This time last year I spent a fascinating day at the BBC with my colleague Paul Grainge interviewing members of staff responsible, in various ways, for BBC iPlayer. Whenever I interview TV practitioners the conceptual frameworks...
Read MoreI’ll always remember my initial reaction the first time I watched Absolutely Fabulous (BBC, 1992-2012). Edina Monsoon (played by co-creator Jennifer Saunders) and Patsy Stone (played by former model and co-star Joanna Lumley)...
Read MoreNetwork’s 12-disc collection ITV 60: Celebrating Sixty Years of ITV is a curious exercise. A compilation of 60 ITV programmes to mark the channel’s sixtieth anniversary, its selections derive from three separate sources. The...
Read MoreSo here’s a list of show titles for you: The X-Files, Twin Peaks, Prison Break, The A-Team, Hart to Hart, Gilmore Girls, Star Trek, Full House, and Magyver. Looking at it, you might think that this was a catalog of DVD box sets...
Read MoreAs I write, I’m on the road in Colombia from Barranquilla (see this impressive citizen journalist seeking to enter Shakira’s home there) to Cartagena de Indias, which Francis Drake briefly captured from the Spanish in 1586....
Read MoreWith recent debates and discussions surrounding the government’s Green Paper and the BBC’s Charter review (how the BBC should be funded; whether it distorts the market; if it should be self-regulated; and so on.) I have found it...
Read MoreProviding a certain sense of symmetry, my first blog of the academic year returns to the same theme I examined way back in July, when I looked at options for bringing ‘old’ TV into the digital age. Earlier this month saw the...
Read MoreBeginning with the young single mother Nancy in ‘The Empty Child’ (2005) Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who stories have often included strongly written female characters. His creation of female roles reached new levels of variety and...
Read More
This article is the result of a recent, but brief conversation with Matt Hills on Facebook, where...
Read MoreI am long overdue a new television set. To my embarrassment, my television set is second hand, occasionally cuts out and sits atop an ugly prefabricated television stand that clashes with the surrounding 1950s-era furniture. I...
Read MoreAugust 11, 2015 is the day Pretty Little Liars (2010-) unmasked ‘A’, a day five years in the making: (Spoiler) ‘A’ is CeCe Drake (Vanessa Ray) on PLL. I write about this reveal not just from a personal investment in the show or...
Read More’ve spent what little time I’ve had recently on the ADAPT TV History project trawling through the BBC Internet blog on topics to do with innovation and social media (I say what little time I have, as for heads of department like...
Read MoreAs Halloween came and went, various images of costumes circulated on social media. One of my favourites showed a mini-Predator with the caption ‘Not every girl wants to be a princess.’ My first response was to laugh in...
Read MoreA few months ago the LA Times ran a piece entitled ‘Women at the CW work to keep sexual violence off their shows’. It detailed the discussions of the ‘Running the Show: The Women Executive Producers of the CW’ panel held at The...
Read MoreIt was a quiet TV night and New Tricks (2003 – 2015) was coming to an end. In the Cold Case office, the three police detectives, brought out of retirement, and their younger boss were solving the case. They were reporting on the...
Read More
On July 18, 2015, Lena Dunham shared the following diagnosis for the title character from Daria...
Read More
Mapping medical television is a complicated task. Not only because of the ubiquity of...
Read MoreThe doctoral thesis is the most problematic aspect of academic endeavour, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. Unlike the sciences, where a doctoral student is typically part of a team attached to a research...
Read MoreMapping medical television is a complicated task. Not only because of the ubiquity of medically themed programmes, or because of the generic, stylistic and formal hybridity that characterises them, but also because, for some...
Read More
(Cat)Fishing for Love Catfish: The TV Show (MTV, 2012-) is a reality programme based on the...
Read MoreIn this post, I want to explore television programming. Not the kind of programming we might typically associate with TV (i.e. the content, or the act of commissioning and scheduling) but the sort of programming that happens...
Read More
It has been said that we live in a time of monsters. Within the horror genre, these monsters can...
Read More‘Remember the Red Indian. When he saw the first steam train, his savage mind thought it an illusion, too.’ Thus begins Doctor Who in 1963 when two teachers Ian and Barbara enter a police box and swiftly find themselves...
Read MoreThe Germans. Among my ancestors. The bad people who tried to bring down Greek radicals. The good people who welcomed Syrian sufferers. The bad people who tried to deceive the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)....
Read MoreThe last weekend in September saw a buzzing festival of television organised by the Radio Times on the green opposite Hampton Court Palace. There were a number of massive tents (including the Eric Tent and the Ernie Tent),...
Read More