Last Saturday I went to a day-long celebration of the official launch of colour TV on BBC1 and ITV, which happened 50 years ago on 15 November 1969.

My last blog for CSTonline (a response to Toby Miller’s first blog of this academic year) talked about my experiences of moving to America and setting up a new life.  Whereas Toby hadn’t quite got wired up for TV, I had, but that still didn’t stop me bemoaning the loss of familiar UKTV and bellyaching about how difficult it was to negotiate the amount of channels available to me in the US. ‘Spoilt brat’ some might say.

“Seven,” sighed the post-graduate admissions tutor in the campus corridor. This integer clearly caused unhappiness. I didn’t know if it was an irrational hatred of odds in general or primes in particular, or bad life experiences with samurai, brides or brothers. “The average number of people likely to read a postgraduate dissertation,” they added, specifying the cause of their disenchantment.

Factual television, as an academic area of interest, has become quite vogue. Not content, merely to look on from afar and research a variety of factual TV programming, some academics have decided to take part in some of the said programmes.

‘And we are LIVE… Hello from Europe, hello from the ECREA Television Studies Section’. I think we should make more of a song and dance of it, don’t you? When I originally came across TV Studies in 1998, I don’t think much European Television Studies did yet exist.

David came in, and what you had was long-form storytelling. Characters that were nuanced, stories that were nuanced, that required your attention and required you to follow it. Nothing was wrapped up at the end of one episode or one hour. It continued. It was sort of like a novel. I think it’s a visual novel – the way he looked at it. People look at television, and you see the lead character, and you think that’s the protagonist.

“There are only two kinds of people in this world. Those who hear the music and those who don’t.”  So says Trevor Chaplin as he places another of his beloved jazz LPs on the turntable in the concluding instalment of Alan Plater’s blissful antidote to thriller series The Beiderbecke Connection (1988). And we know he’s not just talking about jazz.

The last two years have been both luxurious and difficult. Luxurious, because the award of an AHRC ECR Research Leadership Fellowship gave me the freedom to work on a dream project. Difficult, because the slow decline and death of my father ran in parallel to that award. Sometimes – as I struggled to meet my commitments to work and family – that dream felt like a nightmare.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.   Nicky Morgan, the culture secretary, has announced to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee that she is open to replacing the BBC license fee with a Netflix-style subscription charge.

I’ve been moving a lot recently, and I’m overwhelmed by many things, not least the loss, recuperation, and further loss of television. When I left the UK for Colombia this northern summer, I was pursued by Britain’s ever-avaricious and surveillant licensing authorities, who thought I might have dared to use a television in the month between the previous document expiring and my departure.