Doing Women’s Film and Television History IV: Calling the Shots – Then, Now, and Next University of Southampton, May 23 – 25, 2018 Organising team: Shelley Cobb, Linda Ruth Williams, and Natalie Wreyford As researchers of the AHRC-funded project Calling the Shots: Women and Contemporary UK Film Culture 2000-2015 we are proud to host the fourth International Doing Women’s Film and Television History conference in association

The perfect set for every home I love going to archives. From my first visits, I knew that this was going to be the most exciting part of my research. As a researcher of television history, I initially expected to spend my time just at the BFI and the BBC Written Archive, but as my research veered towards the material history of the television set I had to be a little more creative.

How do we write using the audiovisual? Many of us are facing this challenge, frustrated by the restrictions of prose-only analyses. One answer is the audiovisual essay, in its poetic and analytic variants. These have recently taken off in the UK, especially in film studies, as a result of the significant loosening of copyright law, which now explicitly allows quotation of audiovisual works for the purposes of critical comment and review.

Booking is now open for the season of ‘Forgotten TV Dramas’ at BFI Southbank, London in February 2017.

The weeks surrounding the launch of the second season of the STARZ drama series Outlander – broadcast in the US on 9 April and released to Amazon Prime UK the day after – saw a spate of online journalism and fans swooning over the images released of Claire Randall/Fraser (Caitriona Balfe) and Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan) dressed in extravagant period costumes.

Much has been written about the way in which social media has reinvigorated live television, particularly from the perspective of the audience (for example, Liz Evans, Sheryl Wilson, or Inge Sø renson). But much less is known, or written, about how the liveness of social media has affected the production of a range of forms of live television that have made increasing use of platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Periscope, Instagram and

It is quite a joy to discover one of your personal fetishes on the internet. Indeed, I was beginning to feel that I was the only one with a dark, long-term fascination in sitcom studio floorplans, but in recent years there have been one or two articles that have started referencing similar fascinations.

I’ve spent the last year or so researching how television was domesticated in Britain from 1946 until 1976. Following Lynn Spigel’s approach (in a U.S. context) in Make Room for TV (1992), I’ve been using domestic magazines as one of my main sources.

In our ‘post-television’ age when the appearance of television drama and film, both shot on digital camera, is increasingly homogenous, ‘old’ multi-camera studio drama must seem like more of an oddity than ever before.

Is VHS essential to the study of television? This is a debate I’m currently engaged in with the institution I work for which desires to ‘upgrade’ the audio-visual facilities in teaching rooms and sees the removal of VHS as part of this. This upgrade would result in all rooms having DVD and Blu-ray players, but video would be gone;