It’s been just over nine months since the UK entered its first COVID-19 lockdown (time flies when you’re stuck indoors…) With significant restrictions on how we can spend our leisure time, it’s not surprising to hear that we are watching more television than we have done in years. TV studies scholars rejoice – we’ve never been more relevant!
17th November 2020 marked the fortieth anniversary of the death of 20-year-old University of Leeds student Jacqueline Hill. She was the thirteenth and final woman to be killed in the notorious so-called ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ murders that took place in the north of England over five and a half years from 1975 to 1980. It is a series of events which has cast a murderously misogynist shadow over the cultural history of 1970s Britain.
By Eva Novrup Redvall As analyzed in the recent research project “What Makes Danish TV Drama Series Travel?” certain kinds of television fiction from small nations cross borders more easily than others.
The annual MIPCOM market was organized in mid-October as a virtual event. We composed a summary on what is happening in the TV industry at the moment: 1) COVID-19 transformed television for good The topic that we could not avoid even in MIPCOM was the global pandemic and how it has affected the television industry.
How might we describe and evaluate non-human “performances” in television fiction? I blogged a while ago about the performances by puppets and machines in Thunderbirds (ITV 1965-66) and wrote a chapter (Bignell 2019) about them and other non-human actors.
Writing in April 2020, Joke Hermes and Annette Hill note that audiences turned to television during the coronavirus pandemic “because of its particular affordances: its affective, material and ontological elements which become central in lockdown Culture” (2020: 656). There are clear links between the pandemic experience, media texts, and our sense of what sociologist Anthony Giddens calls ontological security (Giddens 1991), which “arises out
Towards the end of April — into what we can now call Lockdown 1.0 as Ireland has recently entered Lockdown 2.0 (The Remix) — the smash hit Normal People was unleashed onto Irish screens. The BBC/Hulu production, based on the best-selling novel by Sally Rooney, was released all at once in the UK and the US a few days earlier making it prime binge watch material.
I have been indulging in crime lately; crime on TV to be precise. I have noticed a few academic friends have been doing the same too. It must be a go-to topic during times of uncertainty and change.
“Disregard the universal. Pursue the trivial, preferably sideways. Truth is never on the main road.
When BritBox was announced, many wondered what impact it would make. Unless it offered something beyond the freely accessible programmes on BBC iPlayer and ITV Hub, what incentive would people have to start subscribing to another streaming platform? As someone with an interest in archive television, streaming services have offered little to appeal to my tastes.
