panthera thats not the point in my opinion the problem is that some (a lot) of people watch this stuff and think its real and that is what needs to change.
Well, you folks might be interested in a recent debate that flared up because of a TV drama called 'Holby City' here in the UK. Basically, it is similar to ER, but is a BBC drama.
The problem came about when a radiographer wrote in to a medical imaging publication about a scene in Holby City where a nurse accompanied a patient into the gantry of a CT scanner to comfort the patient during the scan. Of course this would never happen in real life because the nurse would be irradiated and there are other technical issues to do with positioning too. Anyway, the radiographer who complained about this was concerned that the general public would assume that such practise is routine, and that nervous patients would demand that relatives or staff members accompany them into the CT scanner.
Now before I tell you more about this, I must give you some background about my relationship with the BBC and Holby City. In 2001 they were filming an episode of Holby City wherein a lead character in the show, a doctor, was the victim of a road rage incident and got shot in that altercation. The script called for the bullet to be located in close proximity to the spine, dangerously close to the abdominal aorta. The BBC approached a consultant radiologist at a large London academic hospital, to produce a radiograph (a prop X-ray film) showing this bullet in the required location. They sent the actual bullet via courier and gave him two weeks to produce the radiograph.
By chance, I happened to be walking past the reporting room and saw the radiologist holding this bullet up to a lightbox where he had an abdominal radiograph on view. He had a darkroom technician with him and various films where they had attempted to superimpose this bullet onto the film. None of these looked real. They looked like cutouts and clearly were not suitable. I asked them what they were doing and they told me the whole story. The BBC had even supplied the relevant parts of the script so that the use of the radiograph could be better understood. After a discussion between the three of us it was clear that the radiologist and the darkroom technician had tried all the tricks they knew, and were no closer to achieving a usable film. I offered to give it a go.
Now to cut a long story short, I was able to make that film by using analogue compositing, and I ended up with a film where you could not tell that the bullet had been added in afterwards. The bullet in question was a cast lead .45 with a modest hollow point that had been filled with a red epoxy resin (or similar) so that it retained an ogive, but the point was red.
The story was that the doctor got shot and the bullet was in a very difficult place to access surgically. The drama and tension was derived from the fact that the doctor's own colleague had to operate on him to retrieve this bullet. To further add to the tension, according to the script, it would be discovered at some point during the operation that this bullet was explosive upon contact with air. So there was a big deal made about keeping this bullet submerged in water so that this explosive red compound in the nose would not come into contact wih air.
Now, because you can't see a hollow point cavity on an unexpanded bullet on a radiograph, the X-ray film that I provided showed an ordinary bullet ogive with a slightly flattened tip. It was not exciting, radiologically. So the BBC hand-drew with a graphite pencil, the cavity in the nose of this bullet. I noticed it when the show aired, because I taped it. So clearly they needed props that would enhance the drama and were not concerned with producing a documentary or scientifically-correct programme.
And this is what I pointed out, when I wrote my letter to that same radiographic publication. I told them it was a bit much to expect the ordinary citizen to expect hospital procedures to be learned from a TV drama with a medical flavour. In the end that's all it is. It is a bit like judging nuclear power plant safety procedures by the behaviour of Homer Simpson.
And that is my take on CSI. It is a drama with a forensic flavour. If they religiously stuck to the procedures that are carried out today in crime labs in the US, they wouldn't have an exciting show and they would have to pay many more actors and actresses to take on the variety of work roles in the lab. Some of the investigative techniques in CSI are correct, and some are not typical or are imbued with a dollop of dramatic license. For more details on this check out this link from FirearmsID:
http://www.firearmsid.com/Feature Articles/crimeTV/crimeTV.htm
And that is what we have to focus on. The same applies to Holby City. Now if somebody comes along and demands or expects real life incidents to follow what they see on a TV drama, then that is their problem, not the problem of the TV show. These shows do not present themsleves as documentaries.
There is far more danger in the production of propaganda pieces that masquerade as documentaries, such as anything that fat turd Michael Moore does, or several BBC Panorama epsiodes that were clearly researched by morons or somebody with an agenda.
In conclusion I would say give these shows a break. They are entertainment, not fact. There are far more damaging publications and programmes masquerading as documentaries/fact for us to worry about. Just open the newspaper and watch the news.
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