Anniversary celebrations are being planned to mark the start of BBC radio in 1922 and Channel 4 TV in 1982 next year, as John Ellis’s blog last week discussed. But rather than celebrating a beginning, I thought I would look at the time when television stopped, after a mere three years of existence, during the Second World War.
In the introduction to *The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound (2017) , *Miguel Mera, Ronald Sadoff and Ben Winters write, ‘screen music and sound has consistently ignored aspects of process in favor of the interpretation of completed texts’ (p. 5). Such calls for analysing media production processes have been made since at least the 1980s (Maltby 1983;
**Media Journeys 2021 ** **Special Issue: Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance ** **Making Monsters: The Production of Terror ** We are seeking proposals for article contribution for a special issue in the Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance on the intersection of adaptation, special effects, and monstrosity. Monsters stalk through modern media. They are heard howling from radio, film and television.
Call for Book Proposals Cinema and Media Cultures in the Middle East Peter Lang Publishing
There’s an avalanche of anniversaries coming in 2022, a veritable tsunami of television history. The big one is the BBC’s centenary, starting with the publication of David Hendy’s The BBC: A Peoples’ History in January, and running through the year to climax in November. It’s a pity that BBC4 can no longer commission historically-informed documentaries to go with this event.
My last contribution to CST focused on the CBS True Crime programme, Murder by The Sea ( CBS , 2018- ). This was partly a result of my trawling through the variety of channels hosted by Freeview here in the UK. My intention, here, is partly to draw attention to Freeview, but also the many channels hosted by Freeview, and, to highlight channels that don’t always get scrutinised or discussed in terms of the changing landscape of
I struggle increasingly to explain to my students the basic difference between a television series and a television serial – which is a worry, because it’s a concept that underpins much of my historical teaching on narrative and genre.
Crime is one of the most prevalent and most-viewed genres on our TV screens and the best-circulating type of fiction content in Europe. Studying the attitudes of television viewers to crime shows, therefore, promises an insight into European tastes and preferences when it comes to the genre of crime, as well as finding out about attitudes towards media cultures from other countries.
‘Why publish a screenplay, when these days the finished film or TV series is so readily available? If one only thinks of them as working documents then perhaps there is little point, beyond the academic. But reading screenplays has always been as interesting to me as reading plays; an activity in its own right.’
And here we are again! And I’m still waiting for the bloody phone to ring to let me know which of the two gigs I’m up for I’ve got – if either of them comes through for me, of course. So, at the time of writing, well, beginning to write this, next week (wk beg 11 th Oct, 2021) is the (in some bits of Scotland) Scottish half term break.
A new collection on superheroes is proposed for Peter Lang. As media texts show us superheroes from around the world(s), demonstrating extraordinary abilities and living a life shaped by a moral code, how we define their iconic features and cultural impact has been the focus of much scholarly debate.