It Also Invited The Audience Into The House And Into The Workplace. There Is

It also invited the audience into the house and into the workplace. There is a feeling that at times I, as the viewer, am the sixth member of the household sitting at the kitchen table as Anna is in mid flow during a house conference. However, it would be too easy to say that this use of 'jerky camerawork' was a new invention. It would be equally as lazy to say that it was stolen from US network television. The fact is that this voyeuristic approach had been used before to great effect in British television. In 1966 the BBC broadcast Ken Loach's Cathy Come Home. It can be argued that this was the first of the 'docu-dramas' and blatantly incorporated a style of filmmaking used by Jean Rouch, Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard - cinéma-vérité. This style of filmmaking was made possible by new lightweight cameras and tape recorders that could get into the fiercest action, or smoke-filled rooms, without being obtrusive or ponderous. It allowed a movie that showed ordinary people in actual activities without being controlled by a director. It is also worthy of note that Godard was the man who said Photography is truth, and cinema truth 24 times a second. Loach in turn used this medium to great effect, and there are a great number of comparisons in This Life.
One of the most obvious aesthetic references to This Life leaning towards realism is the use of naturalistic lighting. Whereas previous dramas had been shot using expensive, and time consuming, film stock This Life utilised shooting with modern video technology. This was vital in moulding the final product into the 'docu-drama' style that made This Life work. The lack of a large lighting set-up allowed the cameras to film around the actors in real locations in a less obtrusive way than the old studio-based cameras could. The actors were filmed without the obvious television and stage make-up of previous dramas, unless the storyline permitted it such as Anna using the female toilets in the courthouse as her personal make-up room before going into court in the first episode. This naturalism persuades us that these are ordinary people in natural surroundings (a kitchen, an office, a taxi). It could be argued that This Life owes more to soap opera narrative techniques than to the drama series genre.
This realism affects how we relate to the programme. As an intelligent viewer I know that this is a fictional piece of work, carefully scripted and painstakingly brought to life by astute directing. However, this feeling that I am watching a contrived recorded televisual play soon disappears as the above techniques are threaded together. The verisimilitude is never broken by elaborate, over the top 'auteur-esque' gestures or sloppy filming habits. It is only when the end credits appear that the 'real' reality returns, that these people, Anna, Egg, Milly, Miles and Warren are played by actors, fed lines by scriptwriters and instructed by directors.