Britain in a Day: A television hit photo: dailyinvention
The background
On 12 November 2011, thousands of people across the UK recorded their thoughts, feelings and activities, and uploaded the footage to YouTube. Director Morgan Matthews edited down the mass of clips, including a man with a brain tumour attending his daughter’s wedding and shots of the Occupy camp outside St Paul’s, down to 90 minutes. The result was documentary Britain in a Day – and critics agreed that the crowdsourced BBC programme was a success.
All about love
“Britain in a Day was a film I would have paid to see in the cinema,” wrote Andrew Billen in The Times (£). Billen suggested that the documentary was particularly moving because it depicted love, in a variety of forms: “Without coming over all Richard Curtis, there was a lot of love about: for a dead dog whose ashes were being scattered, for a baby who had lived for just 28 minutes, for a disabled grown-up daughter, for Scottish mountains and Welsh cattle.”
All about pain
“In the end, Britain in a Day was never going to be able to give anything other than the sketchiest impression of the nation,” wrote Tom Sutcliffe in The Independent. “But it delivered a surprisingly comprehensive and moving account of what it is to be human.” Sutcliffe focused on the fact that many of the threads were about pain, both emotional and physical.
All about people
“It would be easy to dismiss Britain in a Day as a monument to collective narcissism, a nation addicted to live-blogging, tweeting and Instagramming its every move,” wrote Sukhdev Sandhu in The Telegraph. But the film is much more than that: “There’s a residual hopefulness and lyricism here that is rarely found in most reality-based television documentaries,” Sandhu said.
Watch a Britain in a Day trailer below
