and Louis about it, in their lives. Because if it was real then they would get Harry and Louis on that show and deny the rumours, but no. It’s like basically fans who are non-Larry shippers and are Elounor shippers going on Channel 4 news and putting up this documentary. It’s literally what it is. These people have nothing to prove that it’s not real and then they call us deluded, they call us crazy? Fuck off, that’s what I can say fuck off, right the fuck now. People like that know shit, and especially people in the media, know shit. And Ihope they fucking see this video. I fucking hope they do. I want you all to send this video to them. I don’t fucking care if this video gets deleted. Once my point gets across I just want them to know that they know shit, that Larry is not real, and we don’t just make up shit. And even if we were, even if we truly actually believed they were in a relationship and they actually weren’t, why the fuck would it affect you guys? Like holy mother fucking shit. Do you know hoe many fan fctions and fan art and videos are made of other people? Holy crap there is like a ship for frickin Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy. Please bitches get your fucking heads out of your asses if you actually think you are fucking great enough to do a Channel 4 documentary on Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson not being together. I would like to see you try bitches. Cos you obviously know shit about what’s going on. You just wanna make us seem like the biggest assholes. You guys are probably getting money for putting out this documentary and streaming it on TV. Honestly I hope you guys burn in hell, I hope you do. Because you are literally dicks. Don’t you dare mess with my Larry shippers. If you’re gonna mess with the One Direction fandom I’ll still get really mad with you, but I have no control over that because the One Direction fan base is huge. But you mess with my fucking Larry shippers, bitch, that’s where I draw the line, that’s where I draw the line. These people, they think that they know anything about what’s going 164 on with Harry and Louis, pfff, They haven’t seen half the shit that we’ve seen. They haven’t even seen ten percent of the shit, like of all of it there is about Larry being real, like fucking A. These people, I am so done, so done. I’m losing my breath over this because I am getting so worked up over something. And I’m not even watching it, you know what? Noone should watch it. Noone should watch it because that gets them more views and that gets them more money. Don’t fucking watch that shit, you know that they’re just gonna insult you. They’re just gonna insult us, they’re gonna put down Larry, deny it. Meanwhile… they’re denying it just cos they want to deny it, not because Harry and Louis tood them themselves okay, they wanna fucking get Harry and Louis on that show and for Harry himself to say Larry’s not real, maybe I’d believe it, maybe. I wouldn’t believe Larry’s real because honestly I wouldn’t think Harry’s a liar but, er, you know, yeah I’d like to see these bitches try because honestly these guys are just douchebags. You guys are getting nothing accomplished and we all know Larry’s real. Yeah fuck that shit. And we all know that you guys are the biggest assholes in the whole fucking world. And that’s not gonna bring me down. It’s not gonna make me stop believing in Larry. Honestly what we should do is make sure that the Larry fanbase gets bigger than fucking ever. We have to do this, we have to make sure that everyone stays strong, everyone still ships Larry, none after this fucking programme releases, noone jumps ship. You all have to believe that they are doing this, just to try to prove a point that it’s not real, when clearly nothing else has been done before like this to prove that two guys are just friends. Just think about it please, think about it, that whatever actor you like, whatever actress, you know that they’re being shipped somehow. Especially the huge fans of Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Twilight, all that shit, whatever I don’t know. You know that these actor and actresses are being shipped with their band members or their co-stars or whatever. And you will know that they can joke openly about it and there doesn’t have to actually be a documentary trying to prove that they’re just friends. Just think about it. Think about how insane these people are to go out of their fucking way and try and prove something that’s real, or try and prove something that they do not want to be real. Because God forbid motherfucking someone is gay, holy shit. Honestly you know what? I can’t wait til Harry and Louis come out and disprove all these bitches. And here, oh he’s not real. I’m so sick of this shit. I don’t even want them to come out for my beneft. I want them to come out for themselves, so they can disprove all these bitches, tell them to sit down, suck their dicks. I am so…! I’m getting really worked up about this, but you know what I’m trying to say. Peace out. 165

23 Maddie F (white female, US 15)

Hello I’m here and this is an entry for the new documentary that doesn’t have to be associated any way with Channel 4, but it has to do with how they made us look in Crazy About One Direction. Okay so, most of the Directioners… Channel 4 took the most perverted creepy stalky people, who’ve got tattoos of them, people who stalk them to the very, very… the creepy people. People who really aren’t us, people who are 99.9% in the fandom, not us. We’re the real people right here. We’re the real people, that actually support them, tweet, tons of times so that they can win award, the people who donate to charities, raise tons of money. We’re the people that help them with their stuff, that support them through anything and I don’t get why they made us look so bad on TV. We’re really not that bad, I mean we’re not. They made us look like freaks… they called us a breed, we’re not breeds, we’re human beings too. Anyway on a regular basis Directioners usually just stay in bed, look on Instagram. School…. still people write fan fcs but you don’t add the creepy stuff into it. We don’t make creepy comments, we don’t say “Oh he’s mine, oh I’m gonna kill myself if he doesn’t follow me.” We don’t do that stuff, we’re smart people. We’re not that idiotic. I mean I tweet them sometimes to say “Hey how you doing, how’s it going?” They won’t reply but I mean it’s still a nice thing to do, just talk to them on Twitter. I don’t stalk them on Twitter. But I don’t know, they made us look like we’re complete freaks. They took the freakiest people from the fandom to make us look bad. I don’t understand why they couldn’t come and look at the real us, why they didn’t mention the awards they got because of us, the charities that got so much money because of us, they took the bad side of us and showed it to the whole world. And now we’re getting death threats? We don’t send out death threats. I’ve never sent a death threat in my life. You don’t wish death upon somebody. And they made us look like we do, which we don’t. I just… it gets me pretty worked up. And we lost 91 people from the family today, counting yesterday - that’s how much it was 42, but then I came back today and I saw 91 people died. So in honour of that I put “We won’t let them go” on my wrist and an infnity sign. So I mean… we’re not creepy. We’re a family… we broke. And I’d like to have a little thank you for Liam for putting us back together, glueing us back together. Still can’t understand not all the boys did it, but just Liam. But at least he did, at least he saw our cries for help. I’d just like to thank him, and I love them all. I love them for who they are, not what they look like. Not just that, I 166 love their singing, they’re so good. I’m getting so emotional, I cried the frst time I tried to flm this. But I’d just really like to thank them for making my life better. Bye.

24 mikey2cool (black male, US 35)

What up… we’re back in here on another one. Got some breaking news for you guys, kinda disturbing news. I’m kinda hoping it’s not true but from reports that are going out 42 One Direction fans committed suicide, or allegedly committed suicide last night, and the term Rest in peace Larry Shippers has been on Twitter all day. And rem this is causing a lot of controversy. Now this seems to have stemmed from a documentary in which One Direction fans were painted in a bad light. And if you don’t know what a Larry Shipper is it’s sort of a One Direction fan that believes that Louis Tomlinson and Harry Styles have some sort of relationship going on. But all that aside, if this has really happened it’s really sad you know what I mean? And um the documentary was basically saying that you know One Direction fans and Beliebers, they’ll do anything for the music group that they follow, and sometimes you know do a little too much, be a little too loyal, and do things that aren’t good. So the documentary painted the fans in a bad light. And the story is these Larry shippers felt ashamed of being One Direction fans and ashamed of liking who they liked and so apparently they committed suicide. Me I’m hoping that this is just a rumour, you know what I mean? I mean we all remember the whole cutting for Bieber thing, we all remember that and how that went down. And one thing I have to say is you know with stuff like this you kinda have to be cool about it. You can’t put stuff out here like this because like I say these fans are very loyal and like I say the cutting for Bieber, a few fans really did cut themselves for Bieber and if anyone loses their life over something like this it’s just a shame, and like I say I wanna know what you guys think about it. Hit me in the comment box to let me know what you think. make sure to share the video to get the word out. This is just really sad man, you know, your life is more important than any group, any cause, any you know any fan following. So think about that for anyone who’s deciding to maybe jump on the bandwagon and do something like this. You know, you are more important. Your life is more important than that, but yeah that’s it for this one. I’ll see you guys on the next one man. I’m hoping this is not true, like I say, and I’ll keep everybody in my good graces, whether you’re a Belieber or One Directioner, you know you don’t have to do stuff like this man, but that’s it for this one, I’m out. 167

25 Momotaro S (black female, US 15)

Hello, this is me. And I’m going to rant about the Channel 4 because, it was going round Twitter and I didn’t really know what it was, and so I decided to watch it. It was put up on Youtube. And my frst reaction… “What the hell?” Okay so probably in real life, without the One Direction, they’re probably really lovely, probably really genuine. But in the One Direction, in the One Direction mode they’re friction mental stalkers okay. Real Directioners aren’t like that - maybe 3 percent of the fandom are like that, but those girls, they make the boys life a living hell. Like they stalk them literally…. they go up to their hotel room and knock on their door and assume that they’ll open it. Are you dumb? Are you stupid? If Channel 4 chose to show One Direction’s fans like this, and even if we don’t approve… we don’t like what the boys do, their choices, even though we don’t exactly, not approve, don’t exactly agree with what they do, but we support it cos it’s their choice that they decided to do. But when I look at it these girls, they’re just hate hate hate hate hate. Like the Taylor Swift and Haylor thing. After they broke up I wasn’t exactly like “YES you did a good job”, I was just like “okay, so what else is going on?” I wasn’t like “Taylor you should go die in a hole because you broke up with Harry” or whatever like that and so um I was just like woah. And the thing that got me the most was the fan fction thing. Okay one rule about being in the One Direction fandom is you don’t read fan fction… You don’t read fan fction on national television. Do you hear me girl? Because fan fction, especially the Larry Stylinson fan fction, is something you read by yourself, in your room, not sharing it with your friends, especially on television, do you hear me? Those two girls that were reading like Larry frickin fan fction on television. Do you understand? How many Larry Stylinson shippers are ashamed now? I mean some of you might not be ashamed, but people judge them now, because they’re like “Oh all of Directioners are like that!” Do you understand what you did Channel 4? You made the public look at Directioners like crazy psychos. That just…. if you’re like that, if you stalk people to make their lives a living hell, then just get out of the One Direction fandom. Go to The Wanted okay? This is not right, this is stupid, like really stupid. I’m not joking. And why you would?… did you run out of topics? Did you just…? I don’t know what you were thinking Channel 4 but this was a wrong decision to pick those girls. You had to pick the hardcore fan girls. You could have just… like the 3 percent fangirls, you should have looked on the 95 percent girls okay? Because I am a 168

Directioner that maybe sometimes likes to read fan fction, hmm not that, maybe, yeah, you don’t share that okay? You keep that to yourself. You don’t put it on television stupid. Sorry but that was a stupid decision. And I’m a fan that if they come to my town then I will go to their concert okay? I’m not a fan that I will track down their addresses, or birth friction certifcates, or the time exactly they were born, or i wouldn’t like follow them on tour. I am not that dumb okay? Why the heck would you put that on television? You had to choose those girls, you should have chosen like, something else. You could have done better and like yeah, that’s all I have to say. So a big “You’re an effing idiot and a middle fnger to you Channel 4 because yeah, that’s not cool, okay? That was my rant. Like, comment, subscribe, bye.

