Author: CSTonline

I’ve always enjoyed action-adventure, especially swashbuckling action-adventure. Admittedly, though, when the BBC’s new drama The Musketeers (2014-) began last year I didn’t have high expectations. The BBC’s attempts at...

I have watched pretty much every episode of the medical reality show 24 Hours in A&E (Channel 4, 2011–). Even though much of my research happens to focus on medico-scientific discourses in contemporary television, this is a...

The Royal Television Society Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture recently broadcast on BBC4 and titled ‘Public Service Broadcasting: A House of Cards?’  reflected on the changing landscape of broadcast television in light of...

I quite often think of myself as an old-fashioned structuralist (as my 1981 essay on narrative and Coronation Street showed) and am quite embarrassed to think about the number of first year students I attempted to introduce to...

In a recent discussion about war on film and television (I probably steer discussions in this direction more often than my friends and family would like), a friend made the point that ‘war is war’.  I have been thinking about...

Last September, an interesting debate played out in the landscape of American media criticism. It was catalysed by film critic A.O. Scott’s article in the New York Times entitled ‘The Death of Adulthood in American Culture’. The...

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...

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,...

(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. They seemed...

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...

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...

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...

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...

How come Television Studies rarely discusses the roles film plays in broadcasting? After all, in its analysis of film production and distribution in the UK in 2013, the BFI Statistical Yearbook 2014 makes clear that “In terms of...

Cathy Johnson’s “Working ourselves to death” will go down in CST-history as the blog which nearly brought the system down, so heartily did it resonate with so many of us! In this piece, I want to continue the conversation about...

Originally kicked off by Steve Allen half a century ago, The Tonight Show remains iconic television. NBC’s show and format was made most famous by Johnny Carson during his run in the 60s, 70s and 80s, and subsequently infamous...