Author: CSTonline

D-Day: As it Happens (Channel 4) was part of the spate of programming that, as usual, accompanied the anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy on 6th June, 1944.  Described on its website as a ‘completely new way’ to tell...

As I wind up and evaluate classes from the academic year just gone by, and start to prepare for the coming year, my thoughts turn to teaching, and in particular to teaching television. It’s always interesting in these blogs to...

Who would be Chair of the BBC Trust in these scandal-hit days? Not Lord Patten, who has just announced he will be off after a single four-year term, despite the awkward timing (it will coincide with both a new government and a...

Television is a media of texture. Glass, plasma, wood, chrome, shiny aluminium and bright neon, encase and embody the circuitry, while across its programming and commercials a range of textures are given weight, depth, and...

Richard Matheson (1926-2013) Voted the best vampire novel of the 20th Century by the Horror Writers Association of America, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954) was revolutionary in its approach to the vampire genre and...

You probably don’t hear it when it happens. Bobby ‘Bacala’ Baccalieri (Steve Schirripa) in ‘Soprano Home Movies’ (Episode 78 in Season 6) James Gandolfini’s death was a shocker.  It came out of the blue.  Late on a Wednesday...

We may watch children’s television at two key, if relatively long, periods in our lives. Firstly, when we arechildren, and second if and when we have children. I am currently experiencing the latter period, with my two year old...

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...