After a quiet 2019, I had a slew of conferences lined up for 2020. Little did I know what was going to happen as I left the first of them in January, an enjoyable MeCCSA conference in Brighton.

After the release of its third and final season in June, mind-boggling time-travel series Dark reached its completion to resounding critical acclaim, making this the right moment to evaluate the first European Netflix original.

Right then – a new academic year.  And that’s why I can see some new faces out there.  Well, there’s a lot of questions that you’re going to be bombarded with as you make your way through Television Studies in the coming years. Questions like ‘Is That Argument Strong Enough?’, ‘Why Have You Missed All This Semester’s Seminars?’ and ‘What Do You Mean You’ve Never Heard Of VHS?’. Oh, and I hope you like figs.

The BBC put a good deal of effort into trailing four-part JK Rowling adapation Strike: Lethal White ahead of its transmission last Bank Holiday weekend. The crime drama, which follows private detectives Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott, is the fourth instalment in Rowling’s Robert Galbraith series.

A Gothic-Without-Borders Conference in March 2021, fully online, hosted by the Department of World Languages and Literatures (WLL) at Simon Fraser University (SFU), Vancouver, Canada, coordinated by the SFU Center for Educational Excellence (CEE), and co-sponsored by the International Gothic Association (IGA) and others Plenary Speakers Linnie Blake, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK Mark Deggan,

More than ever this year I find myself coming up against Facebook memories.

Our extraordinary conjuncture mixes pandemic panic with racial activism. Inter alia , it has produced many changes in the way we watch television. One of these concerns the English Premier League, which for the first time in its thirty-year history has been seen live on British broadcast TV. We have also witnessed the unraveling of rules governing political speech in the game. “Black Lives Matter” has transcended politics.

Lockdown continues to be a bizarre experience for us all, and no less so in our household viewing experiences.

So, in conclusion, I don’t think the order really matters. Do you? “Oh, she’s still got the dog in this one”.

‘ In writing you’re always looking for conflict…’ Malcolm Hulke ‘To my mind the basic problem is that writers are by the nature back-room-minded introverts and yet, in the publicity jungle, they find themselves pitted against an army of highly extroverted actors and actresses.