Thus far, the TV Dictionary project has gathered an impressive number of 80 short video essays. Seeing these videographic works from the perspective of East-Central European scholars and television aficionados, what catches our attention (besides their aesthetic quality and theoretical/historical insight) is one tiny little thing.

The UK’s Channel 4 turns 40 on 4 November 2022. How can we assess the achievements (and failures) of this unique broadcasting initiative? The UK’s fourth TV channel was set up by a conservative government to be innovative in the form and content of programmes. Now it is just one small group of channels among the hundreds that are available. Conceived as the agent of change in the TV industry, has it now served its purpose?

It’s Monday morning, 10.30am, British Summer Time, just, and the Tories are gifting (read ‘inflicting on’) us another Prime Minister.

Conferences – and not the least thematic pre- and post-conferences – are great ways to bring together scholars with similar interests, discuss common challenges and build networks for potential future collaboration.

“Now, the programme is made on film – since we can see what looks like a 35mm film camera in the chapel and the image has vertical tramline scratching of the sort you’d expect with film – but it’s in colour. That’s fine – there were television series being made in colour in the UK as early as Men, Women and Clothes in July 1956, and this is some time in the 1960s, so that’s okay.

Squid Game (2021-) is yet another successful export from South Korea, demonstrating the transnational mobility of Korean popular culture, and further cementing its status as a soft power juggernaut. The series has widely been framed in terms of neoliberalism and precarity. However, Squid Game ’s popularity has come at the expense of its mistreatment of female characters (as well as the other minority characters in the show).

It’s been said many times, not least by my PhD supervisor, that creativity loves constraint. A prompt such as Ariel Avissar’s TV Dictionary is a prime example of how working within rigid parameters can enable new discoveries about a particular media object, even one with which we consider ourselves familiar.

As it has come to Channel 4 recently, I’d like to talk about Hulu’s The Great (2020-). It’s a bit of an oddball in the current television landscape. The Great fictionalises Catherine the Great’s rise and rule over Imperial Russia; it’s an out-and-out comedy, cramming as many laughs a minute as it can get. The fantastic thing about The Great is that it works with, and even against, history.

Here you are. Here’s a cracker. One for the teenagers [1]: This is from The Grinning Man, the New Year 2009 special episode of the comedy-mystery series Jonathan Creek (1997-2016) and it shows the eponymous magic/crime consultant meeting the character who will become his new colleague for his next few cases.

‘A shortage of properly trained television workers is creating a serious skills gap and threatening to undermine the future business performance of the entire broadcasting sector’.  A quote from a recent ScreenSkills Assessment perhaps? In fact, no.  This was Maggie Brown writing in The Guardian in November 2011.