I’m sure that at a certain point people are going to get bored of me worrying at the question of what and who television history is for (if they aren’t already). Speaking as someone who occasionally describes themselves as a television historian, you may see this as a form of existential angst, a near-obsessive need to examine and justify the thing that I spend the majority of my day doing.

It’s suddenly a good time for documentary. The annual Sheffield Festival is about to kick off; ITV shows the latest in the 7-Up series ( 56-Up … can it really be that long;

When I was younger, I used to plan my weeks around those Sunday night episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man .  After all, this was back in the days before VCRs, DVRs, and internet downloads, when “Must See TV” took on an entirely different meaning.  If you missed your favorite show, you were pretty much in the dark until the summer reruns.

Like any socialist who has lived where I have during Rupert Murdoch’s hegemony, I’ve taken immense delight these past months in his public humiliation over phone tapping and much, much more. Best of all, I finally understand one of my formative educational experiences.

As I write this, the seconds are ticking away towards the first live show of BBC’s surprise ratings hit, The Voice .  Locked in a battle with ITV’s Britain’s Got Talent , *The Voice *is proving that Simon Cowell’s rule over Saturday night primetime TV is slowly being eroded.

The recent attention given to the various troubles associated with the Murdoch media empire, not to mention anxieties about the continued expansion of new media giants like Facebook and Google has had the effect, perhaps, of slightly occluding the workings of more traditional state-funded national broadcasters, whose power in part accrues from their proximity (even at the length of a long arm) to the body of the nation state, an entity whose

Ten years ago, I published a Television A-Z (Miller, 2002). A cute conceit, I thought, and one likely to attract attention. It didn’t. Complete failure. Hopeless joke, Toby. I tried revised versions a couple of times (Miller, 2004 and 2010), with identical results.

SP – Steven Peacock  JJ – Jason Jacobs SP: The recent news of Luck’s cancellation, cited as due to the death of three horses on the show, leads us to the race sequences. The death of animals in unnatural circumstances, especially within the controlled arena of the film set is perplexing at best, reprehensible at worst.

So Mad Men is coming to these shores next week? I should be glad, of course I should. The return of one of the best shows to come out of America since The Sopranos should be celebrated. In New York, the fifth season has apparently been greeted with themed shows and parties, people dressed in 60s garb, smoking cigarettes and drinking whisky sours. After a hiatus of 17 months Mad Men is, no doubt, going to be under much scrutiny.

SP: I’d like to start, if I may, with the most immediately arresting and confusing element of Luck , one which has been highlighted by plenty of reviewers and critics in the UK: that of its narrative and language. Many have commented on the difficulty of following the story and understanding the performers’ delivery of dialogue.

BBC4 is featuring interviews at the moment, examining this most basic taken-for-granted of TV. They’re doing the inevitable extracts series ; rescreening samples from the archives ; putting up classics on their website ; getting interviewers to interview each other (Mark Lawson does Terry Wogan for instance); and even showing a series by David Frost.