I wasn’t going to write another blog about diversity—or the lack of it—in contemporary television. But when Viola Davis became the first woman of colour to win the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, during the same week that I met our new cohort of students, I changed my mind.
Daily Show (Image: Liz Giuffre) Jon Stewart’s work on The Daily Show has been an amazing international media ambassador for America. It’s been a token, yes, but proof that there is more substance and nuance to the global media powerhouse than Hollywood might otherwise have us believe.
Television scholars of my generation tend to have a reflex towards medium specificity, a desire to establish what it was about television that made it television. That was useful in the days when we were trying to emerge from a range of disciplines which informed our work – sociology, drama, history and English for example as well as a nascent and equally trenchant film studies.
I am at the end of my third month of sick leave after suffering an acute, stress-induced, asthma attack at the beginning of February, which resulted in an ambulance ride into A&E and an 8-day stay in hospital.
I should probably state at the outset that this blog is not affiliated in any way with the BBC’s current campaign encouraging the nation to ‘get creative’ with all things digital, though byte-sized technology and the Corporation are very much my theme.
What connects a ménage a cinque in Edwardian England, lesbian salons in 1920s Paris, finger snapping and cannibalism? The answer is the harpsichord.
The BBC is under threat like never before. That seems to be the consensus about the two events of past weeks: a budget raid by the Chancellor that saddled the BBC with absorbing the £630 million cost of free TV licences for the over-75s, a seemingly hostile charter review process, kicked off with a Green Paper and the appointment of an advisory group by the new culture minister John Whittingdale.
In 2011, the BBC’s social media guidance was simply “don’t do anything stupid”, equally Channel 4 adopt an approach of ‘if you wouldn’t say it on air, don’t post it online’ (Broadcast, 23/02/12). Yet as the recent ‘Queen has died’ (June, 2015) Twitter blunder by BBC journalist Ahment Khawaja reveals, in which the journalist mistook a ‘behind the scenes’ preparation for the inevitable event, those working in broadcast
Did you enjoy 1864 (2014)? I sure did. That’s because I watched it on fast-forward. I am not sure I should admit this on a forum dedicated to all things television and I am slightly embarrassed. But more of my red ears of shame later. 1864 is not the only programme through which I tend to zoom. Downton Abbey (2010-2014) got the fast-forward treatment.
Elke Weissmann starts, David Leventes Palatinus continues. Please feel free to chip in. A few years ago my wonderful supervisor, Christine Geraghty, asked me what my experience was of speaking to other academics about television. My experience was fine – people seemed interested and polite. They spoke about programmes that they enjoyed and compared their experiences to mine.
