Author: CSTonline

Making and Remaking Television Classics, 20 March 2009, University of Warwick Rachel Moseley writes: Most people have a sense of what might count, for them, as ‘classic television’. From long-running serial drama like Coronation...

In this short reflection on the study of television fictions, I endorse and qualify the recognition by several commentators in recent years that the boundaries between cinema and television have become blurred and require a...

THIS BLOG CONTAINS SPOILERS Someone once asked me “What’s the difference between apocalyptic fiction and dystopia?” I had to think about it for a bit, but then I came up with, “The world goes to hell...

On the 8th and 9th of November I had the pleasure of attending the British Promax conference with my colleague Paul Grainge as part of our AHRC-funded project on the promotional screen industries.  Promax is the industry body...

The BBC is currently engulfed in a crisis that has already led to the resignation of the new Director-General George Entwistle after just 7 weeks in the job. Like several previous BBC crises, this one centres around journalistic...

For the past two years I’ve been the research fellow on the ‘History of Television for Women in Britain 1947-89’ project.  My principal role has been exploring and documenting what we, as a project team, have identified as...

Yet again, the US Presidential election was a televisual one. Yet again, we were told it was not. No matter how many people follow the election cycle on TV, no matter how much time and money the campaigns spend on it, there...

As part of a project on multiplatform public service content, I’ve been examining the changing meanings of the term ‘multiplatform’ at the BBC. In one of my last interviews (at least for a while) at the BBC on the topic last...

Even in our near-miraculous coverage of the Olympics, I would say that we’ve taken – joyously – our capacity to present and distribute existing forms of content to their natural limits rather than innovate to discover genuinely...

I am swimming, swimming in a sea of liquid camera movements, dissolves, reflections, blue pools, deep oceans, lavish spectacles, messy births, intimate bodily exchanges, bad romances, trashy sex, bright lights, swirling colours,...

October is one of my favourite months of the year. In the build up to Halloween, it seems that the world around me is finally catching up with my enthusiasm for all things gothic, gruesome and macabre.  Black and orange become...

As a practicing textual analyst and historian of British television drama between the sixties and the eighties, I have a methodology that is so distinct in my field as to possibly be unique. I gain my knowledge of British...

28 September 2012 To what extent should academics be engaging with industry, and how? What relevance does academic research in television studies have for industry anyway? These are questions that we have been collectively...

FRESH MEAT, CHANNEL 4, THURSDAYS 10PM The second season of the hour long comedy drama Fresh Meat prompts the obvious question: why is this the first successful comedy about students since… well how long exactly? Some critics...

My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die! The Child is father of the Man; And I could wish my days to be Bound...

After the spectacle and drama of live television during an obsessive month of watching the Olympics and Paralympics, the television schedules began to turn to something like normal in the beginning of September and it became...

‘Dear Mr Miller John Lewis PLC has let us know that you recently bought TV equipment. However, we can’t find a record of a TV license for this address.’ The quotation above comes from a letter I received, signed by Carl...

As television criticism goes, HBO’s The Newsroom probably set a new record for the number of scathing, negative reviews that it received.  From its “pedantic lectures disguised as rat-a-tat-tat dialogue” (Grunwald) to its...

‘Performance and Television Space’, a one day symposium held at the University of Glamorgan’s Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries on 20th April 2012, was the second in a series of three conferences organised by...

It’s complicated, being an American, having the money and the bad conscience, both at the same time. (Louis Simpson from ‘On the Lawn at the Villa,’ Selected Poems, 1965) I haven’t given up yet on Aaron Sorkin’s newest...

I’ve got the Bieber fever. I am going to hold up a giant placard, with Justin’s name on, outside his St. Kilda hotel, with a thousand other screaming fans. I am going to shout, ‘I love you Justin’. Justin, just touch my hand....

The Royal Television Society may claim to be ‘Britain’s leading forum for television and related media’ but it can still look like a rather old-fashioned institution. The Prince of Wales is its Patron and John Logie Baird was...

In seeking to capture and manage attention within a competitive media landscape, promotion has become a major component of broadcast output, from the exponential increase in promos, logos, idents and trailers, to new forms of...