The Germans. Among my ancestors. The bad people who tried to bring down Greek radicals. The good people who welcomed Syrian sufferers. The bad people who tried to deceive the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Angela Merkel, corporations, Germany. 2015. The Germans. As Tom Lehrer once put it, ‘We taught them a lesson in 1918, and they’ve hardly bothered us since then.’ (VIDEO CLIP NO LONGER AVAILABLE) The Germans.

The last weekend in September saw a buzzing festival of television organised by the *Radio Times *on the green opposite Hampton Court Palace.  There were a number of massive tents (including the Eric Tent and the Ernie Tent), housing events and talks by celebrities and programme makers; there were screenings, storytelling booths, book signing and hands-on activities for adults and children.

The British pre-school children’s television programme Teletubbies was made by Ragdoll Productions for BBC and first screened from 1997-2001. To my delight it was announced at the end of September that the series will return later this year, now produced by DHX Media.

It’s 2015, and from Hollywood’s Black Mass (2015) to TV’s The Americans (FX, 2013-), Halt and Catch Fire (AMC, 2014-) and Show Me a Hero (HBO, 2015) – the 1980s as an era have become one of the hottest cultural sujets de jour.

I wasn’t going to write another blog about diversity—or the lack of it—in contemporary television. But when Viola Davis became the first woman of colour to win the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, during the same week that I met our new cohort of students, I changed my mind.

Daily Show (Image: Liz Giuffre) Jon Stewart’s work on The Daily Show has been an amazing international media ambassador for America. It’s been a token, yes, but proof that there is more substance and nuance to the global media powerhouse than Hollywood might otherwise have us believe.

Television scholars of my generation tend to have a reflex towards medium specificity, a desire to establish what it was about television that made it television. That was useful in the days when we were trying to emerge from a range of disciplines which informed our work – sociology, drama, history and English for example as well as a nascent and equally trenchant film studies.

I am at the end of my third month of sick leave after suffering an acute, stress-induced, asthma attack at the beginning of February, which resulted in an ambulance ride into A&E and an 8-day stay in hospital.

I should probably state at the outset that this blog is not affiliated in any way with the BBC’s current campaign encouraging the nation to ‘get creative’ with all things digital, though byte-sized technology and the Corporation are very much my theme.

What connects a ménage a cinque in Edwardian England, lesbian salons in 1920s Paris, finger snapping and cannibalism? The answer is the harpsichord.

The BBC is under threat like never before. That seems to be the consensus about the two events of past weeks: a budget raid by the Chancellor that saddled the BBC with absorbing the £630 million cost of free TV licences for the over-75s, a seemingly hostile charter review process, kicked off with a Green Paper and the appointment of an advisory group by the new culture minister John Whittingdale.