Last week I spent three wonderful and intellectually stimulating days at the Forgotten Television Drama conference;

The promenade at Scarborough. A ghostly and malevolent female figure appears by the seafront, cloaked in a sari. The apparition of mysterious brine accompanies her presence and the art-deco seafront is covered in mysterious shells.

I’m in the grip of politics fever. I can hardly concentrate; I want to know what is happening. Less than one week to go to the general election in the UK, and the two main political parties are neck and neck.

So, the other night, I spent somewhere in the neighborhood of half an hour just channel surfing—not watching anything in particular, just scrolling through the channel guide.  If I actually surfed and had been surfing out on a beach somewhere, I might have just been getting started at that point.

Dear Britain, On behalf of Australia, I’m really sorry about Neighbours. Honestly, we had no idea that a little soapie based in a fictional place outside Melbourne would go for so long.

** ** As March wore on and the end of term approached, I was preparing a ‘taster’ teaching session for an upcoming post-applicant day. This is an open day for prospective university students who have already applied and been offered a place. The aim is to give them a flavour of what the teaching on the course will be like, and so staff like myself offer an hour long seminar.

Hello darkness, my old friend I’ve come to talk with you again Because a vision softly creeping Left its seeds while I was sleeping And the vision that was planted In my brain still remains Within the sound of silence   Simon And Garfunkel – Sounds Of Silence      Listen.

Easter being the time of resurrection, I spent part of the break uploading to YouTube some of the programmes I produced for Channel 4 in the 1980s and 1990s. So there is now a Large Door channelfor our moribund independent production company, with a selection from the hundred or so programmes we produced.

(TV that just didn’t get it right…) Medical television is subversive. Because it touches upon questions that are themselves subversive, divisive, invasive (like many of the diagnostic, therapeutic, or preventive practices of medicine), it touches upon questions that, like television itself, are both perennial and ephemeral, and haunt cultural practice, economy, and policy-making.

*This interview was edited for clarity.  It was conducted via phone with e-mail followups. Did you always know you wanted the content that the Gogglebox cast watched to be varied, that mixture of everything from nature shows to the news to party political broadcasts? Yeah, I try each week to include a good mix of drama, documentary, entertainment and news.

No, I’m not planning to write about *Goggle Box * -although I’m constantly struck by the contrast between the high-pitched engagement of the sofa-sitters (after all it did win the 2014  BAFTA award for ‘constructed factual’ programmes) and the research conducted by Peter Collet for the IBA back in the 1980s.