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Ripped from the headlines

What happens when prime time dramas have a storyline that seemingly reflect an incident in your life? Real life as drama is too real for some.

wineryLast week Hunter Valley winemaker Trevor Drayton and William Rikard-Bell had no idea a chapter in their lives was about to be reflected in an episode of All Saints.

Over twelve months ago Drayton and Rikard-Bell were left fighting for their lives following an explosion at Drayton’s Family Wines at Pokolbin.

“I certainly don’t intend on seeing it tomorrow on telly,” Mr Rikard-Bell said last week.

It’s commonly known in the industry as ‘ripped from the headlines’. Real-life stories in the newspapers become the inspiration for television screenplays. But what about those whose lives are set to unfold as prime-time entertainment? They can relive unwelcome memories. There’s no compunction on the part of producers to advise them, let alone compensate, of what they may unwittingly view.

All Saints was promoted “one heart-stopping hour”, showing a man with burns to 70 per cent of his body found writhing in a pool of water. They were the same extensive burns suffered by Mr Rikard-Bell, who was found in a dam after the Drayton blast.

“It is inappropriate, especially if there is a coronial inquiry going on and it’s still fresh in the minds of the family,” Mr Rikard-Bell said.

John Drayton said he was upset the program’s producers did not tell him or his family they were using the blast that killed his brother for inspiration.

“I didn’t know anything about it until this morning . . . a friend told me,” Mr Drayton said yesterday. “They [producers] didn’t tell us anything about it. My parents don’t know and I don’t want them to, for obvious reasons.”

Last month an episode of City Homicide involved the shooting of a suburban mother by criminals who bungled the address, not dissimilar to a famous case of what police believe was mistaken identity some years ago in Melbourne.

Last year SBS pulled an episode of Swift and Shift Couriers after complaints from the family of Private Jake Kovco an episode with the accidental death of “Soldier David Cobbgrove” was too similar.

The series is currently in repeat but SBS looks set to skip the two part storyline this time round.

And what of the journalists who may have put in hours of work in reporting the original story? One US journo says an episode of Law and Order: SVU wasn’t so much ripped from the headlines as ‘ripped off the headlines.’ It took him three years to investigate his original story about violent police who had served in the Army Reserve unit in Afghanistan.

“No, I did not get a dime,” he later noted. “And no one from NBC even called to say how truly inspiring my work was, or how the truth really can be stranger than fiction — or even that the damn episode existed. Instead, my dad saw a commercial for it on TV and sent me an e-mail.”

In 2004 a Manhattan lawyer, filed a lawsuit in 2004 against Dick Wolf arguing that a Law and Order plot defamed him by including an unsavory character which was modelled on him. He filed his lawsuit under a doctrine known as libel-in-fiction. To win his case, he had to demonstrate that the identities of the real and fictional characters “must be so complete that the defamatory material” becomes a “plausible aspect” of the plaintiff’s real life.

He lost.

But producers defend their right to use newspapers and real-life incidents as drama. Episodes are careful to clarify that similarities are coincidental.

All Saints producer Bill Hughes, said his episode was based on the idea of the winery explosion and characters did not relate to Drayton blast victims.

“We googled in ‘unusual explosion’ and from that we got ‘wine factory explosion’. We thought OK, let’s do a wine factory explosion and that’s about it,” Mr Hughes said.

But the show has been criticised for depicting a real-life incident that is still raw for those who lived through it.

Hughes said he hoped it did not offend the Draytons or Mr Rikard-Bell.

“I suppose in a way the Drayton’s explosion is closer to this episode than most of our research usually is. We usually pull out things that happened many, many years ago.

“But if we were to steer away from every single thing that’s ever happened so we didn’t offend someone, we wouldn’t have a show.”

Source: The HeraldNYTimes, Salon.com

4 Responses

  1. They should have contacted the people affected. It would have been useful research as well as simply good manners. Mind you, it would be better if they came up with original storylines, if it’s not too much to ask.

  2. when i saw it advertised as “inspired by a real life story” i thought that they had the consent from the family. They could of at least warned them

  3. Very interesting story David, I didn’t realise last week’s episode was inspired by a real-life case. I think the producers, knowing they were getting inspiration from a real-life (and recent) case, owed it to the original victims to at least let them know or get their OK.

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