Justin Hardy

This book examines the potential of audiovisual accounts of the past as a form of history making and dismisses the view of academic historians that history films are of no value. While this may be true of most, whether Hollywood features or television documentaries, this is not invariably so. As evidence, the book examines a mix of recent costume dramas and presenter-led documentaries dealing with episodes in the history of Britain, France and the United States between the American Revolution and the First World War. For the most part, the authors accept that the documentary is structurally the better of the two genres as a reliable vehicle for introducing past events in our modern audiovisual age. But they emphasize that the greatest potential lies in a hybrid genre which is a costume drama, but one where the filmmaker uses documentary techniques to balance confirmations of truth with dramatic narrative.

Justin was always conflicted over the exalted claims made for the film: for him, The Wicker Man destroyed his family. His brother Dominic has been more distanced. The Wicker Man is a set of fragmented stories: benighted production, brutal editing, critical reception, financial failure, and later revival. Using the newly uncovered sources, the brothers investigate what Robin Hardy’s creative contribution to The Wicker Man was, and consider who was truly sacrificed. They reveal an unlikely heroine: Justin’s mother, who bankrupted herself paying loans to her husband and the film, only for him to leave when it flopped. The brothers agree she should be justly regarded as executive producer of the film she never knew was a success. For all women behind artist husbands, this book reveals a series of heroines: the mothers of the children of The Wicker Man.

In A New Genre for Television?, filmmaker Justin Hardy argues the dramatised history documentaries broadcast by British public service channels in the 2000s constituted a distinct television genre. Offering a vital distinction between docudramas and drama documentaries, Hardy contributes to the field of television history through exclusive interviews with key figures from BBC and Channel 4 – many of whom have never been publicly interviewed before – and envisions a future model for the portrayal of national histories on screen.