The weeks surrounding the launch of the second season of the STARZ drama series Outlander – broadcast in the US on 9 April and released to Amazon Prime UK the day after – saw a spate of online journalism and fans swooning over the images released of Claire Randall/Fraser (Caitriona Balfe) and Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan) dressed in extravagant period costumes.

Two things have made me think about the role of television in the current wave of disaffection from politics.

Several of my previous blogs have dealt with female villains on television, and have mentioned the phenomena (by no means exclusive to TV) of ‘evil cleavage’. For some time I have promised myself I will write on this topic at more length, and was prompted to finally do so by some recent work I’ve been doing on older female characters and actors, and by several news items in the last few months about aging female actors.

Christmas is long gone and some of its televisual pleasures have been explored in the CST blogs by Kenneth Longden (https://cstonline.net/bbc-christmas and https://cstonline.net/sherlock-abominable) and Lorna Jowett (https://cstonline.net/not-so-cosy). But one Christmas special which began on Boxing Day on BBC1 still lingers on. Dickensian (Red Planet Pictures) made the usual Christmas use of a Charles Dickens’

Just before Christmas I was suffering from ‘Flue, we had just lost our third pet in a year and I was not at my best in a number of other ways. I arose from my sick bed mildly feverish by then and sought comfort in Television Drama. Not just any drama, but Doc. Martin (Buffalo Pictures for ITV, 2006-) for me the ultimate comfort television.

Long before the end of Christmas television viewing and schedules, broadcasters and production companies herald their new season of television viewing. It is part of that tradition where we say goodbye to the old year, and welcome in the new, and it is yet another example of how television has ingratiated itself into the rhythms of everyday life and the cultural rituals of a nation.

I expect many people complained this holiday season that there was very little to entice in the television schedules.

The Christmas television schedules have, for many years, introduced a sense of the Carnavalesque to the viewing experience. Broadcasters, programmes, and family favourites collude in temporarily suspending the ‘normal’ laws and rules of television viewing through one-off storylines, and, in some cases, subverting perceptions of seriality in acknowledgement of a collective cultural ritual.

This article is the result of a recent, but brief conversation with Matt Hills on Facebook, where we discussed the merits of the BBC’s Sherlock and fandom.

As Halloween came and went, various images of costumes circulated on social media. One of my favourites showed a mini-Predator with the caption ‘Not every girl wants to be a princess.’ My first response was to laugh in recognition. My second was to think about the kind of princess I might have wanted to be. The ones who were around in popular media when I was young were Leia and Diana Prince.