October 2008 At the Quality American TV conference in Dublin back in 2004 Maire Messenger Davies highlighted a key problem in studying television: namely, the question of availability. She mentioned NBC’s critically acclaimed series I’ll Fly Away (1991-93), which lived on in memory but not in any tangible form like DVD or video.
March 2009. On July 5 2008, the National Film Theatre in London played host to a remarkable event. It was a talk given by one of the central figures in the history of British television drama, David Rose.
Making and Remaking Television Classics, 20 March 2009, University of Warwick Rachel Moseley writes: Most people have a sense of what might count, for them, as ‘classic television’. From long-running serial drama like Coronation Street , to Sunday evening dramas such as Upstairs Downstairs and Pride and Prejudice , or the nostalgic pull of 1960s children’s programming
In this short reflection on the study of television fictions, I endorse and qualify the recognition by several commentators in recent years that the boundaries between cinema and television have become blurred and require a re-visiting of key concepts.
THIS BLOG CONTAINS SPOILERS Someone once asked me “What’s the difference between apocalyptic fiction and dystopia?” I had to think about it for a bit, but then I came up with, “The world goes to hell suddenly in apocalyptic fiction and the people who remain have to deal with it. In dystopias the world has been hellish for quite some time and dealing with it has become a routine.”
On the 8th and 9th of November I had the pleasure of attending the British Promax conference with my colleague Paul Grainge as part of our AHRC-funded project on the promotional screen industries.
The BBC is currently engulfed in a crisis that has already led to the resignation of the new Director-General George Entwistle after just 7 weeks in the job. Like several previous BBC crises, this one centres around journalistic standards. The difference this time lies in the issue: the reporting (or rather not reporting) of a story involving the BBC itself.
For the past two years I’ve been the research fellow on the ‘History of Television for Women in Britain 1947-89’ project.
Yet again, the US Presidential election was a televisual one. Yet again, we were told it was not. No matter how many people follow the election cycle on TV, no matter how much time and money the campaigns spend on it, there remain internet bores/boors who won’t face facts. Their cybertarian obsessions lead them time after time—it’s actually decade after decade now—to proclaim that ‘legacy media’ are on the way out in the United States.
A scandal of some magnitude has hit the BBC over the past weeks. ITV’s Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy Savile , which aired on 3 October 2012 to some 2.44 million viewers, lifted the lid on the dark side of Sir James Wilson Vincent Savile, OBE, KCSG. For those of you that don’t know the story: Savile was a TV and radio presenter whose career spanned over fifty years.
As part of a project on multiplatform public service content, I’ve been examining the changing meanings of the term ‘multiplatform’ at the BBC. In one of my last interviews (at least for a while) at the BBC on the topic last week, I felt compelled to ask whether the meaning of multiplatform had changed so much, it was now a “dirty word”, to be avoided as much as possible.