I am keenly anticipating the simultaneous launch (in April) of three edited collections I have been working on with fellow editors Sarah Cardwell and Lucy Fife Donaldson. The books are part of a new sub-series from MUP, collectively titled ‘Moments in Television’. They derive from the parent ‘Television Series’ books about TV drama creators, a series that has been running for nearly 20 years.

Partly due to an excess of clutter and partly due to the onset of old age, I’ve recently decided to tidy up my study.  Over the years I’ve been an obsessive collector and haven’t been able to bring myself to throw stuff away.

Australians are facing a federal election soon. But first, some translations for international readers. ‘Daggy’ and ‘Pollies’ are Australianisms. “Pollie” is short for ‘Politician’. “Daggy” means uncool or unfashionable. Also short for ‘Politician’. Elections are equal parts fruitful and terrible for the television. They are fruitful because of the advertising – gloriously bad, but gloriously huge ad-spend.

When creator Adam Price created the political drama series Borgen for Danish television, premiering in 2010, no one thought that international audiences would take an interest in the political life and debates of a small Scandinavian country. As we now know, this turned out not to be the case.

This blog is an expansion on an earlier one published on In Media Res in November 2021 SPOILER ALERT

It’s the year 2021 and the UK finally seems to recognise the urgency of climate action. It seems to be everywhere: local councils declare climate emergencies and commit to net zero emission by 2030, the British government gives out funding to councils to improve walking and cycling infrastructures in order to change the way we – the average citizens – travel from A to B, and people start talking about electric vehicles and heat pumps.

I wonder how many fellow television researchers have had something published and, only when seeing it locked into the pages of a journal or a book, have realised that their thinking has already developed. Indeed, whilst television and the scholarly endeavours surrounding it are ‘to be continued…’ in perpetuity (at least, I hope so), the dominant publishing mechanisms currently at our disposal to facilitate such endeavours remain less dynamic.

The twentieth century began with utopia and ended with nostalgia. —Author, cultural theorist, and artist, Svetlana Boym (2007: 7)   It’s impossible to overstate how original the Beatles looked and sounded when they seemingly arrived out of nowhere during the early Sixties.

About two years ago on this very blog, I ruminated on the disproportionate distribution of books and television series, and while attempting to celebrate some of the very tomes that had been issued over the year, I also grumbled about many other important series that had been overlooked. ‘[W]hy can’t I get a decent book about Moonlighting (1985-1989)?’ I moaned about a third of the way down the text.

The research project ‘Reaching Young Audiences: Serial Fiction and Cross-Media Storyworlds for Children and Young Audiences’ (RYA) seeks to provide detailed knowledge about the production and reception of film, TV and online fiction for children, tweens and teens through in-depth analysis of the current strategies for creating engaging fiction for young audiences and extensive qualitative case studies of their media use.