The BBC’s charter renewal is due in 2016 but traditionally the years and months beforehand are full of political jostling, public pronouncements and secret (and not so secret) lobbying.

This year has marked the 20 ^th anniversary since the death of an important British television screenwriter, Dennis Potter.

Let me come out, here, once and for all. I actually like international football. It’s interesting in a jokey kind of way. There’s some skill involved, and a good goal can take your breath away. I also like it because for most of the time it’s dead boring and you can talk to your mates.

Tony Hall has proposed a momentous change as part of his plan to take the BBC through charter renewal after next May’s general election. He has proposed that BBC production should be completely separated from BBC Broadcasting, and should lose its current guarantees of production work from BBC channels and commissioning editors.

In deciding what to blog about this week, I was met by a confluence of events.

Hotel Television Room Blues Baggage: Hotel Room Television sounds as if it might be the title of a Ryan Adam or Johnny Cash love-struck ballad. A broken-hearted boy or girl returns to their transitory space to contemplate the end, caught in the slipstream of multi-channel viewing where every station reminds them of the lover just gone.

I’m now seven months into perhaps my most ambitious viewing marathon, the complete Doctor Who cycle, watched at the rate of one episode every day.

My front-runner status to be the next Chair of the BBC Trust has been jeopardized, thanks to someone named Sebastian Coe (Lord Coe to his friends). Casting around for an explanation of this otherwise incomprehensible news, I have rejected obvious reasons, such as his being a former Tory Member of Parliament and a world-famous athlete who presided over the 2012 Olympics.

Somehow, I always find myself approaching big, multi-media conferences with a faint edge of paranoia. How will television studies fare in the context of a set-up which was originally organised around Cinema Studies and in which different kinds of work is often subject to a severe (though sometimes unspoken) hierarchy of value and importance? I guess everyone feels some version of this.

Canadian TV series Orphan Black (2013-) recently reached the end of its second season. The series airs on Space in Canada, BBC America in the US and BBC Three in the UK, as well as in other countries, and has been a flagship show for all three named networks. Orphan Black had an increase in audience share during the second season.

One of the rewards of teaching first-year undergraduates is that you are constantly forced to challenge your own perceptions about the changing nature of contemporary media and society. This year, I noticed a step change in the degree to which a sizeable minority of students seem disconnected from the idea of public service broadcasting in general, and from the BBC in particular.