26 Paige P (white female, UK, 17)

I am so fucking angry, oh my god. If you’ve just seen the programme then you’ll understand what I’m on about. Firstly, most of them were twelve year old carrots and, uh, sorry. That is not us! URGH! The boys are gonna see that. And you know what? That’s not even… a girl said she got braces because Niall had braces! It’s like bitch, really? Oh my god. They put Larry in it and put Larry in it so much! I don’t care if you ship Larry because I ship Larry as a bromance okay? I don’t care if you ship Larry because that’s your problem, not mine. Thing is you don’t put that in the programme for them to see. Do you know how upset that’s gonna make them because… I have no makeup on or anything! I’m so angry! A girl said she’d seen them 64 times. Another girl had seen them more.Most of this fandom cannot afford to do that, and our mummies and daddies, or “the government” should I say, do not pay for our tickets. I am so angry! You wouldn’t understand unless you’re a Directioner! That word just makes me cringe, because of them girls. I found one of their Twitter accounts, and people are starting to follow her like she’s famous. “Oh my god, follow me, follow me!” No! Okay? No! You need to stop because that is disgusting me. You are ruining this fandom. You are gonna make them hate us. Do you want them to hate us? Look I will show you… making a video of real Directioners. Real Directioners are going to have a video. I don’t care if you like it or not. I am making a video for real Directioners. Your opinions, your tweets, yes. You can just send me them okay? Everyone is humiliated, this has humiliated me. I feel ashamed to even say I’m a Directioner right now because these girls.These girls have upset me so much, saying “We can kill you if we wanted, we can kill a dog, we can kill a cat, we can do anything to meet them” 169

Yeah? We’re so excited about meeting the wax fgures. I love them, I do, cos I have all the posters here - I’ll show you my posters. Yeah? And I’ve got posters down there cos I have a small room. About Taylor Swift, that was like six months ago or something. Get over it. That is not the fandom. And you are not gonna marry Zayn. Yes we have fantasies. But they read out Larry fan fction. Sorry. That’s not what the documentary’s about. It’s not about Larry. Because we didn’t wanna see that. Okay. In my video of Directioners, things that we’ll not include: Larry. Okay you can include a little bit, but the bromance. Er Ziall. What?! What? Ziall. Okay they have a good bromance, but why did I see pictures of them kissing? No. Can you not? Okay? Carrots. That will not. And people who’ve met them 64 times or more. Because you are not a real Directioner. You have just done that to try and be better than all of us. You’re not. I speak for the whole fandom when I say Fuck you Channel 4. You have humiliated, you have shamed us. I don’t feel like I can go out in public anymore. I just can’t. I want to stay in my room. And my mum bring food up here, because i cannot, no. And some of you think oh yeah Paige is over-reacting. No. I’m not over-reacting okay? I, this, this okay, is a legitimately horrible experience. Okay. When I saw the advert I thought okay, this is just gonna be some random stuff about carrots, it’s not gonna be hurtful or anything. No. You actually hurt all our feelings. It actually hurt to know that there’s girls out there who…. Okay “I would seriously like to shove a brick through your big anus and burn your whole studios” That’s @Channel 4. That is how our whole fandom feels! Because you’ve upset all of us. You’ve took like ten people… and now my mum, if she was watching that she’d be like “You’re not allowed to go on Twitter anymore, you’re not allowed to like One Direction anymore, you’re not allowed to fangirl over them anymore, you’re not allowed to go and see This Is Us, you’re not allowed to buy the perfume. What? Shut the front door. I’m not gonna say any more because I’m so angry.

27 rainenemily (14 white US)

Hello guys, I’m just gonna make this short little video about that documentary Crazy About One Direction on Channel 4. I know this rant is a little bit late but I just had a few things to say about it that I haven’t had a chance to say because I’ve been at school and at my friend’s house and yeah anyways. Well I really just wanted to say that the whole thing is just a complete video of negativeness that makes us sound like we’re terrible people I guess, like we’re addicted, yes I get how you mean 170 addicted but they’re trying to say that it’s in a negative way like we literally couldn’t get a boyfriend because we’re so obsessed with One Direction or so addicted to One Direction. It’s all negative and they try to say that we’re crazy and show a huge group of people singing the words to every song. Well, if you’re a fan you’re obviously going to know all the words to the songs, that’s not crazy, that’s completely normal, because if you really love someone then of course… and a lot of the things, like you’ve met One Direction 64 times, they’re making it sound like all we do is stalk them and be terrible and knock on their hotel doors and call them and try to do anything we can basically to get a chance to meet them. In reality I know that so many of us don't do that. I myself when they came here I did go to their hotel, but I wasn’t trying to fnd them you know. I was waiting in the lobby and me and my friend ended up getting kicked out anyways. And then we went to the arena they were going to be playing at and we just waited there the whole time and we didn’t even get to meet them. I actually know that there are like 5% of people who go to every hotel they can fnd and they stalk them and knock on their doors and all that but not all of us are like that and that’s what they were making it sound like. The whole thing is just out of proportion, it’s basically extremely exaggerated and they’re only focussing on the stuff that they think makes us crazy. About them reading the Larry stuff and showing the fan art that people have made, that is just totally wrong in every way. I ship Larry but I don’t judge other peoples opinions and for them to just show that on there and read it out loud is just insane - why would you do that? I don’t want everyone to think that this boyband, or like everyone in this fandom is completely and totally messed up because of a few little things they showed and i know that a lot of people have been sending really extremely rude things which I’ll show you a few. About how we’re so rude, and we’re really not we’re just a whole bunch of people on Twitter, and we’re here to support them not stalk them. They’re missing the point - we support them and we vote for them, we trend stuff for them, we send them love, we love them. We’re not negative like they’re trying to make us sound - well maybe they’re not trying to but…. there’s just so much wrong with this…

28 Reonna O (14, white US south)

So I’m actually gonna make a rant video right now, about something I just heard - I got a text from my friend saying hey go watch Channel 4, i’m like whyyyy? She said 171 they’re making Directioners - well Larry shippers - kill themselves…i’m like whyyyyy? She’s just like they’re just being rude and she couldn’t really explain it so I went online and tried to fnd the thing, but it could be a hoax cos there’s some twitter things and one YouTube video called Unfactual Facts said 50 Directioners killed themselves when actually only 14 did… but there could be more unreported, but I heard they were killing themselves cos of shipping Larry Stylinson, like I used to ship them but I kind of grew out of it. I think they’re really hot, I like their music, I’m a Directioner still but I’m not gonna be going hardcore like Louis Tomlinson and Harry Styles are gonna be together and have babies cos I think that Eleanor and Louis should have children… anyway so people were killing themselves cos Channel 4 were having hate, and frst off I’m gonna say that Channel 4 shouldn’t have done that cos it just brought hate to a lot of kids, girls and boys alike cos it’s not just girls that are shipping Larry, but really? Killing yourself cos people don’t have the same opinion about Larry?!

29 Siobhan O (17, white australian)

Hi guys! I decided to make this video in light of the recent events of the Channel 4 documentary, and I just wanted to say, what I can’t say in 140 characters, which is that, every single Directioner that is on Twitter, I don’t care if you’re a Larry shipper, I don’t care about that, I don’t care because seriously you’re all amazing and you can’t let this hate get to you, and i don’t want, i really don’t want anybody committing suicide, that’s horrible and the fact that people have is just horrible, and i just want to say from me that you’re all beautiful and please! Please don’t! We’re a family, we stick together, we look after one another, and although that documentary was bullshit and they should feel bad for making it and putting it on air, and i hope they do feel bad, you know it just brings us stronger… it just brings us together, as one. And although people are now gonna think we’re crazy psychos and we’re gonna be judged for loving those fve idiots, it doesn’t matter, because that’s what we do, that’s who we love, you love who you love don’t you? So just look for the people that love you on Twitter - ignore the hate! I know it’s hard but just do it, please, for me! Thank you, please! I love you! Seriously though, anybody, I don’t care who it is…just follow me, I’ll follow you, I’m happy to talk to anyone, about anything, cos I know it’s hard sometimes, and we get a certain amount of hate for loving those idiots. So, love you, lots of love, always love. 172

30 smurf smurf (14, white US) hey, well frst off i wanna say um, rip to all the Larry shippers that died last night from that documentary thing on Channel 4 in the UK - it’s everywhere in the world now and I’ve read that 42 Directioners died - another thing said 90+ Directioners died, either way it’s still a lot of people. And um, anyone who has family that was one of the Larry shippers, I’m so sorry for your loss, it’s quite sad. We lost our family, our fandom ripped apart. And then Liam came in and rescued us. Even the Wanted fans stepped in to help our fandom cos everyone knew we were breaking apart. Last night I was balling my eyes out cos I was talking to some people about it. It’s terrible, it’s not a good thing. Anyway today I’m also getting a haircut. This hair - my mum is letting me choose the length of my hair I hope, cos it’s my hair.

