ABSTRACT
Four Minute Mile was a made-for-television film, in two parts, the result of a co-production between British Broadcasting Corporation Television and ABC Australia. Four Minute Mile is a realist drama-documentary. In Four Minute Mile these strategies of positionality, identification and mode of address are embedded within and partially masked by the drama-documentary aesthetic style. In that drama-documentary combines a fictonalized reconstruction of events, appearances and dialogue with the reportage form of documentary, it pushes this claim further, in its implicit suggestion that 'this is how it was'. Roger Bannister's four-minute mile, like other events of that moment, were, transitional moments in sport - situated on the liminal threshold of the television era. Television sport has become the global village fete par excellence: the global reach of television, enabled by satellite technology, is part of a process in which 'flow' becomes more significant than 'space'.
