Exporting Englishness: ITV's Poirot

This essay will explore the export of Britishness via the heritage TV industry, using the long-running ITV series Poirot as a case study. It explores also how the producers have adapted Agatha's Christie's fiction and considers the ideological reasons for the series' popularity among British and American audiences

'It's a film' : medium specificity as textual gesture in Red road and The unloved

British cinema has long been intertwined with television. The buzzwords of the transition to digital media, 'convergence' and 'multi-platform delivery', have particular histories in the British context which can be grasped only through an understanding of the cultural, historical and institutional peculiarities of the British film and television industries. Central to this understanding must be two comparisons: first, the relative stability of television in the duopoly period (at its core, the licence-funded BBC) in contrast to the repeated boom and bust of the many different financial/industrial combinations which have comprised the film industry; and second, the cultural and historical connotations of 'film' and 'television'. All readers of this journal will be familiar – possibly over-familiar – with the notion that 'British cinema is alive and well and living on television'. At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, when 'the end of medium specificity' is much trumpeted, it might be useful to return to the historical imbrication of British film and television, to explore both the possibility that medium specificity may be more nationally specific than much contemporary theorisation suggests, and to consider some of the relationships between film and television manifest at a textual level in two recent films, Red Road (2006) and The Unloved (2009)

The Popular on British Television: Global Perspectives, National Priorities, Local Preferences

This article explores two related and highly significant aspects of British broadcasting: how the nature and identity of British television have been influenced by the potentially contradictory demands of high and low culture and associated popular and quality programming; and how (far) national broadcasting has been able to face the threat to its existence posed first by internationalisation and now by globalisation. After an initial discussion of the notions of the global and the popular, this study considers how past conceptions of the role of television affected attitudes to programming, before considering the difficulty of determining what is national, popular television in a world where domestic broadcasts and global pastiches are scheduled side by side. The conclusion examines how national and local characteristics have enabled British programmes to maintain popularity in the face of globalisation.El presente artículo explora dos aspectos relevantes de las retransmisiones británicas: cómo la identidad y naturaleza de la televisión británica se han visto influidas por las exigencias potencialmente contradictorias de la alta cultura, con su programación de calidad, y de la cultura popular, con su búsqueda de audiencia; y si la producción nacional ha resistido la amenaza, primero de la internacionalización y ahora, de la globalización. Tras una discusión inicial sobre las nociones del hecho popular y global, se aborda cómo ciertos conceptos pasados sobre el papel de la televisión han condicionado la programación de contenidos. Seguidamente, se exploran las dificultades para definir qué es una televisión nacional o popular en un mundo en el que productos locales y pastiches globales coexisten en la parrilla. La conclusión avanza que las características locales y nacionales han permitido a los programas británicos mantener su popularidad a pesar de la globalización

What is news? News values revisited (again)

The deceptively simple question “What is news?” remains pertinent even as we ponder the future of journalism in the digital age. This article examines news values within mainstream journalism and considers the extent to which news values may be changing since earlier landmark studies were undertaken. Its starting point is Harcup and O’Neill’s widely-cited 2001 updating of Galtung and Ruge’s influential 1965 taxonomy of news values. Just as that study put Galtung and Ruge’s criteria to the test with an empirical content analysis of published news, this new study explores the extent to which Harcup and O’Neill’s revised list of news values remain relevant given the challenges (and opportunities) faced by journalism today, including the emergence of social media. A review of recent literature contextualises the findings of a fresh content analysis of news values within a range of UK media 15 years on from the last study. The article concludes by suggesting a revised and updated set of contemporary news values, whilst acknowledging that no taxonomy can ever explain everything