My daughter grew another head and other true life stories.

A channel four documentary examining true life story writers and those who confess.

Story telling is everywhere. While the writers and the confessors my suggest this is about the sharing of common experiences, bonding though this and drawing attention to each others endeavours I am now beginning to see it for what it is - Validation of a personal endeavour. Sure the finical benefit is something to think about but is it really all about the money or is it simply an opportunity for a peacock to show its feathers? Look what I’ve been through. See how well I dealt with it. Aren’t I wonderful?

In terms of documentation of live art the ‘documentation’ of real life stories echoes the problems of story telling as validation of an experience. Truth is the key word here. When asked are the stories real true life journalist, Hannah answers -

‘There is always an element of truth but then it has to be turned into a story and so in that process the writing veers from truth, to make it a good story, otherwise if you told the truth it could make it quite boring.”

Here the elaboration of a story means it’s not fake. Could this be the same within documentation of live art? Sure this is relevant in terms of story telling as documentation but one could argue the same for pictorial or video documentation. Photoshop now allows pictures to be edited and still be believable and further still staging of a photo means an event doesn’t even need to happen. In terms of video documentation editing again means you can twist the truth.

This issue here is obviously validity but furthermore it is all about belief. Belief in the truth or that that is packaged as the truth. This is certainly the case for the true life stories who package the elaborated truth with an even more elaborated headline. (My daughter grew another head really being the story of a girl who grew a small tumour on her shoulder.)

By handing over your story to be repackaged you are not only validating your experience to others but making it bigger and better to get greater validation for something originally quiet pointless. Moreover a fresh angle on a story means an old story never gets old. Someone else’s point of view can add new found excitement though Idiosyncrasy. This is certainly the case of the Mr Gay U.K cannibal story, that a year after originally being packaged into a true life story gets retold through the eyes of his best friend.

The thing that significant to me about the program was the un-complex nature of a story needed in order to gain the most public interest. What is this public interest that everyone keeps banging on about? Should we be interested in someone snogging a swan or running over their fiancée by accident? This is also true in terms of the Guinness World Records. Is someone balancing a milk bottle on their head for the longest distance really of any interest to the general public? Yet this is what we strive to achieve if we want to enter into this world.

The need for someone to be interested in order to validate your experience or endeavour seams to me to be the fundamental issue here. Whether this is truth or not doesn’t seam to matter. Belief and interest will always triumph over truth and importance.