Author: CSTonline

The BBC’s charter renewal is due in 2016 but traditionally the years and months beforehand are full of political jostling, public pronouncements and secret (and not so secret) lobbying. In this case, we don’t even know what kind...

This year has marked the 20th anniversary since the death of an important British television screenwriter, Dennis Potter. The BFI has commemorated Potter and his work through scheduling a complete back catalogue re-screening of...

Tony Hall has proposed a momentous change as part of his plan to take the BBC through charter renewal after next May’s general election. He has proposed that BBC production should be completely separated from BBC Broadcasting,...

In deciding what to blog about this week, I was met by a confluence of events.  I have recently visited Florence for the first time and in addition to the city’s beautiful architecture and wondrous history of Renaissance art, I...

Hotel Television Room Blues Baggage: Hotel Room Television sounds as if it might be the title of a Ryan Adam or Johnny Cash love-struck ballad. A broken-hearted boy or girl returns to their transitory space to contemplate the...

I’m now seven months into perhaps my most ambitious viewing marathon, the complete Doctor Who cycle, watched at the rate of one episode every day. Thanks to the completion of the BBC DVD range last year I started in December and...

My front-runner status to be the next Chair of the BBC Trust has been jeopardized, thanks to someone named Sebastian Coe (Lord Coe to his friends). Casting around for an explanation of this otherwise incomprehensible news, I...

Somehow, I always find myself approaching big, multi-media conferences with a faint edge of paranoia. How will television studies fare in the context of a set-up which was originally organised around Cinema Studies and in which...

Canadian TV series Orphan Black (2013-) recently reached the end of its second season. The series airs on Space in Canada, BBC America in the US and BBC Three in the UK, as well as in other countries, and has been a flagship...

The UK broadcast of Supernatural has gone all to hell. I, like many others, was deeply disappointed by the news that Sky Living will not be showing season nine, which has just completed its broadcast in the US on the CW. At the...

The original line of this opening was: ‘It might seem odd to devote a television blog to books’; however, following Billy Proctor’s blog last week it now feels almost like bandwagon jumping. For me, though, the two media have...

[The killing of one black and two white civil rights workers] was an example of what we had really been talking to the volunteers about before the three went missing—that you are going into a murderously violent state and you...

Comedian Louie CK made the statement above as part of an interview with an American radio show recently. And, interestingly, even though he’s someone whose material is high on the list of things being illegally accessed, he’s on...

Last summer, I gave a paper on the shifting star persona of Jennifer Aniston at the Console-ing Passions conference, focusing predominantly on the significance of postfeminist discourses of ageing to the construction of...

The face of independent TV production in the UK has changed irrevocably. 21st Century Fox and Apollo Global Management together have taken over Endemol, Shine Group and Core Media and will transform them into the world’s first...

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms. Muriel Rukeyser This is an intimate account of the ways in which the moving image enters and energises the stories that we tell one another on Facebook. It is not meant to be a...

Television has long been accused of creating zombies….breeding an audience that sits transfixed in front of their TV screens, hypnotized by the presumed-to-be mind-numbing qualities of this ‘mindless’ entertainment. This idea...

In the early days of TV, some people apparently said that television was just radio, with pictures. Now, the general opinion would be that this is by no means the case. So it seems a little perverse to write here about something...