Steal a little and they throw you in jail, Steal a lot and they make you king. — Bob Dylan, ‘Sweetheart Like You’ from Infidels (1983) Saturday, 20 January 2018, marked the one-year anniversary of the Trump presidency. Americans woke up to a federal government in shutdown mode. Hard core Trump supporters had voted for him to defibrillate the body politic.
Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood producer with 300 Oscar nominations, has fallen. After The New York Times revealed decades of accusations of sexual harassment involving a string of actresses, including high profile names such as Ashley Judd, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie and Cara Delevingne, Weinstein was sacked from his own company.
On May 30thTwitter and the BBC announced a live streaming partnership to provide coverage for a number of election related broadcasts including the May 31st BBC election debate and the June 8th Election Night Special. These election events were simulcast on BBC television.
The horror that the residents, firefighters and loved ones experienced as London’s Grenfell Tower burned is almost unspeakable. Maybe that’s why so much of the coverage was just images. As details emerge about the lack of support and attention to warnings, the event and its toll is also unforgivable.
Television and I grew up together. — Roger Ailes, 1995 (13) Among the sheer glut of head-spinning headline-grabbing news stories emanating from the American political culture this spring, one arrived with far less fanfare than it deserved: former Fox News chairman and CEO, Roger Ailes, died on 18 May 2017.
The International Journal of Digital Television has published a special issue on Television Formats . A variety of topics from the field of Television Format research are covered in the contributions by Jean K. Chalaby and Andrea Esser, Joe F. Khalil, Martin N. Ndlela, Michael Keane and Joy Danjing Zhang, Wenna Zeng and Colin Sparks, Enrique Uribe-Jongbloed and Ethel Pis Diez, Paul Torre, and Tom Evens and Andrei Richter.
It was a bold scheduling move on the part of ITV, the UK’s main commercial television channel. Shifting the nightly news programme to make way for Britain’s latest attempt at a US-style late night talk show was always going to be risky.
When comedian Jimmy Fallon ruffled Donald Trump’s hair during an interview on The Tonight Show in the final weeks of the American election campaign, the internet exploded.
It’s been over a month since the monumental shock that was Brexit as well as its immediate and messy aftermath of public confusion, political backtracking and the general media frenzy that could hardly keep up with the initial developments and shifting agendas.
Ken Loach is surely the patron saint of British film and television studies – venerated for his early work with Tony Garnett and others for making British television drama a national event (fig 1); admired for the prizes (and finance) he has won in Europe; and respected for the way he continues to make films in his own way and following his own conscience into his eighties.