31 susi z

Hi guys, I am a fellow Directioner and I’m gonna be talking about Channel 4’s Crazy About One Direction. This is a rant - just putting the out there. Ok. So frst my thoughts were this is great, they’re gonna do a documentary about One Direction fans, you know, it’s gonna be fun to watch. Then when I started watching I noticed that the fans they were like psycho - Yeah I’m a crazy fan and I would do anything for One Direction, but I wouldn’t go that far, like, I slept on the street for One Direction during the Today show, which was on November 13th, so like yeah I did sleep on the street and I met a lot of fellow Directioners, and they were all really nice and down to earth and they weren’t like psycho. We all had a really good time. But the Directioners they were flming were kind of like crazy. Like, no offence to you if you’re like them, but they kind of went over the top like… so yeah I did sleep on the street for One Direction but I did not go to their hotel room and like stalk them and ok. Now I want to get into er, Larry. I ship Larry as a bromance and not as a romance. I felt bad for Harry and Louis because you know their families were watching, because they were showing pictures of Larry, like really graphic pictures and they were kind of disturbing… like I would be disturbed if my brother was on TV like, having sex with another guy - I would be like, what is going on?! But yeah, then Liam sent out a tweet 173 saying he knows everyone is not like that, so that was okay, but Channel 4 should not have done that. So that’s my rant - subscribe, like and comment. Bye!

32 Turkey2224

Hi guys, well I was not gonna make a video tonight cos I am not in the best mood. But well, if you guys don’t know what is happening in the Directioner fandom right now… Channel 4 made a documentary about Directioners called Crazy About One Direction - you can check it out on Youtube when you’re done. So I was chilling on instagram and Twitter all day cos I got nothing better to do and I was on Twitter, I mean instagram a little bit ago and I heard about 90 people took their lives because of the hate that documentary caused. The stupid documentary showed pictures of what Larry shippers have made and stuff and I honestly fnd it kind of sick that Channel 4 put that up and the Larry shippers are getting hate for that. They just ship something that they think is real and there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m not a Larry shipper, I’m an Eleanor shipper but I’ve never sent hate to any Larry shippers even though I get a bunch of hate for shipping Elounor. But we lost 90 and counting Larry shippers, 90 Directioners, 90 sisters - they were our sisters or our brothers. Whoever they were we don’t have them any more. Heaven has gained so many angels tonight, all because of one documentary. And when the boys wake up, I think we all kind of deserve to apologise to them. I mean what has our fandom turned into? Today was the worst day for Directioners ever. That’s what Channel 4’s documentary was worth - 90 lives. 90. It shouldn’t go up to 90 lives - that’s just going too far. And I’m sorry to anyone who had a friend who committed suicide tonight, I’m sorry to anyone who has a close family member, I’m sorry to anyone who lost their son or daughter or brother or sister, I truly mean it. I’m not one of those Eleanor shippers who doesn’t care. I lost 90 sisters tonight. I may never know them but they all deserve to be respected. That’s why tomorrow we’re all gonna write on our wrists rip Larry shippers and I think we kind of deserve to apologise to the boys, for everything we’ve done, not just tonight. Just think - Liam was apologising for stuff he never did. I think we kind of deserve to apologise to them. And it’s the truth - I seriously think we deserve that. Honestly, this is not us. The documentary was the 2% of us that are crazed. Yesterday I lost one of my followers, to me she wasn’t just a follower, she was a little sister. She was beautiful sweet and wasn’t perfect. Her parents were getting a divorce - she was going through so much even though she always had a smile on her face. I 174 loved her so much. She decided to commit suicide after getting all these hateful mails after Channel 4 had published documentaries about Directioners. Still can’t get over the fact I will not be able to talk to her. Rip Alexis and to all the other beautiful sisters that passed away - we love you. Any of the people who took their lives we love you. Even though you’ll never see this but we love you. Whether you’re a Larry shipper or an Elounor shipper we all love you. Just always remember that. And if you’re one of the people who was thinking of taking their lives, don’t. Try not to listen to what people are saying. You are part of this family no matter what. We may not know you but we all love you.

33 Vanney G

Hey guys, so I just fnished watching the Crazy About One Direction documentary and this is my reaction to it. I honestly cannot put into words how much this documentary has upset me. It is one of the sickest things I have ever seen in my entire life. It is disgusting. Whoever created it should feel ashamed. I just holy crap, because of that stupid documentary there’s people dead. There’s at least 14 Larry shippers dead because of that documentary. So whoever created it should feel like shit, because they killed 14 people. At least, as of now. I just watched it because I’m from America and as soon as it came out, hell broke loose. There were people getting hated on, bullying each other. All because of that stupid documentary. I actually heard that management is suing Channel 4 and to be honest I never thought in a million years I would say this, but I agree with management. I love management. It’s just sickening to know that that documentary ended so many lives. So many people from this fandom died because of it. I may not have known them, or maybe I did, maybe I talked to them one on Twitter…. maybe I have no idea who they were. But they still loved the boys, just like I do. They didn’t deserve the hate they received and it’s just sickeningme, it’s disgusting, it’s just uuurgh, i can’t even put it into words how… no! Whatever the intentions of the creators of this shit were, it clearly didn’t work, because its helped us to become stronger as a family in this fandom. Yes it did cause a lot of harm, but because of it, Beliebers are backing us up - and we’re always fghting with them, but they still have our back. Even the fans of the Wanted are with us on this. Its bringing Elounour and Larry shippers closer together, because we are part of the same fandom, even if we ship different people together, we’re all still part of the same fandom. So whatever this documentary thing was, what they were trying 175 to prove… it didn’t work. We’re strong, we’re stronger than all of you. And I really hope that you feel like shit if you created that video, because now 14 people are dead because of you. And you deserve everything that you are out to get. I don’t even think that was a real documentary. Some of those things those girls said seemed pretty sketchy.Hang on let me pull it up - I have it right here. Like when that girl said “I’m part of a fandom that could kill a person if it wanted to”… like what is that? That is just making us look crazy and obsessed and I know for a fact that that’s not even 50% of this fandom, hell, that’s not even 5% of this fandom. So why would you do this? It’s just sick, there’s something wrong with you, you need help! And whatever hate you get from this I really believe the people who created this documentary deserve every little thing they will get. Even More. My prayers go out to all of the people that, and the families and friends of the people who committed suicide. I’m so sorry. I may have know them. They were part of this fandom - they were like sisters or brothers to me. And it’s just sad and it’s devastating and it’s sickening to see what extent people will go to bully others so that they feel bad enough to commit… it’s just sickening. I have to go, I’m getting pretty emotional… I actually knew a person, so yeah. And like I said before, the people who created Crazy About One Direction should feel like shit, and if you don’t, I hope people make you feel like shit for what you have done to this fandom.

34 xxthatgirlhollyxx (16, asian, UK) hi guys it’s Holly here, I just came to talk to you all about the Channel4 documentary that was on last night. Channel 4 is a British TV channel that holds documentaries…. stuff like My Dwarf Family… it’s all stuff like that ok, just reacted stuff ok? But there was a documentary on last night at about, I think 10 o’clock, and it was called Crazy About One Direction. So I knew it was on, but my mother put it on for me - she said hey do you wanna watch this? SO I was watching it with my mother and my sister and… I was embarrassed, I really was. I was sat on the bean bag the whole time in front of the TV and my mum and sister were saying ooooh Holly looks really angry, and I wasn’t angry, I was just so sad you know, my heart was actually hurting. And it was about, it was about a couple of girls right, and they were obviously picked to be on this programme. It took you across their lives with One Direction in it. So, I don’t know their names, cos I wasn’t taking any notice of that, but there was this one girl… she seemed nice ok, they all seemed nice… but just a different type of Directioners to 176 us normal ones ok? This one girl said she’d met One Direction 64 times and the girl next to her said that she can’t even keep count but it’s more than that ok? Right some people like myself, my sister, my cousin and anyone else in this Directioner family may not have seen them, may not have even… I’ve never been to a concert, never been to a meet n greet, never been to a signing, never met them before ok? But that doesn’t mean I’m not a true fan - cos I am. You may look round my room and think that’s not One Direction, that’s not One Direction… but that’s because I can’t… we don’t have any money to buy the Merchandise or posters. Not everybody is rich ok, not everybody can go and see them every time they’re round… so that was one thing. And then they started bringing out the Larry fans. So when they were talking about Larry, they kept doing little clips of them, and little fan art drawings, and I personally fnd them quite disturbing you know because… not disturbing as such but, you know it’s different because… do you remember Louis’ tweet last year saying it’s not true? He was so angry about that cos that nearly split Eleanor and him up, and I think they’re such a good couple, so that upset me. It was all these girls saying that they were disappointed when the One Direction big announcement , cos they thought the Larry shippers would come out, ok… they thought that Harry and Louis would say oh yeah we’re together! That’s ungrateful you know, cos they put all that time and work into that world tour and they’re probably gonna bring out new songs for it as well… but those girls, woah back up, cos we care, but you just want to see the other side of them, that might never come out ok? And the other thing, Channel 4 were labelling us, anyone who likes One Direction, as crazy. We’re not crazy. We’re nowhere near crazy most of us. 97% of us have never met them, never stalked them, never been to their hotel, it doesn’t matter, that means we’re not crazy ok? But those girls, apparently Zayn ran away from one of them and had to hide somewhere. What is the fun in that? Why do it? Because they’ve got lives as well right? You’re treating them like they have nothing. Like they’re just toys to play with, but they’re not right? They’ve got their own lives and we can’t go round dictating what they do all the time yeah? And then this girl went to Harry’s hometown because the boys had some days off, thinking Harry would be at his house… so she went to his bakery and everything and was kissing the walls, like, and then they were talking about - Louis’ family don’t mind if we go there but Harry’s family don’t like it, but I don’t care. Why not? They’ve got their own privacy… just cos Harry or Louis is famous doesn’t mean that their family needs to take some of the hate or some of the girls coming to their house every single day. They’re probably fed up of it you know? And they asked how she 177 found their address and she said Oh I found them on Twitter. How do people know their address in the frst place? Do they like follow them home or something and then post it all over the internet? Cos that is wrong ok? That is so wrong. Next thing is I wanted to talk about the girls that have never seen them but have dreams about them and stuff, cos I’m one of them girls ok? I make wishes every single day, for the last two years, I make the same wish every single night, it doesn’t mean it’s gonna come true, it’s that little bit of hope in you that you hope it does. So I make wishes saying that I would love to meet them and that I would love to spend 2 minutes with them. And I always thought that wasn’t such a big ask but then I see the girls that have met them all the time and it just makes me feel awful because there’s so many fans, there’s so many of us, like they said the boys have got at least 10 million followers each on Twitter and then there’s just you and you’re just sat here, One Direction are here and they’re talking to these girls but you just never know what to do and you’re trying to get in but you can’t ok? And that’s what makes me really sad because I think about it every night and I think I’m never gonna meet them. Then I get really angry at myself and upset and I shouldn’t because I could meet them… and it sounds like I’m being ungrateful but I’m not. I love all of the boys and all of the words, and every single song and everything that they do. They’re like nearly all of my heart ok? But you just think of the worst don’t you? Well that was my little rant video about the documentary on Channel 4 last night. Sorry it’s quite late, but it was on quite late last night and I couldn’t do it because everybody was asleep. I didn’t sleep last night, I slept about an hour, that’s why I look so awful I’ve just woken up. I love meeting new people on Twitter and that, so feel free to DM me on Twitter. I will post my link either here in the description box or here. Feel free to talk to me. I follow back as well so thats always good, but just please to all those Directioners that have taken it to heart, don’t worry because 94% of us are not like that ok so Channel 4 have just done it like that to make it bad ok, so we’re not all like that. i want you to know that me and the boys and everybody love you so much ok. we’re all family.

