Reality by fiction : A qualitative study in how power structures are narrated in the BBC-series “The Hour”

The objective of this study was to investigate how power relationships between journalists and politicians were shown in the fictional BBC tv-series “The Hour”. We wanted to investigate how these power structures is narrated by the producers of the series and what impact the narration could have to the audiance of the 21th century.We choose to analyse a total of 12 scenes from all of the six episodes, which are all set in Britain during the beginning of the Suez Canal crisis in the 1950’s, all seen from a BBC editorial point of view.In our analysis we chose to use two different kind of methods, the first one was a situation analysis and the second one a text analysis. The situation method was useful to get a perception of the relations between the participants .The text analysis we used to analyse what was said in the tv-series and to interpret underlying motives.The fictional form necessitated a personalization of power structures, in the sense that each and every power was represented by a single character; political power was for instance represented by the character of Angus McCain. We believe that this personalization of power is a narration tool from the producers so that the audiance can relate and identify to the different power that is narrated in The Hour.In our analysis, we noticed that the fictional narration of the Suez Canal crisis could have an impact in the audience view on the power relations between journalists and politicians during the actual Suez Canal crisis