Christopher Booker writes: ‘Even today few people in Britain realise the extent to which our intervention in south-eastern Iraq was an abject failure’ (North 2009: 1). The dominant narrative of the British military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan in broadcast television media has been one of emotion, of valiant fighters and of underfunded victims betrayed by politicians, but also of a military strategy, purpose and consequences that are rarely questioned. The media constructs war in a narrow and specific way that leads to an assumption that there is only one way to look at war. Aspects such as the rational analysis of war, the causes of war and, most importantly, the political nature of war disappear.

In this chapter I look at the coverage of a British military operation in Iraq in 2004 in two different British television documentary series, Andy McNab's Tour of Duty (ITV4, 2008, ep. 2) directed by Tom Peppiatt, and Soldier, Husband, Daughter, Dad (BBC1, 2005, ep. 7), which I directed for the BBC. By comparing extracts of what was shown on screen in each documentary, and discussing what techniques the films use to keep the viewer watching, I reflect as a film-maker how these television documentaries about war can make other realities invisible. I also look at how certain functions particular to British television documentary render invisible aspects of war, including how documentaries ‘claim the real’ (Winston 1995). I examine the specific way that reality is represented and constructed, and suggest that the demands of the cognitive modes of visual and psychological realism allow the spectre of past war and emotion to hide a more rational analysis of events, thus blocking an understanding of how war has changed. The demands are in part driven by the craft of the filmmaker, who has to construct war in a way that is recognisable and plausible to a British television audience who has no experience of war, so builds on what is familiar, that is, the spectacle, the visual and a reaching towards an emotional truth in what is shown. The magnitude of the subject matter and the search for an antecedent truth also affects what is, and is not, shown. Past representations and expectation are a spectre ‘haunting what can be said or written’ (Nichols 1991: 291).