35 xxthatgirlhollyxx 2 hi guys it’s Holly here, just to add on to the video just made. I was looking on my Twitter and I saw some tweets that said RIP Larry Shippers. So I researched it and look what’s happening… apparently some people are committing suicide, because they are extreme Larry shippers and they found out that it may not be real. Please stop it, 178 we can’t be having any more, stop doing this, you can’t be doing this to yourself ok? This is a serious message to you out there who’s watching this - please don’t try and hurt yourself ok? This is just a pathetic programme that was on and its created so much uproar, apparently One Direction’s management is trying to sue them and trying to get the thing taken off ok? Just please don’t do anything to hurt yourself. Like I said tweet me, tweet other people, we can give you help okay and talk to you and make you feel like you’re not alone, cos you’re not. We’ve got thousands of girls and boys out there who’s feeling the same thing as you are ok? To all you out there who is struggling and don’t know what to do, just hold on, this is gonna be sorted out, look at Liam’s tweets ok? He is even saying that it is gonna be ok. He has said we’re the best fans, he said that it’s all just rubbish, all crap that’s happening on the documentary. We don’t need to worry, we’re fne. Everybody’s fne. To those people who have taken their lives, just RIP to you okay? Thank you for watching my two videos, comment your own opinion. Like I said, RIP to the girls who have taken their lives, please don’t make the numbers rise. Thank you for watching. 179

Appendix 2: Transcript of Interviews with Past Documentary Participants

I have conducted interviews with eight past participants of the documentaries I have made, ranging from work made 20 years ago, to that made in recent years. The interviews were flmed on a DSLR in a space that was comfortable and familiar for the participant.

Tommy from the 2008 documentary Clowns, interviewed 12 January 2018 in Brighton.

So Tommy why did you allow me to make a flm about you? Er because at the time I was a childrens’ entertainer, which I still am, but I fgured it was the perfect way to get some perfect exposure, um I didn’t know if the project was ever gonna come to fruition, cos there’s a lot of people in Brighton who turn up and say we’re gonna make a flm! and then it peters out to nothing, but it must be said you managed to get it through - it eventually ended up on television…

Did you ever regret the decision to be in the flm? I don’t regret the decision to be in the flm, what I do regret is the absolute shit storm that happened in my life after. The major asset from making the flm with you was when I saw the rushes… for those that don’t know they’re the unedited bits… i saw how my relationship was with my current girlfriend at the time and I just thought, who wants to be trapped in that existence? So I had a personal documentary spotlight for the audience of one shone on my life, so I thought, I’ve gotta get out of this relationship. So I made a series of positive changes, which are jeez, 10 years later still having some sort of social ramifcation against me because obviously we had a child and so there’ve been other things that have led on from that but yeah… on the 180 whole it was positive, but there were certainly some long lasting damaging negative effects from it.

So did you feel like you were performing a role for the flm? There was an element of performing a role for myself, because I was making the kind of television that I would actually want to watch. And I’ve gotta admit to ya, I made lots of… It is a decade old that flm and it’s still spoken about in very fond terms and people who still see it remark about how timeless it is, how we just managed to nail the zeitgeist of what was happening at that time… drunk parents, uptight parents, cheesed-off children’s entertainers, the state of society as it was at the time. / Tommy Tickle has set back children entertainment by two decades and of course the letters rolled in to the Radio Times saying Not all Clowns Are Like That! And I had people ringing up my house. I had one guy ring up and say I tell you what mate You’re an Arsehole and a Disgrace to the Industry and hung the phone up… I pressed 1471 and zero to ring him back, frst thing he said to me was How d’you get my number? That’s the level of intelligence loads of people with loads of opinions, and no knowledge. Loads of opinions and loads of judgment, that’s all there was. I was dealing with the early Brexiter. / I had people coming up to me, as you well know there was a woman who saw me in that that I ended up getting married to. We’re no longer married. But the point is she was sitting in a group full of people who were shouting out Where’s Tommy Tickle?! We want Tommy Tickle! So yeah within the entertainment scope of that, yeah, I would have liked to have been paid. Because it did my career 50% bad and 50% good. Those that got it hired me instantly, and then I turned up to some parties where people would actually say We were saying before you turned up I hope it’s not that gravel voiced drunken guy who’s really moody, and they’ve sat in the audience as guests of someone else’s child’s birthday party and they’ve seen the act and they’ve come up and shake my hand and said you weren’t… because they’ve only seen the worst aspects of the act. When you see the act as a whole then it makes sense, but of course there wasn’t enough screen time for that and that’s not what the aim of the documentary was about. / The only thing that I got cheesed off about, which you later told me, which is the classic thing that documentary flmmakers don’t tell you…. They can be as honest and as doe-eyed and as batty-eyelidded as they want, but when it come to certain things they do… like you deliberately made me late to a party! So that we had to… No I didn’t! 181

Yes you did! It wasn’t deliberate! You said that you deliberately held back! You were drunk at the time! I accidentally made you late by suggesting we went on the coast road. Well there was that as well but I did… if you remember I was doing 90 in a 30 and that was in one of the fnal edits and I did say Do you mind just taking that bit out? While you were flming down there… I mean that was just… you know. Yeah it was thrilling, but anyway. It happened years ago so it doesn’t matter. they never hired me again! / Right lets backtrack. Ask me the question again.

Are you asking for fnal edit in this one as well? I already sent you the text saying I want a fnal edit in this… Oh yeah. And you just said Yessssss.

Alright, so lets say then… do you think people in documentaries are generally misrepresented? I say that people are generally misrepresented by the documentary flmmaker because that is the nature of the business. No-one is actually interested in the true story from the person’s point of view who is the subject in it. As I’ve since discovered… and the good documentaries tend to focus on at least three or four people, er, so that you’ve got some bounce around. And when you’re dealing with three people’s different subjective point of views you need someone… the documentary maker is there to pull all the threads together, it’s like an umbrella and you’re there to bring it all together as a coherent story and they will see different elements of the individual stories that the subjects may not think are important. That maybe are. A great documentary flmmaker is someone who has a cocktail stick and the subject is a winkle and they’re trying to get them out so that they can then consume them! Like you did! / And I think a lot of other documentary flmmakers will get away with what they can. You’re not there to tell the truth… you’re there to tell a story. Everybody seems to think in their mind that wow it’s gonna be like the Blue Planet… it’s gonna be factual… it’s gonna be like a nature documentary… Blue Planet’s not factual! It’s all about squids missing their long lost romantic love! Well, I think you’ll fnd it’s seen as a factual documentary. But I think that a lot of human interest stories aren’t viewed like that at all… and the documentary 182 flmmaker… you’re gonna pitch it to a TV company and they’re gonna want it in 10 words or less while they’re there sucking on their big cigars. The subject seems to think that the documentary flmmaker has all the power but in actual fact they don’t realise that the documentary flmmaker is way down in the chain.

What was the reaction of the audience to your flm? Er, it was completely 50-50. It was absolutely brilliant. It was as interesting as you can get - some people hated it and some people loved it. And those that got it got it, and I realised that those people that got it were the people that I could actually get on with. I’d recommend to everybody doing a very subjective documentary in their life cos it just weeds out loads of people that you just don’t need to know in your life.

What sort of comments did you get? The comments really divided people. Some people said that I shouldn’t be in this industry. I had one woman that said, when I turned up to a party, that she thought I needed psychiatric help. I had another woman that said she wouldn’t let me near her kids… social services should be called. People then turned around and said It’s absolutely brilliant and we can’t understand why you’re still being a children’s entertainer. The comments overall were…Shouldn’t be in this job…Absolutely brilliant. It was one side or another. Nobody was ambivalent. It was complete marmite.

