Author: CSTonline

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...

You have to feel sorry for Broadchurch creator, Chris Chibnall. His ability to hold and manipulate the audience, demonstrated so brilliantly in series 1 of Broadchurch, seems to have deserted him and newspaper and television...

A few weeks ago, Amy Poehler and Tina Fey hosted their third Golden Globes Awards, with much being made of their long-standing, real-life friendship in the lead up to the event (see here and herefor some examples). This made me...

As part of the AHRC project, ‘Technologies of Memory and Archival Regimes: war diaries afer the connective turn’ (ref. AH/L004212/1), I have spent the last four months at The National Archives in Kew (TNA).   The project...

  Television’s Daily Bread There will be different reasons for why the routine of viewing television will momentarily leave our day-to-day lives. Major rituals and life events may require of us to turn it off, to be...

One of my new year’s resolutions this year is to improve my work-life balance. It is with some irony, then, that I find myself finishing this blog on the second Sunday in January, particularly considering that I started writing...

I’ve never been a saint.  I’m sure if anyone wanted to get me on my past, they very well could. Bill Cosby, 1989 (Collins 141) The unconscious mind can be both friend and foe.  It sometimes is the source of strange and wondrous...

Video Playtime, Ann Gray’s account of the domestic use of the VCR in the 1980s, was one of the great cultural studies accounts to come out of early television studies. In describing and analysing ‘the gendering of a leisure...

Towards the end of last year I had the privilege of taking part in a panel on LGBT characters in science fiction television at the BFI Southbank as part of their Days of Fear and Wonder season. Chaired by Emma Smart the...

… is the kind of television I ought to disapprove of. It is ‘drama run by the costume department,’ as Rupert Murdoch once said of the ruling-class fantasies of grandiose UK period fiction. It is mostly about ethnically-closed,...

When Robin Williams died in August there was an outpouring of grief, disbelief and finally, celebration. While in recent years Williams’ television work may have been overshadowed by his film appearances (including academy award...

The difference between commemoration of the fiftieth anniversaries of Doctor Who last year and The Wednesday Play in 2014 could hardly have been more marked. I feel as though I have lived through general elections that got less...

Now that I’m moving between part-time academic posts in three countries, I’m lucky, needy, or nerdy enough, to look for, accept, or leap at short-term opportunities. This week I’m a visitor at the Advanced Cultural Studies...

In the most recent episode of Matt Berry’s sitcom Toast of London, the titular thespian demonstrated a lamentable (though characteristic) disengagement from his profession by several times announcing: ‘I never watch the...