Even before its first episode was transmitted in April last year, The Undateables (Channel 4, 2012- ) polarised opinion.

I’m not a great sports fan. I enjoy the Olympics, tennis and darts when they happen to be on the telly, but I’ve never suffered the agonies and ecstasies of loyally supporting a particular team or following a specific sport. That is until I discovered Formula One.  I’m not sure what it was about Formula One that drew me in a few years ago.

Ricky Gervais’ sitcom Derek concluded its first season around the time Michael Haneke’s Amour won the Oscar for best foreign language film, and my viewing of both overlapped in a way that made comparison perhaps a bit more obvious than it otherwise would be. At first glance these two figures could not seem more different: on the one hand Gervais – portly comedy innovator who (along with lanky co-writer

I was surprised to hear from the editor of CSTonline that no one had yet covered the topic of this week’s blog, the HBO comedy drama series Girls (2012-), created by and starring Lena Dunham. Surprised because the series, following the lives of a group of white, middle-class women in their twenties who live in New York City, has been met with both a huge amount of critical acclaim and

Who says that hearing voices is a bad thing?  As far as my television viewing habits go, I’ve been hearing them more frequently as of late, or, at least, I’ve been hearing those voice-overs that continue to characterize and add character to so many television shows.

Today’s factual TV is all about formats: repeatable, exportable templates that can generate multiple episodes in a multitude of markets. Thanks to excellent collections of case studies like Tasha Oren and Sharon Sharaf’s Global Television Formats, we can now understand the dynamics of adaptation from market to market. But what makes a successful format in the first place?

At a Royal Television Society event in February, Peter Bazalgette (formerly Creative Director of Endemol, latterly Chair of English National Opera and about to take up a new role as Chair of Arts Council England) interviewed Maria Miller MP (Secretary of State forCulture Media and Sport) about television.

In a previous post for CST I began thinking about the question of multiplatform quality.

So what will be the future of the internet? Is it a glorious new frontier that can never become a border, an ever-expanding sphere of meaning that is generated permissively and received chaotically? Or is it an increasingly controlled domain, centralized not only by state fiat but corporate advertising and consumer animation? One answer to these questions lies in an unlikely area: football on television.

In the past year as researcher on the Warwick and De Montfort Universities AHRC project A History of Television for Women in Britain (1947-89) I’ve been thinking a lot about women and situation comedy, and watching a lot of women in situation comedy.

By the time this blog is published, Utopia will have finished its six episode run on Channel 4. If Poliakoff’s Dancing on the Edge was launched with one kind of hype (see Stephen Harper’s blog), Utopia was surrounded by hype of a different nature.