‘Seeing a conspiracy around every corner’: Paranoia as procedural in Tony Marchant’s The Whistleblowers (2007)

Abstract

The Whistleblowers is an unusual example of a British television conspiracy drama. Developed by Tony Marchant for ITV as a competitor to the BBC’s Spooks, it centred on ordinary people struggling with the ethics of reporting malpractice in state or corporate institutions. This was invested with verisimilitude through advice from the whistleblowing charity Public Concern at Work, though kept in tension with generic expectations of the conspiracy thriller. Unlike most British conspiracy dramas, The Whistleblowers was not a serial but a procedural with stand-alone episodic conspiracies, creating a vision of conspiracy not as escalating crisis but as ‘standard operating procedure’.

Who killed Utopia? Cult conspiracy drama and a television imaginary

“…According to Oldham (2013, 2019), Utopia offers a bold, transgressive take on the traditional conspiracy television drama (Fenster, 2008), developing a post-patriotic model of the genre through its use of dark humour, hapless protagonists and experimental aesthetics and soundscape. Thus, we can see the most explicit conspiracy regarding the drama is within its storytelling and cult form.…”

“…Thus, when audiences and fans reflected on the false social imaginaries in Utopia they engaged with the storytelling as a filter that highlighted their social and political realities – ‘ Utopia is going to happen naturally.’ The television imaginary of the drama reverberates within them, flowing through their words and actions – Utopia is ‘happening right now’, ‘we look for solutions’ (see Hill, 2018). In these examples of audience and fan engagement with Utopia there is a sense of the drama as revealing the truths within the lies, that political conspiracy is standard operating procedure (Oldham, 2019) and that it is up to ordinary people to challenge false social imaginaries.…”