The 1974 series caused uproar by presenting an ordinary family warts and all, while a portrait of a couple afflicted by Alzheimers almost ended the documentary-maker’s career
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.
