Panaroma: Analysis

Panorama is a British documentary that is aired on BBC One. The program has now aired for over 40 years and is one of the nations most popular television documentary programs.

I will be analysing the episode ' Last Chance Academy.' Which addresses the struggles of attending and working in a new found academy secondary school.  The episode shows the perspectives of key people, including the head teacher, the troubled teenagers, and the socially inept pupils.

Panorama uses many forms of codes and conventions. The films starts with a female voiceover, the choice of a female voiceover is important to the tone of the episode because it creates a sympathetic, caring almost motherly atmosphere. The voiceover begins with facts and statistics informing the viewer about the school and the recent decisions and findings made by the government.

The episode 'Last Chance Academy' is a fly-on-the-wall style documentary. The visual of the programme is largely observational. Panorama uses many cutaway shots in their documentary, filming the pupils, teachers, playground and the main road outside, a few of the cutaways shot are birds eye view shots that use drone cams, this gives us the perspective of the teachers, who are watching over their pupils. The documentary has a context threaded through, starting with the people, then the school and finally the local area. This is to create a journey tone to the episode, which resembles the students and the teachers journey from being to end of term.

The documentary uses many interviews during its run time, these interviews are semi structured; meaning there is a focus point of the conversation, however these interviews are more relaxed and can sometimes go off topic. To keep this documentary entertaining the interviews are only taken with key people such as, the headmaster and the troubled teens.

 Panorama is targeted towards a more mature audience ranging from 25-80 years old. Panorama is aired on the BBC which is target towards a  more conservative audience, which on the NRS social grade will range from lower middle class, to upper middle class. (C1-A)

In conclusion the episode 'Last Chance Academy' continues to use it's qualative and quantitive research to full effect and understand the target audience that they are catering for.