A ‘Billy Fluff’ is a moment in Doctor Who from 1963 to 1966 when William Hartnell, the lead actor playing the Doctor, ‘fluffs’ or blows one of his lines. Some are legendary, including ‘anti-radiation gloves’ and ‘cinders floating about in Spain’. But a collection of them on YouTube is only six minutes long.
British history is full of strange and disturbing noises. They rebound and echo, providing a constant reminder to future generations of the violent noises of the past- signalling colonial atrocities, and the stifled disenfranchised voices of class and gender inequalities.
In this blog post I want to challenge the separation of ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ paratexts as divergent trajectories within what Jonathan Hardy (2011) has named the ‘commercial intertextuality’ of contemporary television series. To do this, I’m going to respond to Jason Mittell’s recent post for In Media Res where he suggests exploring the affective, rather than purely interpretive, meanings that paratexts generate.
I seem to be thinking about the past lately—my last post, in fact, dealt with reboots, restarts, and remakes—and this month has me traveling back there again, this time through a “rabbit hole” at the back of a diner or, more appropriately, through one in my phone and TV. (Am I preoccupied, or am I responding to a cultural preoccupation? This recent article from USA Today suggests that it’s the latter.
Question: What do the popular sci-fi television series’ Farscape (1999-2003) and Orphan Black (2013 – ) have in common? Answer: Neither featured in my undergraduate class ‘Science Fiction on Television’, but I can explain – I think.
Since 2015 various news outlets have been reporting plans for Steven Spielberg to create a new television adaptation of the 1932 novel Brave New World and since 2013 a film adaptation by Ridley Scott has been in the pipeline. The book by Aldous Huxley was last adapted for TV in 1980 and filmed in 1998.
Somewhat tentatively , I set off for the gigantic 2016 Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference in Atlanta in early April.
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.
It’s been one of those days. The Christmas holidays had been lurking around the corner, and finally I had some free time on my hands, between the formal end of the academic calendar of 2015, and the big celebration rush that we tend to throw ourselves into, meeting up with family and long-time friends.Free time – priceless. And somewhere, somehow, I had come across an announcement that a new SciFi show would be airing on SyFy;
I feel I should start this blog with an admission: I am a lifelong X-Files fan. I first watched it at the age of 12, and over 20 years later I’m as obsessed with Mulder and Scully as I was then. The news last year that the series was coming back for a 6 episode event season was met with a combination of excitement and consternation by fans (me included). Would Season 10 pick up where I Want to Believe (2008) left off?