What was the impact of being in the documentary on your life? The impact of appearing in the documentary longterm is still 50-50. In my personal life… I’ve still got, I mean… I don’t see my son as much as I’d like. Because he was in the flm obviously and after I saw the rushes I broke up… it’s taken me 7 and a half years to get on a level playing feld there. The positive side is that in Brighton society, and this is a fantastic city, it means that I’m a known quantity. I couldn’t have asked for better advertising with burlesque dancers, magicians, writers, sculptors, and I’m known with that and I’ve got a really good reputation in that. That has been the major thing and I now feel part of my local environment. Really, it’s just so welcoming for the soul. My neighbours know me, my peers know me, and the people that don’t wanna know me or don’t speak to me, I don’t deal with them. Perfect! 183

Are you not clowning any more? I still do a couple of parties a month. Er, the thing is clowning is a very difficult industry a the moment. Everybody’s afraid of clowns cos of ‘It’. Children's Entertainers are seen very unfavourably in the media over the past six or seven years. Think of Rolf, think of Jimmy… they’re always viewed, they’re always mentioned as children's entertainers… it’s an absolute killer for the business. It means I’ve had to diversify… that means I’ve been skint. Last year as you well know I did a stint as a funeral director, so that was funeral directing Monday to Friday and clowning Saturday and Sunday… that was interesting. That was the balance of life. But then a few months after that I accidentally bought a jerk chicken shop over at Preston Circus. I had that for 3 and a half months before I turned it around. And then I lost it, long story, we ain’t going in to that. But now… seven weeks ago I managed to get a pub kitchen, so I’m running two businesses out of here… English food to the pub customers out front, full english, Sunday roast and all the rest of it to Dave and Barry and Shel, and out the back door Caribbean Jamaican food which I learnt how to cook when I had the Jerk chicken shop, that’s Deliveroo. This place is now expanding and I’m now beginning to hire ex homeless people, so one’s doing the delivery, one’s gonna be the main chef. So the whole idea now is this is a social, ethically minded local business.

What does our relationship mean to you? We’re sometimes friends. We both have very volatile personalities and often fall out, which is kinda good. I have a healthy distrust of you. I’m very wary of you. It’s about 34.8% of all conversations we have you disagree with, that you’re wrong on. How do you know it’s me that’s wrong? Because I’m telling you about a personal point of view and you go into… you don’t go into friends mode. If I was to say well you know what I can’t believe how much trouble I’m in cos I drank a load of beer and smashed up an off-license and beat up two police and a nun, a friend would turn around and go yeah I know it’s disgusting how they’re throwing the book at you, it’s disgraceful. But you turn around and say I think it’s outrageous, you shouldn’t have… Your friends would say they should have had rubber glass, toffee glass, you know, they shoulda given you the free beer, but you don’t, you just like say… I’m never judgemental upon what you do, you get up to some terrible things, that are never documented because you’re on the other side of the camera! You mooch in here and you do your little close-ups, you’re always doing 184 it, close-up of this, close-up of that, obviously with a voice over, and it’ll be someone saying what they’re doing and you’ll be highlighting certain things, and the idea is to butter the audience up into a mood. But then, I see it now as if you’re all autistic. All these documentary flmmakers are going, hmm cup, we’re in a kitchen now, hmm some things here, but it also means that in my mind as a documentary flmmaker I’m also framing things as well. And I bet when your cameras down and you’re going round Sainsburys you’re also framing stuff, when you’re standing there going hmm I wonder how people view me when I’m looking at this? Should this be lit from the back or the top? Should this be with a voice-over? I’m speaking out loud! Everybody’s looking at ya. You’re a bunch of freaks. You are a bunch of freaks. But I think there’s an element of the documentary flmmaker that is also trying to make sense of their own life as well. They’re trying to get running themes… they will always get a theme for the documentary that is personal and close to their hearts so that they can… I think the documentary flmmaker should go down the pub more and chat to people, because they seem tone very insular people, who say well maybe if I just go and interview a load of people then my own life will make sense.

If you wanna know the detail just ask… Okay, cos you haven’t been exactly forthcoming with it have you? What do you mean? I’ve got absolutely nothing to hide about anything that’s happened in my life! You can ask me anything you want. Anything? Anything. Right. Go on! / So I’d like to say on camera that the thing that I could say anything I want has just been edited out! This is the classic documentary flmmaker mentality! Ask me anything you want! And then you have control! Yeah. You have control. You haven’t mentioned the mmm of the mmm that I just mentioned. That’s true. Damn straight. It is true isn’t it? Right. So in actual fact it’s not a fair playing feld… it’s not a level playing feld. 185

So would you have wanted me to put in that thing that you just said that I’ve just cut out? No, I think I was being provocative and I think er…

Would you do it again? Yes I would do it again. I think if it’s done right, yes of course, you do have a… You have a very good reputation and you have a very good rapport with people. I have a great rapport with you. And, but, you are mischievous! You get an idea in your head and you’re like… You would give the stone to someone to throw and tell them to break the window. And if someone came out and said who smashed that window you would honestly say He did it! I’ve never done that. Well no, but that is what you do within your industry. In your chosen vocation that’s what you do! We know the two people that didn’t make the cut for the clowns documentary because you said that they would have an entire shitstorm from Animal Liberation Front and everyone else by just the innocent thing they were doing with those bunnies and their hairdryer! I was protecting them! Yeah partly that, but it was also running time. So lets face it… I mean you had a choice of brilliant weirdos for that, me included. The bunnies with the hairdryer was very entertaining. It was fantastic, bit it still would have created a shitstorm. Is that what you feel that I metaphorically did to you? Gave you a stone and said Break that window!? No I think you initially said that and then I picked up a stone and said Lets break the window together! Which you willingly did. But the lines are blurred within this you see because I’m no longer a subject. I’m now part time a mate. Because we’re always falling out. And yeah we’re fucking terrible, we’re incorrigible. And that is brilliant. But when you’re good with a camera, you’re very very very good with a camera. The rest of the time an absolute bag of shit. What are some of those documentaries you’ve made? You did a documentary about the history of Oxo. Loads of stock footage. Yes! Oh lord, no, stop while you’re ahead! I ain’t stopping! What was the fucking question again? I think we’re done. Yeah good yeah. Are you done? 186

Yeah. Everybody’s a fucking documentary maker now aren’t they? Everybody’s got a phone! Everybody’s got one of these nan!

Kimberley from the 2001 documentary This is Me, interviewed 31 August 2017, at home in Hertfordshire.

How did you decide to let me flm you? I was 14 and I met you at school, and I remember seeing this person i didn’t know. And I wanted to know what was going on. i remember how you looked… you had your red Doc Marten shoes on, dungarees, checked shirt, and you had this really bleached blonde hair, and you had this camera and I came over to you and I wanted to know what was going on. I don’t know, you just looked appealing and I wanted to know what it was all about. I think we pretty much just hit it off from there really didn’t we? So… and twenty years down the line we’re still friends. I can’t believe it’s twenty years actually… Yeah, I could have got less for murder! You should have done that! I wasn’t really popular at school or anything. I just kind of think that at that stage in my life I wanted to be noticed a bit if that makes sense, wanted someone to give me some attention, and I thought cameras! I didn’t really shy away from things like that you know, I was pretty much out there weren’t I? I thought I’d come over, make conversation and see what you were doing and I think we pretty much that same day started flming didn’t we? 187

Did you know what you were letting yourself in for? I don’t think I really knew what I was letting myself in for at all if I’m brutally honest with you. I didn’t have a clue. When I look back on it now I’d say it was defnitely an experience. I think it was pretty much, it was never planned with us, it was just day by day. We went with what daily life was like for me and what you see is what you get sort of thing. And it’s still pretty much like that now, twenty years down the line… what you see is what you get with me and I think that is the best way to be.

What was it like being flmed? I mean I was only 14 at the time so I was quite nervous of the camera and I think I was making more contact with you than the camera but once I became more confdent with what was going on and knew what was going on I think that it was more… cos I knew it was gonna be aired at some point I wanted to connect with the people watching me. I wanted them to know me, the person I was. I wanted them to get to know me when they were watching me and really get that connection and think yeah I get that girl, i understand where she’s coming from and I get that. I think I always try to get that. For me it was just about being real… keeping it real.

What was the audience reaction like? I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for. I didn’t know what the reaction to me being flmed was gonna be. It was all fun and games to begin with, you know I was quite young, bit out there, quite inquisitive and I suppose I just wanted to be like everybody else at the time. But it’s only after the documentary’s actually made and edited and then you sit down and actually watch it back that it really hits you and it really sets in, like wow, this is what we’ve been doing for all that time. Then you get yourself all geared up cos you know it’s gonna go on TV and I think that’s the most nerve-racking part is knowing that night it’s going live, being aired and then it goes to the public and that their reaction is gonna be and you’re always gonna get good and bad. I did get a negative response from it but i also got a positive response so you have to weigh it up. If I was to go back 20 years ago would I have done the documentary? Yeah I think I would of, cos it’s always better to try something than not to try at all. I just think it was a challenge wasn’t it? It was a challenge I was prepared to take. I was prepared to take the negative comments on the chin and I was also prepared to take the positive as well. I think that it also helped me to become a better person specially watching the frst documentary back. Because I sit there and I think 188 was that how i really was and I look at it and think i don’t want my children to ever be the way I was then. But with television and documentary making i always think it’s better to just be yourself and make that connection and let people get to know you the way you are. I personally think it’s better to just be that way. It was defnitely a challenge put it that way, and very enjoyable as well the fun we had doing it!

How did it impact on the way you see yourself? You learn from it. It was a very big learning curve for me in my life and years down the line when I’ve watched it back it’s helped me in so many ways, not to be the way that I was, if that somehow makes sense in some way. And it really helped me move on, how can I explain it? I think it bettered me as a person as well. I think it helped me calm down and I’m a mum now so things are very different for me now. Even 20 years down the lane people still recognise me, they still stop me in the street and they say Gosh you’re that girl from the TV programme aren’t you? And they’re like how’re you doing now? How’s life for you now? So even 20 years on I still have a lot of people stopping and asking me questions. And a lot of people saw my frst documentary and lots of people haven’t seen the second, or lots of people have seen the second and haven’t seen the frst.

