Author: CSTonline

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...

The objects of two of my fandoms – Doctor Who and The Archers – have been in the news in the past few months because of cast changes. Tom Graham, who has played Tom Archer in the BBC radio soap for 17 years, took to Twitter last...

As a fan of the teen drama series genre, I’ve been following E4’s recent offering, Glue (2014), with keen interest. Set in an English rural community, Glue is a teen/crime drama generic hybrid. The series’ over-arching...

WARNING: POTENTIAL SPOILERS FOR THE WALKING DEAD AND GOTHAM About a year ago, I posted a column about the current state of television and wondered if we were at a crossroads with anti-heroes and the television drama.  I feel...

One thing is for sure: World War 1 is not going to disappear from our screens any time soon. It’s there on all channels from CBeebies and BBC3 to ITV and the more specialist Discovery and History channels. The BBC has...

I want to talk about Some Girls. Some Girls is a teen comedy on BBC Three about four 16 year old girls (as they begin the first series) who attend the Greenshoots Academy in South London, all play for the school football team...

Here’s the problem. The licence fee is a cheap and elegant way of funding public service TV. It’s far cheaper than a Sky subscription and yields far more original UK production. However, a lot of people wriggle out of paying it,...