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

Is VHS essential to the study of television? This is a debate I’m currently engaged in with the institution I work for which desires to ‘upgrade’ the audio-visual facilities in teaching rooms and sees the removal of VHS as part of this. This upgrade would result in all rooms having DVD and Blu-ray players, but video would be gone;

@james_a_bennett Television production is often thought of as taking place either in the studio, on location or in the edit suite.

Released in its entirety on Netflix on December 18 ^th , 2015, the 10-episode long crime documentary, Making a Murderer – directed by Columbia University film graduates Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos – quickly became the ‘must see’ global TV hit of Christmas and the New Year.

A decade ago, Bernie Sanders and I arrived on the same plane from New York to a public event in the mid-west. We were allocated shared transport from the airport, so I spent maybe forty minutes with him. The event we were headed to was about media reform. Other speakers included Jesse Jackson, Amy Goodman, Billy Bragg (whom noone had heard of), and Phil Donahue. My friend Bob McChesney was our presiding guru.

My eyes lit up when I saw her – I’d dreamt of seeing her in the flesh since I first laid eyes on The Bridge ’s detective Saga Noren. Long, fashionably uncombed hair, ethereal beauty, flicking crumbs from her cinnamon bun off her ankle-grazing khaki military coat and leather trousers – this bewitching brunette was the ultimate Saganaut right down to her lace-up ankle boots.

It was in the November of 1989 when the first private television station in Greece transmitted its first signal and new frequencies invaded the audiovisual landscape which had been dominated by the state monopoly. This invasion was a turning point in the history of Greek television, as it was the stone that moved the stagnant waters of the strict and petrified television landscape, fostered by the state-bred system.

The BBC is under threat like never before. That seems to be the consensus about the two events of past weeks: a budget raid by the Chancellor that saddled the BBC with absorbing the £630 million cost of free TV licences for the over-75s, a seemingly hostile charter review process, kicked off with a Green Paper and the appointment of an advisory group by the new culture minister John Whittingdale.

First it was a river. Then it was a bookstore. Then it sold power drills and pen refills. Now it’s a movie studio inviting one and all to submit scripts and videos?