Somewhat tentatively , I set off for the gigantic 2016 Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference in Atlanta in early April.

I’m enjoying watching the Women’s Twenty20 World Cup on television in Australia, where I spend seven weeks a year mentoring junior faculty and giving guest lectures when professors want to escape Perth, elude the responsibility of entertaining the great unwashed, or save their souls from preparing one more PowerlessPointless slideshow because today we are all 1970s art historians who just lurv Malevich.

In the current febrile atmosphere of the debate about whether the UK should be “in” or “out” of Europe, it is interesting to look back at how TV has shown and shaped our relationships with other countries.

Channel 4’s recent foray into foreign-language television drama, Deutschland 83 , highlights a preoccupation of contemporary culture, and of contemporary television, with identity. The mediation of this theme/meme through popular television in particular has taken many dramatic and representational forms.

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.

Liz Giuffre’s earlier blog ‘From Ramsay Street, With Love’ starts with an apology and ends with an assurance that Australians know that long-running soap Neighbours is ‘a bit embarrassing and a bit backward’. As a Scottish fan of the soap, I read her blog with fascination.

Stock characters in entertainment television are well known to all of us: the wise old man, the nurturing mother, and the rebellious teenager evoke images in our mind, accompanied by a set of character traits and flaws. They are stereotypical depictions of societal roles, which help us navigate through the story and set up certain expectations.

As I write, I’m on the road in Colombia from Barranquilla (see this impressive citizen journalist seeking to enter Shakira’s home there) to Cartagena de Indias, which Francis Drake briefly captured from the Spanish in 1586.

Spying on Spies was an international conference held in London over 3-5 September 2015, organised collaboratively by myself and Toby Manning (Open University).  The aim was to bring together a diverse array of international research on the spy thriller, one of the defining popular genres of the 20 ^th and early 21 ^st centuries which has provided an alternative lens onto broader cultural and geopolitical shifts

Mapping medical television is a complicated task.