The right way to make a drama out of a tragedy

Beware of drama documentaries. Filmmakers may trumpet how they're "based on fact". But "based" is the weasel word. Drama documentaries are not entirely factual. They're a "dramatised reconstruction of events". Which means that some bits are factual, others aren't. Viewers are never told which bits are which so they can't judge whether the overall picture of truth the film-maker purports to paint is faithful to the facts.

Nowhere has this territory been more fraught than Northern Ireland, where finding the "truth" can be strewn with elephant traps. One is the shooting dead of 14 unarmed civilians in Londonderry - six of them 17-year-old lads - by paratroopers during a civil rights march 30 years ago this month.

Let's get one thing clear. Bloody Sunday was a bad, bad business. The evidence emerging from Lord Saville's inquiry suggests this is the most shameful post-war event for a British Army which otherwise has much to be proud about.

That certainly was the conclusion I drew from watching last night's Bloody Sunday on ITV. The Army still insists it came under a hail of gunfire, but the weight of eyewitness, photographic and forensic testimony from Saville suggests it was the Army who fired first, the IRA responded with a few pot shots, and then a handful of soldiers went berserk. All the dead were innocent and some, it seems, were picked off. Portraying this version of "the truth" doesn't make the film's writer and director Paul Greengrass the Republican propagandist some have suggested.

Nor could Greengrass, a former colleague, be fairly described as anti-British, since he resists a potent Republican myth about Bloody Sunday - that the massacre was ordained from Downing Street. For such conspiracists, a very juicy memo has emerged from Saville. It was sent about a month before the march by the Commander of Land Forces, Major General Robert Ford, to his boss, the General Officer Commanding Northern Ireland, Sir Harry Tuzo.

British soldiers were nightly being made to look like patsies on TV by what they called the Derry Young Hooligans, who were burning mainly Protestant-owned businesses as their front line crept forward. General Ford regarded his local military command as weak and vacillating in its attempt to curb them.

In his memo, Ford proposed the only way to do this was to "shoot selected ringleaders ... after clear warnings had been given". He suggested issuing rifles adapted to fire high-velocity .22 rounds to "minimise (their) lethal effects".

But Greengrass makes no mention of this memo, for he believes it is a fundamental misreading of history to draw cause and effect with what happened later on Bloody Sunday. Ford was floating the idea of lethal force as a bargaining chip, to get Tuzo to stiffen the sinews of his military commanders in Derry, he argues. "Ford was bidding high," says Greengrass. What he ended up with three weeks later was agreement for a major show of military force and to stop the march, forcibly if necessary, with mass arrests. It is this concept of the military operation, rather than any sanctioned use of offensive lethal force, which Ford imposes on the Brigadier in charge of it, as is blindingly clear from the notes jotted down by the Brigadier when he speaks to Ford on the eve of the march. In other words, they were being given a licence to be muscular, not a licence to kill.

The operation got sickeningly out of hand, which is why Greengrass's film deals with the "mess of events" - and from both perspectives: the marchers, headed by James Nesbitt, playing the local Stormont MP Ivan Cooper, courageously determined to show that peaceful protest was the way to curtail the IRA's phoenix-like rise from the ashes; and the Army, all psyched up and straining at the leash, having already lost 43 of their comrades.

I wasn't at Bloody Sunday but I was at many riots that followed, and Greengrass's portrayal of the military reeks with authenticity, probably because he chose real exsoldiersto play the parts. By contrast, Jimmy McGovern's rival portrayal of the events, entitled Sunday, to be shown a week today on Channel 4, is not as convincing. His General Ford, played by Christopher Eccleston, looks absurdly young and unseasoned, and more sinister than Greengrass's largerthan-life General, played superbly by Tim Piggot-Smith, who brims - as only real generals brim - with confidence and purposeful aggression: "Go on One Para. Go and Get them. And good luck!"

McGovern boasts of "three years' painstaking research. I know that kind of effort would put most British journalists to shame." But facts are one thing and what you do with them, another. What McGovern does with them is build up the conspiracy theory knocked down by Greengrass.

Within minutes of the opening sequence, McGovern hangs this squarely on the Ford memo. The General is seen dictating his idea of shooting rioters, then recording that he has asked the Brigade to prepare a plan for the march in Derry in case there is a battle. We then cut to the Paras in Belfast mobilising for Derry, then back to brigade in Derry where the commanding cfficer of the resident Royal Anglians is aghast that the Army's most aggressive soldiers are on their way. "The decision has been made at the highest level," says the Brigadier. "Highest level?" asks the Commander. "Of Government?" The Brigadier ignores the question: "Will that be all?" The Colonel responds: "No soldier would send in troops that don't know the ground." "Will that be all?" snaps an irate Brigadier.

The inference is irresistible: Prime Minister Ted Heath is colluding with General Ford's plan to shoot the rioters which is to executed by the Brigadier, even though the documentary evidence on which McGovern says he has "based entirely" his drama shows the Ford Memo never went down to the Brigadier, only upwards to Tuzo, who anyway rejected it.

The British Government had drawn a line in the sand all right, but not to shoot unarmed civilians. What they had agreed to was a reckless, aggressive and ill-conceived mass-arrest operation.

McGovern is revered in the docu-drama business. But my guess is that history and Saville will chime with Greengrass's version of events. If so, he will have restored integrity to a genre with which too many "fact-based" film-makers have taken too many liberties for too long.