I mean obviously there was a lot of negative response, but that’s par for the course and I think you’re gonna get that no matter what you do in your life… whether you’re making a documentary, whether you’re baking a cake, whether you’re taking your kids down to the local pool. I mean you’re always gonna have someone saying something good and someone saying something bad. That was pretty much water off a duck’s back to me, I didn’t really let it get to me. Although I did take the comments on board. Can I rephrase that? I say I didn’t let it get to me… certain things did get to me, especially when people mocked my parenting, you know, and said that I was sponging off the government, and that I wasn’t prepared to get off my backside and go to work, and that I was just having kids here there and everywhere to different men, and that i weren’t with any of the fathers you know, that kind of upset me a little bit because… when you’re doing a documentary you can only do a documentary for so long and you have to cram so much in and you have to… a documentary is not a joke you know, you have to stick with it and you have to… there’s a story to it, and there has to be point-making, you know. You can’t just make a documentary and you’re just doing it for fun and none of it makes any sense. You 189 know… and I think that my documentary really did make a lot of sense. You know… I was 15 and I was a rebellious teenager…you know… I disrespected my parents massively, I didn’t care, my attitude stunk. I was 16 when I had my frst son and yes I did struggle as a teenage mum. i can hold my hands up and be honest about it and say yes I did struggle, to the point of which I was in a domestic violence relationship… I found it very hard to get out of that relationship. Social services were then brought it and my son was then placed with his biological father. Then years down the line I did have more children. Unfortunately my relationships didn’t work out, but you don’t sit there and think oh I’m gonna be with somebody and my relationship’s gonna break down… you sit there and think right this could really be it. Shit happens, things happen… you don’t know what tomorrow holds. You know, unfortunately my life hasn’t been hunky-dory, it hasn’t been a bed of roses… I haven’t been dealt a great deck of cards you know, but it is what it is. And you pick yourself up and you dust yourself down and you just move forward, you plod on, you have to carry on. Everything I do I do for my kids. People probably sit there now and say a lot of negative stuff about me, but I don’t care cos I’ve got everything I want and I’ve got everything that I need, to some extent, you know, i’ve got my beautiful children, i’ve got a roof over my house and i’ve got the love in my heart that I give to my kids every single day, you know. I try so hard. You know particularly with the kids educations now because I want the to do well and succeed, because when I look back at my life now, especially with my frst documentary and see how I was… that’s not necessarily how I want my children to be. I want them to grow up and be great achievers. I think when I was young I don’t think I ever believed in myself, I don’t think I thought I was ever good enough. I think that’s why I lived the life that I did, you know, I was rebellious. Even the second documentary and the struggles I went through with my son Harvey and how hard I had to fght, especially being a single mum, and to get him off the child protection register and so on. Now I know some of that was my fault, admittedly, but I fought so hard and it’s got me where I am today. I have a bright son and a bright daughter, and Danny’s starting school now. / It defnitely helps you move forwards.

Do you regret doing the documentary? Do I regret doing it? No… I don’t ever regret doing anything in my life. I don’t believe anyone should regret doing anything in life cos everything you do is a lesson. It’s a learning curve and it makes you the person you are, whether it be good or be bad. 190

But you can always change that, always. Would I do another documentary? Cos I know that question’s coming at some point! I don’t know, I don’t know. / Obviously 10 years on my marriage had broken down and I went back to being a single mum. I was on benefts and i was struggling, struggling to do the shopping. I was struggling to run a house, struggling to be a mum. But I did it, cos I had no choice. It was the bed that I made, so it was the bed I had to go and lay in. I don’t think that I’ve done too bad. But a lot of people said really bad things about me, that I shouldn’t be sponging off the government and should be looking after the kids on my own. Oh yeah there was a comment that stood out to me that someone said i cared more about the jewellery I was wearing than spending on my children. But little did people know that the gold earring and necklace that I was wearing wasn’t actually real! So sitting there reading all the comments behind a computer screen, I did actually chuckle to myself! I thought to myself that’s just your assumption of me, you don’t know me! The second time round obviously we sat and we had more time to think about it and we really knew what we were doing then. That’s when the public really got to know me a lot more deeper and I think that’s when they saw me developing as a woman. They saw a lot more emotion there… being more real, being more open, sharing my intimate life really on national TV. When I say intimate I mean around my children.

It was really really hard knowing that people were gonna be watching the documentary and people would have something to say, and i was going through so much with social services and I didn’t know which way that was gonna go. I had it in the back of my mind we’re doing this documentary and we’ve obviously got to fnish the documentary. I can’t just stop halfway through… and I didn’t ever wanna lie on the documentary or say yeah yeah things are fne. And I was absolutely petrifed that I was gonna end up losing my son. I was so so scared. Because social services were on my back for domestic violence in my marriage, for domestic violence in my relationship that progressed after that. I just kept making history repeat itself with my bad choices in men and that impacted on my children which then resulted in me losing them. That’s when you saw the real me coming out and I found it hard at those times and didn’t want to be flmed. I’d walk away from the camera or I’d say Just leave me alone right now. On the second documentary I’m on the camera and I’ve walked away but then you’ve come in and I’m sat on the bed. You spoke to me and asked me questions and it just came out you know, why am I the way that I am? And it’s… it’s quite an insight into somebody’s life. I think when you do a documentary and it’s 191 quite a personal thing, you are opening the door. You’re letting the outside world into your small world. Does that make sense? And I think… that’s a big thing. It really is a big big thing. And when it’s all said and when it’s all done, are people gonna stop you, are people gonna say bad things to you? Are people gonna notice you in the supermarket? Should you walk with your head high or should you walk with your head low? I walk with my head high - I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.

I’ve watched my documentaries that I featured in back, quite a few times and you know, I think… you watch it back and think is that really me? Did I really say that? Did I really do that? Sometimes it’s as if I want to go back into the TV screen and give myself a hug. Does that make sense? Especially with my second documentary I look back and think Look how broken I was. I was a broken mess. Fighting for sanity nd to keep hold of my children, but at the same time I felt I was losing who I was… it was quite hard. / I knew that there had to be shift and I knew that it had to be done quick. I knew I couldn’t keep going down the same road I was going or I was literally gonna crash and burn. Watching it back was a massive wake up call because instead of having the attitude of everybody hates me and nobody gets me and nobody’s understanding me, it was actually… realising that some of the problems lay within myself and people were actually trying to reach out and help me and help me step outside of the box and see the bigger picture. But I was so in my own zone i wasn’t prepared to listen to what anybody was saying. I think that’s why I was the way that I was. But when you watch it back years later it makes you realise how far you’ve come as a person, how much you’ve developed and how mature you’ve become. Do you want your children to become the way that you were or do you want to set them a good example and help them move forwards in life, export who they are as people and what they wanna do in life. For me, it’s about supporting them do whatever they decide, good or bad and I want to help them make the right choices. I think I made the right choice in doing it. I really do. Some people will say I should never have gone on TV and told the whole world my business. But these things happen on a daily basis. There are teenagers out there that were like me. Maybe some parent out there will have watched it who was struggling with their teenager… that could have changed one person’s life. Then it was all worthwhile wasn’t it?

Can you describe our relationship? 192

When the camera has been turned off and people haven’t seen that side, we built a relationship behind the camera as well and when I was at my lowest and really needed somebody you were my rock. Absolutely. When I was going through hard times with social services and Harvey and I asked you to be his Godmum, you said yes. All these things you said yes, you could have said no… you could have kept it strictly professionally, you know, but you didn’t. I don’t know why… you said I inspired you, that I was courageous! Something else along those lines… it’s going back 20 years now! But no when the camera was turned off we had some very deep conversations didn’t we and I think that you just handed me an olive branch and really wanted to help me. And I think that’s part of why we’ve stayed friends for so long. I think that’s great that we’ve stayed friends that long and I hope there’s another 20 years to come! It’s been fantastic.

Okay I’ll ask you a question now! Why did you want to stay in touch with me? I just loved you. You were always such a laugh. You lived next door to my sister so it was easy at frst. Now we have to make more effort. But we’ve survived all that. I just think we genuinely get on really well. Yeah. Obviously we have our disagreements. God yeah. When do you think I’ve most pissed you off in the last 20 years?! Oh when I got the letter from social services… Oh yeah I stood up to you… Yeah you gave me a drilling and I didn’t like it. You had Harvey’s interests at heart though. We did have a bit of row that day. But it wasn’t just Harvey…I wanted you to be happy as well. We got over it though. You’ve taught me courage, frankness, being honest with yourself about what’s happening, a kind of resilience… you’re kind of unsinkable. I always get back up defnitely. And also you’re funny, you crack me up! I’m pretty blunt yeah, that’s me! I never have to guide or question you when we’re flming… you just go for it and I sit here like a lemon. I guess I’m so used to it now. But you were always natural at it Kim. You would just tell a good story. 193

Vegas & Lola from the 2013 documentary Crazy About One Direction, interviewed 13 January 2018 in Brighton.

What did you think it would be like to be in a flm? V: I don’t know, I guess i wanted to do it because it was part of the fandom and like it was meant to be about the like biggest fans! L: I am the biggest fan! V: Yeah it kinda proved you were a massive fan if you were in a flm about the biggest fans!

Did you ever regret it? V: I don’t think I regret it, but I was so young at the time… it’s one of those things people bring up now and be like Hahahaha look at you in that! But I don’t regret it. But it’s just funny when I look back on it cos I was so young when it was flmed. I was like perfectly fne with like deciding that I wanted to do that, but I dunno if I should’ve… I dunno… if I did it again I dunno if I should’ve done it just cos I don’t know if I’d want that forever of me at the age of twelve.

If it was your kid would you let them do it? V: Yeah if they wanted to, it’d be funny! I’d probably laugh at them if they did it though!

