Watkins, Peter
Entry updated 4 November 2025. Tagged: Author, Film, TV.
(1935-2025) UK Television and film director, active as a maker of documentary films from 1959. He was one of the pioneers of the technique of staging historical or imaginary events as if they were contemporary and undergoing television-news coverage, making his reputation with two quasidocumentaries or "docudramas" for BBC TV: Culloden (1964), in which participants at the Battle of Culloden in 1746 are interviewed by modern journalists; and The War Game (1965), which he novelized as The War Game (1967). The War Game (1965) used a sophisticated cinema-verité toolkit to simulate the likely consequences of nuclear attack on the UK, and did so realistically enough for the film to be denied a screening on BBC television, for which it was made, until 31 July 1985. As the contract with the BBC did not ban its use in another medium, the film successfully gained Cinema release in 1966, winning an Academy Award (oddly, for Best Documentary Feature), along with other prizes.
Watkins's next film, Privilege (1966), features a pop star used as a puppet by a future government in a cunning propaganda plan for the manipulation of the nation's youth. Gladiatorerna (1968; vt The Gladiators; vt The Peace Game), made in Sweden, and Punishment Park (1971) are both set in the Near Future, and both use stories of channelled violence to argue a pacifist case. Both revolve around agonistic games (see Games and Sports), the latter more plausibly; it features tournaments to the death "played" without choice by political prisoners (see Crime and Punishment), interestingly sophisticating Robert Sheckley's The Tenth Victim (1966), and prefiguring Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games sequence.
An interesting paradox is that, while his theme is normally the use of mind control by future governments to channel the aggressive instincts of the people, and his purpose is to generate moral indignation at this cynical curtailment of our freedom, his own work equally uses the illusion of fact to present a propaganda fiction. Almost certainly aware that he might be accused of fighting fire with fire, he seems to have trusted his audiences, though not perhaps the commentariat. After its initial success, Watkins's work was indeed treated less kindly by critics, who did not doubt his sincerity but deprecated his methods; in the twenty-first century, however, it increasingly seems the case that Watkins captured a moment in the history of the West. In their shifting of focus from nuclear Holocaust to governmental control over its citizens, his films now seem prescient. [PN/JC]
Peter Watkins
born London: 29 October 1935
died Bourganeuf, Nouvelle-Aquitaine, France: 30 October 2025
works
- The War Game (London: Andre Deutsch and Sphere, 1967) [novelization of his own film: The War Game: pb/still from film]
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