ABSTRACT
No One, or at Least no Anthropologist in Britain, can have failed to have noticed that as the 1990s come to an end, the ethnographic film genre has largely disappeared from British terrestrial television broadcasting, probably for good. For a few, this may actually be cause to celebrate: finally, the screens have been rid of those functionalist and superficial one-tribe-per-film representations typified by Granada's ‘Disappearing World’ programmes of the 1970s and early 1980s. But celebrations of any victory of academic rigour over prurient exoticism may be hollow and premature. By and large, any interest in the non-European world has vanished from our screens completely. Away from occasional current affairs programmes investigating political issues in the non-European world, the area of British television documentary has shrunk to the narrow focus of the docu-soap — the inside of a driving school car, the fly on the wall of a hotel kitchen, the cult of the celebrity mediocrity. But there is one significant exception, one which frequently invokes the legitimization of anthropology and archaeology.
