This year has seen the passing of two of the principal actors in The Avengers (ITV, 1961-69), Honor Blackman and Diana Rigg.

By Christa Lykke Christensen, member of research project Reaching Young Audiences

‘Our goal’, Ronald D. Moore wrote in the mission statement for his Battlestar Galactica (Universal 2004-9), ‘is nothing else than the reinvention of the science fiction television series’ and so did they all those involved in the production of one of the most important American television dramas.

The afternoon before my Dad died I was at the house with my kids. There was a blackout – we’d noticed because the iPad and computers stalled – but Dad hadn’t moved. There he still sat in his chair, dozing/glancing/dozing in front of the TV. “Dad, has the TV gone off”? I asked? “Oh yeah, I guess so”, he said with a smile.

DWFTH 5 revised for 2021: New call for papers–‘Histories of Women in Film and Television: Then and Now.’ A Hybrid Conference: July 10 – 11, 2021 (virtual and on-campus at Maynooth University, Kildare, Ireland) Supported by Women’s Film & Television History Network, this call for papers is made in collaboration with ‘Women and the BBC’, a special themed issue of Critical Studies in Television.

It’s become a bit of a truism that, ‘these are strange and dangerous times’. But I am not referring to Covid. I am writing this on the 29 ^th September, and we have found out that the US president is in that much debt that he cannot borrow anymore locally and is thus indebted to foreign powers. And yet, he is still president.

Our digital TV has just updated its interface, without asking us. This confirms my long-held suspicion that TV tech has just become too complicated for TV users. This is alienating viewers. Many users now concentrate on a narrow band of potential choices, or to abandon TV for other pursuits. A huge number of users, particularly in older age groups, tend to blame themselves for their ‘technological naivete’ or clumsiness.

My wife and I love elephants. They seem to be such caring, gentle creatures. And because of the shaping of their mouths behind their trunks, we graft that onto what we associate with human physiognomy and assume that they’re smiling and so that therefore these are happy animals. So we love them. We have a little elephant of our own.  Well, I say ‘our own’, but he’s a bit more of a time-share really.

Genre/Nostalgia 2021: An online film and television symposium on Wednesday 6 January 2021 Keynote speaker: Dr Kate Egan, Northumbria University: ‘Nostalgia for British Comedy’s Past: Monty Python, the 1960s and 1970s, and Fan Memories.’ Film and TV genres and nostalgia have long been intertwined. Fundamentally, both are rooted in the practice of creatively recycling and adapting modes of the past;

Issue edited by Fanny Beuré and Jules Sandeau This issue of TV/Series will focus on the relationship between stars and TV series within diverse cultural and historical contexts.

With Disney+, Apple TV+, and NBC’s Peacock joining Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Go, Hulu, Crunchyroll, ESPN+, and CBS All Access, industry observers and tech writers have declared that we now live in an era of “peak streaming TV.” Yet, even as this surfeit of services promises easy access to immense archives of video content – both past and present – it is worth asking what gaps, fissures, and fractures might exist within these collections;