… don’t worry; you’re still doing better than most modern undergraduates. Welcome back everyone – and what better way to start the academic year than with a good read? After what seems (to me) like an eternity, my first book – The Changing Spaces of Television Acting – was at last published at the end of August, and I have since been busily promoting it via whatever means possible.

The comic, recently legitimized through the graphic novel phenomenon while remaining anchored in popular culture, can provide unique insights into issues surrounding authorship. Although comics scholarship has explored autobiographical comics and the strategies for self-fashioning of individual canonized comics artists and writers, the complex and mutating concept of comic book authorship remains by and large overlooked.

I said it wouldn’t work, didn’t I? Yes, friends, after less than two years in operation, the BBC Store is shutting up shop, having admitted defeat ‘in the face of streaming service rivals’. Way back in November 2015 I blogged about the Store’s launch (I like to keep things current), when Auntie Beeb was proudly trumpeting the fact that over 7,000 hours of content, old and new, would be made available to purchase and view via

Summer in New Zealand has been particularly crap so far this year (storms and flooding), so my beloved and I had to travel to the Pacific Island nation of Samoa, in search of sun, some four hours on a plane heading north into the Pacific. I also had another purpose: a significant birthday fell on January 9 ^th and I wanted to be Where Nobody Knew My Name.

Since CSTonline was last published at the end of June we have seen some seismic political shifts – the UK has voted to leave Europe in a total Brexit shocker, we have another female Prime Minister (let’s hope that’s all she has in common with the other one) and the US has just voted in a reality-TV star for President. Who would have thought that such huge changes would happen in a quarter of a year?

I have a book coming out. You didn’t know? Well, it’s called The Changing Spaces of Television Acting , and it examines how modern UK television performance has changed – and the various contextualising factors underpinning this – since the days of live, multi-camera studio production.

Providing a certain sense of symmetry, my first blog of the academic year returns to the same theme I examined way back in July, when I looked at options for bringing ‘old’ TV into the digital age.