‘Television is not dead’ was one of the opening statements of John T. Caldwell at the biennial ECREA Television Section conference Redefining Televisuality: Programmes, Practices, Methods . The conference took place from the 25th to the 27th October 2023 at the Film University Babelsberg in Germany. Experts from all over the world traveled to Babelsberg to discuss the overall topic of change in television.
Two weeks into my MA, I attended a conference.
Nineties comedy/crime drama Due South (multiple international production partners, 1994-1998;
Thirty years ago today [1], I made my first visit to an amazing place. A place that – like one of my favourite fictional concepts brought to me via the modern miracle of television – is bigger on the inside than the outside.
It is not uncommon for bands from outside the US to find success in ‘breaking’ the US market through becoming famous in New York City (Edwardson 2008 on Canadian musicians who have done so). This can be thought to be a corollary to the so-called ‘American Dream’ coupled with the Protestant Work Ethic (PWE) and the fallacious belief in a meritocracy, in which anyone who works hard enough can attain success in the form of upward mobility (Fisher
As a current master student at the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf, I’ve come to realize that my previous bachelor’s studies in communication offered limited exposure to television studies.
As a first year MA student of media studies at Film University Babelsberg, I recently had the privilege of attending the ECREA Television Section Conference Redefining Televisuality: Programmes, Practices, Methods , October 25th to 27th in Potsdam, Germany. The conference invited researchers to critically engage and revisit the concept of Televisuality developed by John T. Caldwell.
The Reckoning is the BBC’s examination of the life and criminality of broadcaster Jimmy Savile (played by Steve Coogan), which aired over the last fortnight on BBC1 (available on iPlayer). It is billed as a ‘Factual drama examining the crimes of Jimmy Savile, with testimony from survivors.’ and that is an accurate description, but its existence is puzzling. Who is it for and why was it made?
I sometimes feel like a bit of an imposter. As women working in academia, we probably all feel a little like this. With me, that feeling is also because being an academic is my second career; my first was as a programme maker for the BBC, something I loved doing for twenty years.
Like many people, I binge-watch horror films or movie franchises in the run-up to Halloween. With the release of Saw X this October , I decided to revisit the series’ nine predecessors that belong to the wave of ‘torture porn’ films popularised in the 2000s. While many franchises employ serial storytelling, I was struck by how Saw felt more like ‘TV’ than other horror series I’ve watched over the years. Fig.
