Cathy Johnson and Karen Boyle’s recent blog posts on Working Ourselves and Others to Death have generated an animated and, in my eyes, helpful debate that has also allowed me to take stock on where some of my colleagues and myself are in terms of our working patterns.
We’re fortunate in television studies. The exclusively formal, stylistic, and ideological attention paid to texts in literary studies has never been deemed sufficient in our field—the immensely social nature of TV, like cinema, has largely militated against such reductionism. Endless moral panics about learning, lust, and lawlessness have meant that technologies, audiences, and regulations have been necessary components of our agenda.
(A re-introduction to the Eye tracking the Moving Image Research Group) I have a painterly confession to make. When I saw eye tracking visualisations for the first time they flooded me with affecting impressions.
To write his television serial Foyle’s War (2002–2015), Anthony Horowitz armed himself with history. Spinning tales based on actual events in England during and a couple of years after World War II, he reminds us that life is the best friend fiction ever had.
There have been few DVD box sets that I have enjoyed going through so much as volumes 2-4 of the Network Look-Back on 70’s Telly anthologies, which collectively run to 48 different half-hour shows, allowing the viewer investigate almost the full range of 1970s ITV children’s drama (Volume 1 is devoted to pre-school shows). They really do seem to have everything in them, the only omissions that I can find being anything made by Southern,
I am on a big search – and it will be a long and protracted search – for a new meaning. Not of life (well, that as well, but that’ll last even longer), but of what it means to watch television. Yes, I have discovered doubt: I no longer trust my old instincts. And so I will spend 2015 – this is at least one of my new year’s resolutions – on thinking through what it means to watch television today.
We’ve all seen One Born Every Minute, 24 Hours in A&E, Educating Essex (or Yorkshire), The Hotel… But how many people know that these are ‘fixed rig productions’? And how many know what that actually means, beyond the fact that they have an unholy amount of robotic cameras festooned around the place?
After my last blog on academic work culture almost brought the CST site down I was going to resort to less fraught ground today and write about the brilliance of Claudia Winkleman.
It is perhaps a little cheeky to borrow a blog title from Robert Graves’ autobiography, but after all the complimentary things I’ve said about I, Claudius over the years, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind. This will be a relatively short piece, as I am currently mired in essay marking, while also preparing a lecture for next week.
Tony Ageh, the BBC’s one original thinker, spoke at Royal Holloway earlier this week. Those expecting a standard defence of the ‘BBC licence fee’ were in for a shock. He proposed a complete rethinking of the concept for the digital age. “We used to be broadcast beings. We are now internet beings. We should ask what the Licence Fee buys us when we, as citizens, are under attack from all sides.
