Voyeur

Guardian, 16 June 1998
Fiction's dead. That's a fact
by Linda Grant

It is the week before a birth is be broadcast live on the internet, and Herbie Mowes will die '(though not live to make a grisley pun)' on British television. Grant discusses the moral revulsion which has accompanied these announcements, wondering why we want realism when fiction and drama has always delivered in the past.'The hunger for the real seems to mistrust the mediating role of the artist: it wants direct untarnished "truths" so we can decide for ourselves'. The writer puts most of it down to the fact that television has eroded our innocence, noting that parents who sat in their living rooms and watched their children being killed in Vietnam on primetime TV would no longer accept an intermediary presence telling them what to think.