Television often has subtitles in my household and not just when we are watching Euro-dramas on BBC4. I hadn’t given much thought to this until I read an excellent article on the topic by Maggie Brown in the Royal Television...
Read MoreI like old things. When I was a teenager my granddad entrusted me with my great grandfather’s fob watch, and it always gave me a thrill to think that I was holding something of (it seemed at the time) inestimable age. It was...
Read MoreI guess we have all had the experience of pointing a remote device at the wrong point of focus, and wondered why nothing was appearing on the screen. Or having sat on the TV remote accidentally, to create mayhem on the screen....
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I am currently suffering from a massive dilemma. The last episode of Undercover (BBC, 2016) is...
Read MoreIn this blog post I want to challenge the separation of ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ paratexts as divergent trajectories within what Jonathan Hardy (2011) has named the ‘commercial intertextuality’ of contemporary television series.
Read MoreI’m in Colombia, doing some research on a plaque unveiled by Prince Charles in Cartagena two years ago that briefly commemorated a British fleet trying to starve the inhabitants into submission and make the United Kingdom an...
Read MorePart Two: Whose Show? [Part Two of “GENRE OUT OF THE BOX” delves further into the connection between genre and gender] In Part One, I explored the genre hybridity of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, and began my inquiry...
Read MoreThe hit television comedy Absolutely Fabulous is set to hit the big screen as a movie (July 1st 2016), and as such it is worth considering the hype, the paratexts, and the anticipation that surrounds this venture. First the...
Read MoreI seem to be thinking about the past lately—my last post, in fact, dealt with reboots, restarts, and remakes—and this month has me traveling back there again, this time through a “rabbit hole” at the back of a diner or, more...
Read MoreThe White Paper on the future of the BBC is broadly good news for the organisation, but that’s only because the real damage has already been done. George Osborne’s budget raid cost the organisation £630 million, and led...
Read MoreIn 2013, Carol Vernallis published a brilliant book called Unruly Media: YouTube, Music Video and the New Digital Cinema. In it, she eloquently describe the ‘media swirl’ which characterises the contemporary audiovisual...
Read MoreAs The Good Wife is drawing to a close after seven seasons in the U.K. [Note: As this blog appears in the UK the series has just finished in the US], I found myself wondering why it is that Alicia Florrick has become something...
Read MoreA year ago Elke Weissmann wrote about finding time for television, and discussed that when we actually find that limited time in our day to sit down and watch television, we do not actually watch television. Instead we watch a...
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There’s been quite a bit of trending lately on Facebook about saving the BBC. I’ve done my fair...
Read MoreThe death of Prince and the triumph of Leicester City in the English Premier League. One inevitable, the other not so. Each, untimely. No-one really knows as yet why either event occurred. One should become clear in the near...
Read MoreI have a book coming out. You didn’t know? Well, it’s called The Changing Spaces of Television Acting, and it examines how modern UK television performance has changed – and the various contextualising factors underpinning this...
Read MoreQuestion: What do the popular sci-fi television series’ Farscape (1999-2003) and Orphan Black (2013 – ) have in common? Answer: Neither featured in my undergraduate class ‘Science Fiction on Television’, but I can explain...
Read MoreOne of the games played in the run-up to the BBC Charter renewal process (a process which is likely to be particularly brutal this time) is for critics to identify those programmes which can be used by BBC negotiators to put the...
Read MoreEntertainment television programmes help shape the public discourse on politics. As American political communication scholar R. Lance Holbert pointed out, these shows can play a vital part for the public understanding of...
Read MoreThe weeks surrounding the launch of the second season of the STARZ drama series Outlander – broadcast in the US on 9 April and released to Amazon Prime UK the day after – saw a spate of online journalism and fans swooning over...
Read MoreMuch has been written about the way in which social media has reinvigorated live television, particularly from the perspective of the audience (for example, Liz Evans, Sheryl Wilson, or Inge Sø renson). But much less is known,...
Read MoreIt is quite a joy to discover one of your personal fetishes on the internet. Indeed, I was beginning to feel that I was the only one with a dark, long-term fascination in sitcom studio floorplans, but in recent years there have...
Read MoreBritish television fans need no convincing of James Corden’s smiley, shiny, naughty wonderful. From host to writer to actor to bloody nice singer and dancer, he’s annoying good at many showbizzy things (plus, he seems just...
Read MoreSince 2015 various news outlets have been reporting plans for Steven Spielberg to create a new television adaptation of the 1932 novel Brave New World and since 2013 a film adaptation by Ridley Scott has been in the pipeline....
Read MoreSomewhat tentatively , I set off for the gigantic 2016 Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference in Atlanta in early April. It was my first SCMS and the prospect of five full-on days and more than 1900...
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