Author: CSTonline

What is television? I’ve been trying to answer this question by turning to the morning papers. That’s assuming the phrase ‘morning papers’ is not a homonymous typo for ‘mourning papers.’ The Global North is obsessed with...

   (Warning: Contains Spoilers. But ones you can avoid. Don’t click on any of the hyperlinks if you don’t want to know) This month my nephew was among the many, many people who were enraged on 4th June when the free commuter...

In 1972, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn’t commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the...

ABC’s Nashville (2012) and NBC’s Smash (2012-13) are two new US serial dramas that have caught my attention over the past year primarily because of the innovative integral role that music and theatrical performance...

The news of the death of Mick Aston (24 June 2013) came for me with a real sense of loss. Not only had Time Team (Channel 4, 1994-2014) been cancelled, but now there was no chance of bringing it back, no matter how outspoken the...

It is often said that we live in Gothic times. In fact, I think that most generations feel this way as the Gothic embodies uncertainty, anxiety and change, emotions and experiences that so often bubble up around us individually...

If horror has a new name on television, then that name is actually something more familiar, something immediately recognizable.  I’m talking about NBC’s Hannibal, the Bryan Fuller serial-killer thriller inspired by Thomas...

One of the major revelations from media studies research came to me, long ago, via David Morley. It was taken from what I think was a German study and related to the use of media in everyday life.  It concerned a man who every...

The kind of total or pure aesthetic experience I wish to describe here only happened to me (at this pitch of intensity) once in my life before that I can remember, and I’m not sure that this should be grounds for gratitude that...

Channel 4, Sunday at 9pm, the slot that gave us Homeland launched a new series The Returned. The  trailer told us that this is “the no.1 French thriller”, perhaps a bit of an exaggeration for a series that had an average...

‘The United States has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember  .  .  .  The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest...

So the BBC has called time on its Digital Media Initiative (DMI), the project to create tapeless workflow and archive access: £98m in the hole for a software solution that can now be bought off the shelf for less than £1,000. A...

Byzantium, a vampire film that incorporates both period detail and contemporary era in its tale of a mother-daughter relationship, has just hit the big screen and I’ve been working on a conference paper about flashbacks in...

Even when you work as an assiduous researcher of television drama history, it’s rare that you make a genuinely major discovery, but watching Patricia Hooker’s 1973 Armchair Theatre play, ‘The Golden Road’, I had the tremendously...

When doing the research for my book on television branding I spent a lot of time in archives fast-forwarding through the carefully catalogued television programmes to view the junctions or interstitials in between. I was...

Futuristic TV images are fun to look at, whether the sets are depicted in splendid isolation or with asinine human faces as accompaniment. I like to look back and think about what was once thought of as the future as well as...

I return for this blog to the topic of neglected historical British television comedy.  In my last post, my focus was on the significance of female performers to the genre, with a retrospective of the comedy career of actress...

          Putting aside watching or re-watching TV shows via box sets, the shows I watch as they are broadcast fall into two tiers. The first is made up of series that are, to use a cliché, appointment...

The concept of prequels is not one that, on first consideration, sits easily in the television landscape. Given the serialised nature of so much modern television drama, which essentially hinges on keeping viewers hooked on what...

Forgive me for returning to Broadchurch so soon after John Ellis’s excellent account, written just as it finished. But I thought it was worth commenting on some of its other (largely textual) features before it slips away from...

Elementary (CBS 2012-). Arrow (CW 2012-). Game of Thrones (HBO 2011-).  These recent American television programmes are all based (to varying degrees) on texts rooted in cult appeal, around particular fan communities, and with...

It wasn’t something I deliberately set out to do.  It was a result of a combination of factors – a PhD to finish, lessons to plan, marking to do, the day-to-day demands of running a household.  Life, in short, getting in the way...