The recent General Election in the US shocked politicians, pollsters, political scientists, and progressives alike. How did two absurd people end up as the principal parties’ picks , and why will the most ridiculous coiffure since Jefferson’s enter the White House in January?
(First published on December 14th 2012) Image from AMC.com. I am watching Walking Dead on the small flat screen television that sits beside my computer.
Since CSTonline was last published at the end of June we have seen some seismic political shifts – the UK has voted to leave Europe in a total Brexit shocker, we have another female Prime Minister (let’s hope that’s all she has in common with the other one) and the US has just voted in a reality-TV star for President. Who would have thought that such huge changes would happen in a quarter of a year?
Why has the television business made it so hard for its users to find something they want to watch? It used to be so easy. You turned on the TV and instantly there was something, if you didn’t like that you could hop from one channel to another… or use the handy scheduling grid to find what was on when. There is no equivalent for the digital age.
Watching the seventeenth series of Big Brother UK, broadcast on Channel Five this summer, and perusing the headlines about the show which proliferate on news sites like Metro , the Mirror and Mail Online , one could be forgiven for forgetting that in 2010, Big Brother UK, the reality television phenomenon of the twenty-first century, was pronounced dead.
Ken Loach is surely the patron saint of British film and television studies – venerated for his early work with Tony Garnett and others for making British television drama a national event (fig 1); admired for the prizes (and finance) he has won in Europe; and respected for the way he continues to make films in his own way and following his own conscience into his eighties.
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.
During a recent trip to New York City my TV nerd colleague and I attended two show tapings. If you never have done this, I can highly recommend it – the TV lover’s equivalent of looking inside someone’s bathroom cabinet to see what makes them tick. Not that I’ve ever done that last thing – seriously- honestly. Well, maybe.
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015-) is a Netflix comedy produced by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, and follows the life of 29-year old Kimmy Schmidt (Ellie Kemper) in New York City after her rescue from an underground cult.
