What do the following programmes have in common?

As this goes to press (can we say that about online materials?), series four of Line of Duty is about to commence transmission in its new Sunday evening slot. I must admit I was slow coming to this particular party; when I saw the first series being advertised in a Radio Times feature back in 2012 my response was along the lines of ‘Crivens!

When I moved from the UK to Ireland in 2015/16 my transition in terms of the availability of television was relatively easy. Given that many of the same channels, subscription packages and streaming services span both the UK and Ireland, it felt more that my television viewing was enhanced by the re-introduction of Irish terrestrial broadcast channels such as RTE 1 &

Having recently returned to work after several weeks off work because of anxiety and clinical depression, it seems appropriate to write about a ‘trending’ topic: mental health, mental illness, its representations in popular media, and how all of these affect staff and students in universities. I am referring here to my own experience working in a UK institution of HE but I’m sure some aspects of the situation apply elsewhere.

It was a bold scheduling move on the part of ITV, the UK’s main commercial television channel. Shifting the nightly news programme to make way for Britain’s latest attempt at a US-style late night talk show was always going to be risky.

I finally got around to watching the new version of Roots (if you haven’t seen it yet, episodes 2-4 are still available on the IPlayer). The series, even in its new version, still feels monumental: it evidences just how rare it still is to see history told from any other point of view than that of a white, heterosexual man. Unfortunately, despite this feeling of observing television history, I also found myself being quite disappointed.

Forgive me if I am wrong, but I had thought that Higher Education was for adults, albeit young ones. On the pages of CSTonline we have, from time to time, talked about the problem of teaching TV Studies at University.

I don’t have much time for WikiLeaks or its narcissist-in-chief. Anyone surprised by their revelations (consider, you know, the history of the US government domestically and internationally since, oh, 1776) or his conduct (q.v. Julian Assange v. Swedish Prosecution Authority) is naive in the extreme.

Contemporary media culture seems to suggest that it is unacceptable for a woman to look her age if she is over twenty-five. Apart from the flood of anti-aging products and procedures advertised to ever younger audiences, another key indicator for this trend can be found in the female faces presented to us in popular television programmes.

I blogged last year for CSTonline about how shared conceptions of childhood facilitated links between television institutions and audiences across Europe, in case of the children’s documentary series If You Were Me (BBC 1971-75). This blog follows up with some examples of how networks of borrowing and collaboration around Europe underpinned children’s animation programmes from the 1960s to the 1980s.