Money and Meanings

Tamar Ashuri

London School of Economics, London.

Abstract

Last summer the  documentary series ‘End Game in Ireland’ was broadcast on BBC2. The  viewers had been promised  the full story of the  Good Friday Agreement, as told by  those who made it happen.  No one was told that the film had been co-funded by three different public service networks (BBC, PBS and RTE). Nor was it made known that  an  independent production company had been  hired by those three networks to produce the film, so that, for example, while the  film was being viewed in Britain, the American and the Irish commissioning editors were cooking up their own national versions of ‘The Full Story’, using the same footage  that had been produced by the independent production company. The final outcome will thus be a documentary series, titled  ‘Endgame in Ireland’, existing in three different versions, American, English, and Irish, where in each version the conflict in Northern Ireland is being presented differently.

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