Do you think you were yourself during the flmmaking? V: Yeah, I think so. I mean it was so long ago I can’t really remember and obviously I’m so different now to how I was at the time of it. But at that time that was how I was. 194

So is it quite hard to have like a record of a certain moment in your life? V: I guess it’s just weird cos it’s not just you that has that record… everyone has that, like, record of you and can just, like, see it. I dunno it’s just a bit weird to have that.

When you watched it did you recognise yourself? V: Yeah… what do you mean by recognise? Did you think oh yeah that’s totally me? Or did you think oh that’s been edited like… V: Oh no I didn’t think anything had been edited weirdly… I just thought oh that’s me, that is so weird! But everything that was said was like how I said it. And I came across like myself.

Do you think that the One Direction fans in the flm were sort of cut to be a certain way? V: No not really but I think the flm showed, like, the extremes people went to, and then maybe people were angry at those extremes being shown rather than showing the, like, the less extremes. Whereas if you showed the less extremes it would be a lot less interesting and the whole flm was about how extreme the fandom was.

So basically it didn’t represent all fans? V: No.. it represented the craziest of the craziest… Did you feel like you were the craziest of the craziest? V: Oh… no! Not really!

What did you think of the title? V: I think the title made people feel like they were being judged for it, more, because it was like crazy rather than about how much they loved them or whatever.

When you see the flm now do you think Oh my god that’s exactly what I was like? Or do you think that is only one little bit of me? V: No, I see it and I think That’s exactly how I was! At that point in time. And exactly how I acted.

Do you think that I was naughty to make a flm about One Direction fans? 195

V: No I think someone needed to do it because it was so different to what had happened before. And the way you did it, it actually showed more of an insight than if other people had done it.

What do you think of me? V: You just encourage everyone to be as cheeky as they can. And then you just laugh at them when they do it. So I’m sort of like that as a person you think? V: Yeah, as a person though. Like with anyone. You’ll just encourage anyone to do whatever you think… like, whatever’s funny! That sounds so irresponsible… oh god…

What was the response to the flm like? V: Some people love the flm and like get it, but I think a lot of the fans kinda freaked out, because they felt like not everyone would go to some of the extremes that were in the documentary. But then I think some fans were almost angry that they weren’t shown because like, they see themselves as a massive One Direction fan and they weren’t picked to be in this flm… why was that person picked and they’re only this much of a fan and I’ve done all of this?! So I think it just… and also cos it gave an insight and some people felt that it was their thing and a secret between them, and someone had just flmed it and like put it everywhere… Some of the stuff I said as well it just makes me cringe so badly when I re-watch it! Like when I said I’mm part of a fandom that could kill you! Every time someone says that I just cringe so badly! I literally want to crawl into a ball, I hate myself! Oh no! It makes you hate yourself?! V: No, not hate myself but you know when someone says something and you just wanna disappear for a second?! Just for noone to see you! But you never felt angry that you had to deal with that? V: No, not at all. Why weren’t you kinda mad at me that I put you in that situation? V: I don’t know. Cos… it’s never actually affected me, like, being in it, or… what happened… I never got any hate for it, like, I actually… it was really enjoyable when we did it. / Nobody would really recognise me from it though. No-one would see that, unless they knew me, no-one would watch that and say That’s defnitely Vegas! 196

Literally you wouldn’t even know it was the same person unless you knew me well enough. So in that way it was good you were so young? V: Yeah.

Do you think that the girls in the flm were their real selves? L: No. Everyone puts on a show in front of the camera. That’s just what people do, like. And that’s fair enough. I reckon they wanted to seem crazy… V: And that they were the most intense…? L: Yeah cos you would get attention from it… you would get more recognition from people watching. V: And thinking the boys would see it… and think Oh my god look at the lengths she’s going to to try and get my attention! L: Yeah exactly. V: And oh she’s in the documentary and she’s trying to get more recognition for it…

Were you glad that you were in it, or not Lola? L: I just fnd it funny now so yeah. It’s fun to look back to!

Johnny & Mary from the 2015 documentary After the Dance, interviewed 4 November 2017 in Clare, Ireland.

When I was frst asking you to make a flm, what did you think of the idea? J: Sure, when we frst heard the story that Tom was the father, we kinda felt ashamed, cos we always looked up to Tom kinda, as a pillar of society. We’d kind of preferred if it would never have went on television or anything. We thought we were blackened 197 and we didn’t know what kind of reaction we’d get - would people look down on us? But we were kind of surprised that people seemed to, you know, were happy that we’d done it for you. They encouraged us for doing it, you know, it brought our families together. And everywhere we go we meet someone that’s seen the flm, and we’re kind of happy with that. They say how love the flm and how natural we were in the flm and that if you paid actors to do the flm it wouldn’t have come out as natural. We took no notice of the cameras - we just spoke from the heart and that got across to the people.

So they liked the fact that you weren’t kind of putting a show on? J: Yeah. Yeah. From the reaction we got back we were happy we done it for you you know. We were out to help you and we said we’d put ourselves on the line you know, for your sake, we’d face the puckolts! M: Sure, there’s a thorn in every rose like, in every rose. Not any of us is perfect… we all have faults, we all make mistakes and no-one can point a fnger at anybody.

What did you think when you saw yourself in the flm? M: Well… I didn’t know what to think really… just… I did my best and I tried to be as honest as I could, like, you know. And when people come up to you and say Were you in that documentary? And they’ll be so full of happiness! I went down to Tralee the other day, and the lady came up to me and she was so happy, and I didn’t know what was wrong with her! And she said were you in the documentary, After the Dance? And I said yeah. And they said, they had a story themselves about her mother and father, they had a child when they were kind of young and they were going together. And they couldn’t afford to have child, so they gave him up for adoption and they got married in later years and they never told the family about it. And then when they saw the documentary, they told them about their story. And they wanted to meet this new person. And the fella that was adopted, he got on well in life and everyone was really happy. And I tell you, I couldn’t tell you the joy I met that day. And people really come up to us, and they’ll be happy with us you know? They’ll just be happy with we. And you feel so good that you did it then you know. J: We’ve met with people and they tell us they had much the same story you know, or they knew of people that had the same story, that was kind of brushed under the carpet like, long ago. And they were happy that they got encouragement from the 198 documentary to look for their relations you know, and we were happy that we got to do good for other people. We were happy with that like. At the start we didn’t think things would turn out so good and we’d get so much reward from the flm. We thought it would be the other way round after doing the flm, that we’d be looked down on, you know. But we didn’t… I feel we were looked up to. M: And I feel everyone has their own story to tell in this world you know.

What did you think when you saw yourself in the flm? Did you think it was the true you? I thought it was the true me, yeah, the true me. If I had to do the flm all over again, I felt I couldn’t do any better. I felt I couldn’t improve on it. We came out natural you know, our true self, as they say the slat of the earth! M: And I feel when people saw how natural we are they kinda reached in to us and wanted to make friends with us. J: And what was a great boost to me was all the letters and cards I got from people congratulating me. They were coming every day, and that was a great encouragement and lift. It kinda gave me great confdence, going to New York you know, and going to the flm premieres, and doing the question and answer sessions and the audience saying Can we have a song from Johnny?! That gave me a great boost you know and I think I can face anything after that! M: They all brought something different out of the flm, even some people wanted to see it again. J: And all the beautiful women coming up and wanting to take a photograph! That was a great encouragement and lift! So we’re happy for what we done, and we’d do it again for you tomorrow!

Did you feel like it changed your life in any way? J: It gave me more confdence and I’m bolder now to speak out. Like giving an intro to a song. I was always ferce shy when I was young, but one thing… I never refused to sing! Well if I was able I’d give it a lash. I felt that about it you know. I was always improving, that was the thing. But now you feel more confdent to speak? J: I feel more confdent now - we have done it all! M: I feel more natural now and more myself, and I feel closer to people as well. Is that because people know you better now? M: Yeah they come up to you and talk to you and they’re really friendly with you. 199

J: When I sing an old song now they’re shouting for more and coming for an old chat with me and taking photographs… I felt half a celebrity! So have you enjoyed your new found celebrity? J: Yeah, we’re the same people, we have to do the same things… snug an old cow and feed the calves! We don’t want to look down on anyone, we want to feel humble, but if they want to give us fame, we’ll take it as well you know! We take everything in our stride you know… M: We enjoy the enjoyment with them. J: Yeah.

Josephine from the 2011 documentary series My New Home, interviewed 2 July 2017 in Tynemouth.

Did you ever regret letting me flm you? No, not at all. I don’t regret… not one thing. There must have been moments when you regretted it?! You know the moments that I regretted it… well the last thing I wanted was to put my children at risk. That was the moment when I wished that I had not done it. Wishing otherwise, it could have turned out differently. But it wasn’t a very easy choice. Cos not saying anything was also wrong in its own way. I wanted people to know the real truth about life and what happens. When we were doing documentaries there wasn’t anything that was fake, you know what I mean? I didn’t prepare to be flmed or anything. It was just like real life. So some times if I’m commenting on anything it will be really genuine and that was what I was thinking at that moment. 200

So you didn’t feel like you were playing a character or anything? Doing what you thought you should do? No!!! Because from the beginning it was clear. I was saying what do I have to do? What do I have to do? And you don’t have to do anything, just be yourself. And that was what it was.

Do you remember the frst day we met, when I explained to you that I wanted to flm with you fr fve years… and you were like Yeah that’s fne, we can do it. And I remember saying to you Do you not want to take some time to think about it? Are you sure you want to do it? And you were so angry that I asked that. Do you remember? I don’t remember that! You were like: I can make the decision - why are you questioning it?! I don’t remember but I think that at that time I really didn’t want someone to over- question me. I was a very angry mother - I missed my children so much. I hated the system with a passion. And I think that anger would go out onto anyone. I didn’t see my son since he was 5 - I had no idea what he looked like. I pretended to be happy when I am talking to him on the phone, but inside myself I was crying every minute. It was a nightmare and I couldn’t live with that. because I felt that I am guilty, because I chose to come and live in England, and I’m selfsh. Even for my daughter Memento it was worse, because she started her period… I didn’t even have any idea what happened. I had no time… I wasn’t even given the opportunity to advise as a mother. So the anger that you have… on the system, on everybody around me.

