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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Mark Lawson

Paul Watson created reality TV with The Family. Then he got even more controversial

A scene from Paul Watson’s The Family
A scene from Paul Watson’s The Family (1974). Photograph: BBC

It seems somehow fitting that the TV documentary maker Paul Watson should have died, aged 81, in the year of a major movie about J Robert Oppenheimer.

Both men were responsible for a development that revolutionised their profession but was then exploited by others in ways that they had not fully anticipated, causing them moral qualms and to be blamed for horrors that were not their responsibility. In Oppenheimer’s case, it was the atomic bomb; for Watson, reality TV.

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