Fly on the wall

Fly on the wall is a style of documentary-making used in film and television production. The name derived from the idea that events are seen candidly, as a fly on a wall might see them. The metaphor originally applied to journalism and newspaper reporters, and may have been coined by Walter Lippmann in the 1920's " ...‘the fly on the wall,’ seeing all, feeling nothing, utterly detached, utterly objective ...’’.^[1]

In the purest form of fly-on-the-wall documentary-making, the camera crew works as unobtrusively as possible; however, it is also common for participants to be interviewed, often by an off-camera voice.^[2]

Decades before structured reality shows became popular, the BBC had broadcast fly-on-the-wall film Royal Family (a 1969 documentary produced in association with ITV),^[3][4][5] while 1974's The Family, is said to be the earliest example of a reality TV docusoap on the BBC.^[6][7][8][9] In 1978 the BBC aired Living in the Past recreating a British Iron Age settlement. In the late 1990s, Chris Terrill's docusoap series The Cruise^[10][11][12] made a star of singer^[13] and TV personality Jane McDonald,^[14][15][16] while Welsh cleaner Maureen Rees^[17] became popular after her appearances on BBC One's^[18] Driving School.^[19]

Other British examples include Airline, Dynamo: Magician Impossible and Channel 4's Educating... series, while in the United States popular examples include American Factory, Cops, Deadliest Catch, Big Brother and Weiner, a film about a political sex scandal which developed during a mayoral election in New York.^[20]