Docudrama

In other words, docudrama covers an amazing variety of dramatic forms, bound together by two things. They are all based on or inspired by reality, by the lives of real people, or by events that have happened in the recent or not too distant past. Furthermore, they would seem to have a higher responsibility to accuracy and to truth than does fiction.

And docudramas would be the perfect epitaph because, though Norman Kingsley Mailer dreamed of being the monarch of the American novel, he was finally the king of faction, the man whose greatest books, a nightmare for any librarian hoping neatly to classify as fiction or non-fiction, consolidated the now standard view that reporting is as important to storytelling as invention.

“Docudrama” is by its nature a confusing genre—neither fish nor fowl, and thus lacking either taste or substance.

Fenny Compton featured in the recent TV docudrama Mr Bates vs The Post Office. It was where the first meeting of postmasters took place in 2009, organised by sub-postmaster Alan Bates to begin mounting a fight for justice in the now well-publicised Post Office scandal.