Wow, what a year it’s been. If, before the pandemic, people thought television was dead, now we all know how much we rely on it. Television, as Michael Wolff wrote, is the new Television. And in the UK, the years of 2020 and 2021 came with some astounding television: I May Destroy You (BBC, HBO, 2020), Small Axe (BBC, Amazon, 2020), It’s a Sin (Channel 4, HBO Max, 2021) and many more.
Television’s involvement with a contemporary media terrain shaped by COVID-19 has been increasingly sharpened as critical focus has gradually shifted towards understanding and thinking through our still-evolving relationships with the small-screen in pandemic times.
Inclusion is not our biggest challenge, but our greatest untapped opportunity
MR WHEELER: Were you expecting a load of timber, Mr Chaplin? TREVOR CHAPLIN: You know me Mr Wheeler, I never expect anything. So when something turns up, that’s a bonus. The Beiderbecke Connection: Hello Sir, Hello Miss by Alan Plater Summer semester. Disappointed academics. Many of whom prepared seminars that attracted audiences of none-ish.
What a couple of days it’s been for a certain type of television-obsessed millennial. Firstly, everyone’s favourite so-bad-it’s-good school drama Waterloo Road is returning, after seven years away, two definitely-demolished locations and a fanbase that definitely aren’t still teenagers. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
Young audiences have been a buzzword for a while across the entire audiovisual industry. In these digital times – saturated with overproduction of youth content that has never been distributed more easily – the competition for young audiences became a rat race.
The Black Lives Matter movement, the trial and conviction of Derek Chauvin, calls to defund the police, the prominence in the media of killer police such as Joseph James DeAngelo are recent manifestations of intense and even unprecedented levels of media attention on policing at interlocking points of race, inequality, social justice and political agendas.
Wastelands: 34TH EUROPEAN ASSOCIATION FOR AMERICAN STUDIES CONFERENCE Madrid 6-8 April 2022 The year 2022 marks the centenary of the publication of T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land . The title of the conference alludes to Eliot’s work and the main themes in it, expanding the idea of the wasteland to the study of the United States.
I have finally watched Hannibal (NBC, 2013-2015). I binged it in less than a week. If you think that is a good sign, think again. I just wanted to get past it. There was no savouring going on or getting addicted. No. On the contrary: I wanted to finish it as quickly as possible. I thought the programme was utterly – and excuse my lack of a better technical term – naff.
“I thought there were fifty-one episodes of Maigret plus the pilot with someone other than Rupert Davies.
