I like old things. When I was a teenager my granddad entrusted me with my great grandfather’s fob watch, and it always gave me a thrill to think that I was holding something of (it seemed at the time) inestimable age. It was probably only manufactured in the early twentieth century, but I carried it to school with pride;

The White Paper on the future of the BBC is broadly good news for the organisation, but that’s only because the real damage has already been done. George Osborne’s budget raid cost the organisation £630 million, and led to the closure of BBC3 as a digital broadcast channel amongst other cuts.

One of the games played in the run-up to the BBC Charter renewal process (a process which is likely to be particularly brutal this time) is for critics to identify those programmes which can be used by BBC negotiators to put the Corporation in its best light, for audiences but particularly for politicians.

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.

Two things have made me think about the role of television in the current wave of disaffection from politics.

Back in December, Cathy Johnson wrote a CST blog outlining the differences between TV Online and Online TV. Where TV Online represents the extended distribution of broadcast-first programmes across online platforms, Online TV refers to the way the overall television service uses both internet and television to make and distribute content that cannot be accomplished via traditional broadcasting practices.

So what was special about Monday 15 ^th February (apart from being the day after Valentines day)?   Answer: it was the last day that BBC 3 was on air.   From Tuesday 16 ^th the channel was only available online.

It’s been over a year since I took up my post as Lecturer in Media Theory at the University of Salford, so I thought that this week I might say a little something about the gleaming edifice in which I now live and work: MediaCityUK. No, that’s not a typo; there is no space between ‘Media’ and ‘City’, and if you think there should be you are simply displaying your ignorance. We who operate at the heart of the media know best.

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.

Christmas is long gone and some of its televisual pleasures have been explored in the CST blogs by Kenneth Longden (https://cstonline.net/bbc-christmas and https://cstonline.net/sherlock-abominable) and Lorna Jowett (https://cstonline.net/not-so-cosy). But one Christmas special which began on Boxing Day on BBC1 still lingers on. Dickensian (Red Planet Pictures) made the usual Christmas use of a Charles Dickens’