Author: CSTonline

‘A good bake’ As regular viewers of The Great British Bake Off will know, ‘a good bake’ is the highest praise indeed. It is a perfect pastry base: short, smooth and golden; it is a crisp, evenly-coloured biscuit; it is a cake of...

BBC2’s  Big Allotment Challenge pushes the TV challenge format to breaking point.  This six-part series pits nine contestant pairs against each other each week in three contests: growing a prize specimen; arranging a bouquet;...

TV has traditionally been seen as domestic, and often as social: stereotypical images of families gathered around the television readily come to mind. While we may think such images nostalgic in an era where many households and...

Ten years is not very long in the immortal life of a vampire – with or without a soul – but in the life, or afterlife, of a television series, it feels like an eternity.  It is therefore with heavy heart that I note that it has...

In a moment of frustration a few weeks ago I posted the following status update to Facebook: ‘Today’s teaching has felt like dealing with school children with half of my second years turning up to seminars without having...

Fifty years ago this weekend, BBC2 began, with a technological fiasco. Everything that could go wrong, did, from power supply to headline reading. These were the days when signals were routinely interrupted, aerials regularly...

WARNING – THIS BLOG CONTAINS SPOILERS. I was pleased to see Anthony Smith and CST finally engage with what I’ve described elsewhere (slightly hyperbolically) as the televisual equivalent of Manet’s Le déjeuner sur...

Before sitting down to write, I decided to cast an eye over this week’s television schedule, alighting almost immediately on two examples of a genre which has long confounded and intrigued me: the celebrity documentary. By this...

For those not familiar with EastEnders, the last few months may nevertheless have yielded glimpses of Dot Cotton (Branning) via the actress, June Brown, who has played her since July 1985 and who has been publicising her...

I have taken a strange interest in ratings in the last year or so, an interest that admittedly developed not long after I started watching the first season of Hannibal.  For all of its critical acclaim—here’s a recent example...

It is ten years since the final episode of HBO’s hugely popular series, Sex and the City (1998 – 2004) aired. This anniversary is being marked by a conference held at the University of Roehampton next week on the 4th of April,...

On 5 March, the BBC announced that BBC3 would become an online-only channel, subject to  approval by the BBC Trust. It would be replaced on the digital broadcast spectrum by a new BBC1+1 service, following the success of ‘plus...

A great deal of hand-wringing has taken place since the decision to cut BBC3 as a terrestrial television channel, particularly on the pages of The Guardian – where everyone from Steve Hewlett to Boyd Hilton to Mark Jackson has...

Hey there marshmallows!  Veronica Mars is back. I’ve been thinking about Veronica Mars.  On the 12 April 2013, I blogged about the exciting news of the Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign, in which TV creator Rob Thomas and actor...

When thinking about TV in relation to horror/SF/fantasy I tend to think in quite simple terms. Its modern incarnation starts with the arrival of Twin Peaks in 1990. There’s not much more than needs to be said about Twin Peaks,...

Rake is an Australian television series that airs on ABC1 on Sunday nights. Now into its third series, it centrally features Richard Roxburgh as Rake Cleaver Greene, a charismatic but anti-establishment, criminal defence...

Why the parentheses? Well, the established argument is that television’s very domesticity and ‘ordinariness’ militates against any capacity to produce ‘stars’ in the sense that cinema is traditionally perceived to have done....