Did your kids ever say to you… Mum this is hard enough…why do we have to experience it all on television?! No, what happens is when they came it was the frst thing that they knew. They didn’t know anything else. It was their normal. It was me that was questioning myself, because they haven’t lived in the country they didn’t know anything about it. They didn’t know what to hide, what not to hide. It was good in the sense that it was raw, fresh… everybody was speaking out their mind and it was genuine. And I think that came across. We had so many families who actually related to us, and they formed their own Facebook group, whereby they would say That family is coming! And when I went to a party at Nando’s in London, this lady said I know you! And I was like no… and she said yes I know you.. are you not Marshal’s mum? And that was too much, for somebody to call you Marshal’s mum… from TV! Oh right yes! And then she started 201 telling me that we have a Facebook group where people come and comment on what she has done today, what they have done today, and they are liking her more than the other mums because of her boldness and courage lalala! It was so interesting and I was like wow laaaaaa I should love you a hundred times! And then I said can I go in the group and she said no, because we are talking about you in the group!

We didn’t have to act anything. It was just normal life, and Daisy following us around with a camera. So nobody had expectations of anything, except just being us.

Do you think it has changed your family at all, to be so public? Yes it has changed our life in many ways. On the negative, when people think that what we have done or said is wrong, they will just literally hate us for no apparent reason and we wouldn’t even be knowing. And sometimes on social media they can actually try to attack and things like that… so that was a negative. But um… on the positive it has actually… I can see it through Mento. She stands out and she likes to speak out. And she wasn’t like that when we… I think confdence. Everybody has been boosted in their confdence. It didn’t happen like hey here is your confdence coming! It happened gradually, when we were living and experiencing and talking and hearing the feedback and everything. I think… it was a good outcome. I kind of felt that your flming is very eloquent, and different. It make you feel at home. You don’t feel pressured to do anything and I think that way you actually get more out of people than if you would be questioning them… Why did you do that etc It is totally different. Most journalists would be having the answer frst before they even asked you. Everyone was free to share what they wanted… there was no pressure. So yeah… well done Daisy!

There were some points whereby flming would be monotonous because you know what I mean? Every time you would always be with somebody and you just wanna be free and do your own thing, without somebody flming you. But it was impossible cos I already signed up to the flm. Daisy’s calling and… Can I come next week? Can I come tomorrow?! And I was like no, no, no! And I thought I’m saying no to everything! That was the pressure we were under. And I kind of feel it now for the celebrities! It is so hard to have everybody following you every day of your life. If I had some money I would have gone to Hawaii! 202

So do you think people in documentaries deserve to be paid? I think they do in a way… as a token of thank you for having to commit. It’s more than writing a book. And it’s your life… one in the limelight, two the risks you might have to face, after all this bullying, racism, abuse on Twitter and stuff that can happen. And this is a permanent story. Nobody can erase. To me doing a documentary is like writing a book. And people subscribe and pay… and we get totally nothing. And I don’t think it’s fair on the participants. Even if they weren’t working. Having a camera flm you all the time for the rest of your life that you are in it… I think it deserves some form of payment… in fact huge payment. This is my life and it’s never gonna change. And we have change things for a lot of people who have learned from what we have done, what we have experienced. And it’s permanent.

It’s a strange experience isn’t it because I think often in life we re-write what happened. But you can’t do that, because yours is on flm. Yeah you just live what is going to happen on that day. It’s genuine…. everything is genuine on the documentary. I’ve never seen one person who pretended to be what they are not, because its just like normal real life.

Do you think people on television pretend a lot? Yes, wow, those people are so much in trouble. They have so many expectations… what do they want people to see them as? How they dress? What their make up is like… And after that they rehearse 100 times what they want say and maybe delete it 100 times. It’s different.

Are you glad we didn’t do it like that? yes I am glad we didn’t do it like that… because it would have been boring.

How did you feel about the way that I represented you? Did you like the way I made you look? Or did you think that’s just the way she sees me, it’s not how I really am? Er… did you have any infuence on the way we seemed? I don’t think that you did. Because the way you flm is totally different from other things as I said… because you just allow people to be themselves. So it wouldn’t be… you were allowing us to be 203 what? Everyone was just being what they were, and that is exactly what the flm was intending to be.

Marshal from the 2011 documentary series My New Home, interviewed 2 July 2017 in Tynemouth.

I want you to tell me honestly, what it was like for you to be on TV from the age of 10 to 15? M: I’m not gonna lie to you… when I was a kid it was like pretty cool, I was like yeah I’m gonna be on TV! It’s not something you felt like is gonna happen! But the way you flmed it I didn’t feel I was doing something for anybody… I was literally just me, doing what I do normally on a daily basis like. But the whole idea I was gonna be on TV was like, ok that’s pretty cool! Other kids are just gonna know me for like… I’m not tryna entertain them, just like, guys this is what I do… this is Marshal! There aint nothing to it. Just live your life and go about it, like. And that's how I went about it.

Did you ever regret it, that you were going to be living your whole teens in the public eye? I didn’t regret it so much, cos it taught me so much… to not always disobey people, cos like you don’t wanna have that whole image behind you… oh he’s a bad kid blah- de-blah. As me, being Marshal… I didn’t wanna come across as someone else, so like I literally just went on, the way I am, innit so… The only thing I’d say it restricted me from was like, going off drinking at the age of 14 or whatnot, like, staying in the streets and doing what I’m not supposed to be doing. It’s kinda like, yeah, just be you. I didn’t regret anything at all, like, from start to fnish. Just… some silly stuff was said! But you know! It is what it is! The gay situation… my mum wasn’t about it. She was 204 against it, a lot. So to me it was like, it’s not a good thing at all. So I was like yeah, I’m gonna commit suicide if I turn gay. But yeah, lets just throw that out there!

So do you think it actually changed your behaviour being flmed? Yeah, I think I coulda been bad. There was something at the back there, yo, a bad person, but obviously with the whole mentality behind it I was like, this is me… I’m not gonna walk round and act a fool like. You don’t wanna have that forever, cos people are like we know what he’s doing, we watch him on TV, we know he’s a bad kid! I don’t want that, I don’t like that for me like. All those people that walk around like We’re bad! I don’t see any appeal to that. To me being bad is kinda just like going downhill. It’s not helping yourself. For me, with this flming behind me I’m like right I gotta focus, gotta learn to read. I gotta do this to improve on my being. It wasn’t anyone pushing me… it was just common sense. Cos I coulda been like any one of those kids. I coulda been like, cool, I’m being flmed, let me just act up in front of the camera. I just did me, and it worked out well I guess. Yeah I’ve learnt a lot from being in the camera like. There’s embarrassed moments, but apart from that it’s just being in the moment.

Do you think you got to know yourself by seeing yourself in the flm? Yeah a bit more like. Watching it back I was high argh I hate watching myself but from each part seeing what I do… I might just criticise myself a little bit obviously cos you don’t wanna be acting the fool, but at the same time I was like… How can I make myself better and always improve? From when I frst seen the show I was like oh my God i saw that scene… I can’t even read! That’s just me aaaah God that scene just killed me inside, I’m not gonna lie. Woah ok. Lets do something about that. Lets learn to read or balance it out with something else I can do to help myself. Yeah I guess I’ve changed myself after watching it cos I get the chance of seeing myself on TV and seeing what I’m doing wrong and what I’m doing right. Not everyone gets that opportunity like… they just do what they do. Whereas if you get the vision of somebody else seeing it, it’s like wow, that’s what you actually look like? You don’t wanna be too embarrassed about how you come across… if that’s you, do you, 100 per cent.

Who is this weird lady flming me?! Mum told me on the phone - you’re gonna be on TV, Channel 4. Oh my God I’m gonna be famous! TV! But like, after it’s started 205 happening, in motion, you don’t really realise the camera’s there half the time, just go with the fow. I’d been told this was gonna happen so I started seeing you more often, flming, and I was like I guess this is what she wants! I’m not gonna go Why are you flming me?! I’m just gonna enjoy it and go with it. I wasn’t against it at any moment. There would be times when I’d be like… you wanted to ask me questions and I’d be like I don’t wanna answer questions, I just don’t wanna do that. But like we had to make a show… there was a concept behind it. It wasn’t like we’re just doing it, not for any reason. But…

Yeah when you were like 13, you really didn’t want to talk to me! Nope! Obviously, 13, just getting into the teenage thing, trying to be secretive and hide stuff. But it was literally, you can’t do that cos like… parents signed up! You’re being watched! You’re there 24 hours. You can’t.

Can you describe our relationship? I think we had kind of a bond going on, where it was like… My mum was there, and also you. And I could talk to you… and you’d be flming… and there’s stuff I could talk to you about that I can’t say to my mum cos like…. You were more about it. You’d confront me about it, like Oh do you wanna talk about this dududuh… and obviously I’m not gonna pass it off and not talk about it but… You brought it to the table and I was like I might as well just go ahead and talk about it whereas with my mum it wasn’t like that. Coming in and not having seen her for that long, it was like, right, building a bond at the same time because coming in and I hadn’t seen her for all that time. Right there’s these two female fgures I’m gonna build a bond with and like… She’s cool! My mum’s cool, but my mum’s strict! So… yeah it was fun. I never hated the moments you were here. I was like, it’s fun! Daisy’s here! It was cool. 206 207 208

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Appendix 4: @LovinLarry17 Twitter Suicide Hoax 212

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Appendix 5: Sample of #ThisisNotUs Tweets 15/8/13 215

Appendix 6: Guide to Attenborough Centre Installation 216 217

Appendix 7: This is Not Us online 218 219 220