Documenting our Own Lives: Video Nation

In the mid 1990s the BBC’s documentary output was dominated by observational documentaries. The poetic tradition represented by Humphrey Jennings and Basil Wright was nowhere to be seen. In an attempt to refresh factual output and reflect an increasingly diverse UK, the BBC invited hundreds of people to record aspects of everyday life for the Video Nation project. 

Taking advantage of the arrival of the camcorder, these were home movies reinvented – first-person video recordings that vividly conjured diverse lived experiences. Audiences encountered Video Nation through over 1,200 2 minute Shorts that were broadcast on BBC 2 Monday to Friday just before Newsnight. Video Nation was like a virtual UK – a “home” for fellow citizens shared by participants and audience.  

Video Nation was inspired by a much earlier British project - Mass Observation. Begun in the 1930s, Mass Observation established a cohort of people who captured their experiences, feelings, and thoughts in diaries about everyday life in order to create what Mass observation called an "anthropology of ourselves”.  

In this illustrated discussion between season curator Mark Cosgrove and Mandy Rose, co-producer of Video Nation and Professor of Documentary & Digital Cultures at UWE, they will explore the history of this documentary tradition from Mass Observation to Video Nation and how documenting everyday life through first person diaries and recordings has brought distinct perspectives to the media landscape.