As I wind up and evaluate classes from the academic year just gone by, and start to prepare for the coming year, my thoughts turn to teaching, and in particular to teaching television. It’s always interesting in these blogs to read about other opinions, other critical ideas, other research and I guess many CST bloggers write about what most engages them.
Who would be Chair of the BBC Trust in these scandal-hit days? Not Lord Patten, who has just announced he will be off after a single four-year term, despite the awkward timing (it will coincide with both a new government and a review of the licence fee). Not that many want him to stay on, after his dismal performance over the appointment and dismissal of George Entwhistle as Director General over a torrid three months last year.
Television is a media of texture. Glass, plasma, wood, chrome, shiny aluminium and bright neon, encase and embody the circuitry, while across its programming and commercials a range of textures are given weight, depth, and quality. Television is a touching experience: it is made of inviting, sensory-loaded surfaces and sits amongst other textural furniture in the living room;
Richard Matheson (1926-2013) Voted the best vampire novel of the 20 th Century by the Horror Writers Association of America, Richard Matheson’s *I Am Legend (1954) *was revolutionary in its approach to the vampire genre and prescient of how the genre would develop in the 21 st Century. No his vampires aren’t sparkly.
You probably don’t hear it when it happens. Bobby ‘Bacala’ Baccalieri (Steve Schirripa) in ‘Soprano Home Movies’ (Episode 78 in Season 6) James Gandolfini’s death was a shocker. It came out of the blue. Late on a Wednesday afternoon, June 19, I was making small talk in a hotel meeting room when my eye glanced towards a large video screen on the side wall.
As part of my ongoing research into uses of ‘blue screen’ and the role of the television designer in ‘Golden Age’ television drama, I want to blog about an episode of a little-known ITV anthology series of the mid 1970s, Shades of Greene (Thames Television, 1975, 1976), which adopted this technique extensively over two series of televised Graham Greene short stories.
We may watch children’s television at two key, if relatively long, periods in our lives. Firstly, when we* are*children, and second if and when we have children.
For those of us watching on this side of the Atlantic, the end is now very nigh for Nashville , ABC’s female country music ensemble drama. With The Good Wife already finished for another season, More 4’sThursday night America drama slot is going to leave quite a gap in my TV schedule.
What is television? I’ve been trying to answer this question by turning to the morning papers. That’s assuming the phrase ‘morning papers’ is not a homonymous typo for ‘mourning papers.’ The Global North is obsessed with pronouncing the end of the medium, even though this is actually a boom time for the industry because of the growing number of dedicated readers in the Global South.
** ** ** (Warning: Contains Spoilers. But ones you can avoid.
In 1972, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn’t commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune.