Lunchtime Talk: Video Nation – Home Movies of the 90s
In this Lunchtime talk, Mandy Rose will revisit the Video Nation project, with a focus on the Shorts that were the best-known output.
Between 1994 and 2000, hundreds of people across the UK recorded aspects of everyday life for the BBC Video Nation project. These were home movies reinvented – first-person video recordings that vividly conjured diverse lived experiences. In their homes, audiences encountered their fellow citizens through over 1,200 Video Nation Shorts drawn from these recordings that were broadcast on BBC 2 Monday to Friday just before Newsnight. Commissioned by the national broadcaster, Video Nation was like a virtual UK – a “home” shared by participants and audience.
Video Nation became a household name – appreciated by viewers, TV critics and academics. Polly Toynbee wondered how the participants “all leave us with a feeling of warmth and empathy…”; Jon Dovey described the project as, “the television experiment that offers a working model of both fragmentation and belonging in contemporary culture”.
Mandy Rose was co-producer of the Video Nation project for its duration (with Chris Mohr). In this talk, Mandy will revisit the project with a focus on the Shorts that were the best-known output. She will present a variety of responses to these TV miniatures – from contemporaneous reactions to Adam Curtis’s 2025 series – Shifty. 30 years on, with television transformed and first-person video ubiquitous; how do these recordings resonate with us now? With national identity contested and public speech fraught; might Video Nation be a resource for thinking about media and community today?
Mandy Rose is Professor of Documentary & Digital Cultures at UWE Bristol. She is Co-Investigator of the UKRI MyWorld programme. She was Co-I on Virtual Realities: Immersive Documentary Encounters and co-convenor of i-Docs. During 20 years at the BBC she oversaw award-winning participatory and interactive media initiatives including Video Nation and the Capture Wales/Cipolwg ar Gymru digital storytelling project. Mandy is co-editor of i-docs: the evolving practices of interactive documentary (2017) . Her recent writing appears in Studies in Documentary Film, Convergence and the Intellect Handbook of Documentary (2025).
Join us online on YouTube Live, or in the building on Friday, the 7th of November 2025 at 1pm for the talk and to take part in the Q and A discussion afterwards.
The Pervasive Media Studio is a partnership between the Watershed, University of the West of England and University of Bristol. The lunchtime talks are partly supported by MyWorld, a project led by the University of Bristol to support creative industries in the region. Watershed is supported by Arts Council England.