166 research outputs found
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āDo you really enjoy the modern play?ā: Beckett on commercial television
Television was the key popular medium of the second half of the twentieth century in the UK, and Samuel Beckettās work was consistently aired by BBC, the British non-commercial TV broadcaster that had already featured his work on radio since the mid-1950s. But it is not generally known that his work also appeared on Independent Television, the commercially-funded British television channel set up in 1955 to rival BBC. The commercial ABC TV company made the series The Present Stage for the national ITV network in 1966. In its feature announcing the series, the TV Times listings magazine asked āDo you really enjoy the modern play like Look Back in Anger or Waiting for Godot?" ITVās first half-hour programme on Waiting for Godot followed DIY expert Barry Bucknellās demonstration of techniques for laying carpet. The following weekās episode, including extracts from Godot, was preceded by Bucknellās advice on paving garden patios. This chapter asks what it meant for the ITV commercial channel to make a programme about Beckettās drama in this context. Moving outwards from the example of The Present Stage, the chapter places Beckettās drama in a time of dynamic and exciting instability in British culture, when the categories of the popular and the elite were being contested, to argue that Beckettās work contributed to a cultural revolution
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Into the void: Beckett's television plays and the idea of broadcasting
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When Beckett on Film migrated to television
In the migration of drama from one medium to another a text is reshaped, and different audiences are addressed by adaptations because of the process of remediation. This article evaluates the significance of the intermedial migrations that happened to the "Beckett on Film" project in which Samuel Beckettās 19 theatre plays were performed on stage, then filmed for an international festival, then shown on television in the UK, USA, Ireland and elsewhere. The analysis focuses on the television versions and shows how their distribution and reception contexts framed their meanings in different ways, and assesses how medial migration destabilised the object of analysis itself at the same time as the work became able to address multiple audiences and fulfil different cultural roles
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Television and the popular: viewing from the British perspective
The academic discipline of television studies has been constituted by the claim that television is worth studying because it is popular. Yet this claim has also entailed a need to defend the subject against the triviality that is associated with the television medium because of its very popularity. This article analyses the many attempts in the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries to constitute critical discourses about television as a popular medium. It focuses on how the theoretical currents of Television Studies emerged and changed in the UK, where a disciplinary identity for the subject was founded by borrowing from related disciplines, yet argued for the specificity of the medium as an object of criticism. Eschewing technological determinism, moral pathologization and sterile debates about television's supposed effects, UK writers such as Raymond Williams addressed television as an aspect of culture. Television theory in Britain has been part of, and also separate from, the disciplinary fields of media theory, literary theory and film theory. It has focused its attention on institutions, audio-visual texts, genres, authors and viewers according to the ways that research problems and theoretical inadequacies have emerged over time. But a consistent feature has been the problem of moving from a descriptive discourse to an analytical and evaluative one, and from studies of specific texts, moments and locations of television to larger theories. By discussing some historically significant critical work about television, the article considers how academic work has constructed relationships between the different kinds of objects of study. The article argues that a fundamental tension between descriptive and politically activist discourses has confused academic writing about āŗthe popularā¹. Television study in Britain arose not to supply graduate professionals to the television industry, nor to perfect the instrumental techniques of allied sectors such as advertising and marketing, but to analyse and critique the medium's aesthetic forms and to evaluate its role in culture. Since television cannot be made by āŗthe peopleā¹, the empowerment that discourses of television theory and analysis aimed for was focused on disseminating the tools for critique. Recent developments in factual entertainment television (in Britain and elsewhere) have greatly increased the visibility of āŗthe peopleā¹ in programmes, notably in docusoaps, game shows and other participative formats. This has led to renewed debates about whether such āŗpopularā¹ programmes appropriately represent āŗthe peopleā¹ and how factual entertainment that is often despised relates to genres hitherto considered to be of high quality, such as scripted drama and socially-engaged documentary television.
A further aspect of this problem of evaluation is how television globalisation has been addressed, and the example that the issue has crystallised around most is the reality TV contest Big Brother. Television theory has been largely based on studying the texts, institutions and audiences of television in the Anglophone world, and thus in specific geographical contexts. The transnational contexts of popular television have been addressed as spaces of contestation, for example between Americanisation and national or regional identities. Commentators have been ambivalent about whether the discipline's role is to celebrate or critique television, and whether to do so within a national, regional or global context. In the discourses of the television industry, āŗpopular televisionā¹ is a quantitative and comparative measure, and because of the overlap between the programming with the largest audiences and the scheduling of established programme types at the times of day when the largest audiences are available, it has a strong relationship with genre. The measurement of audiences and the design of schedules are carried out in predominantly national contexts, but the article refers to programmes like Big Brother that have been broadcast transnationally, and programmes that have been extensively exported, to consider in what ways they too might be called popular. Strands of work in television studies have at different times attempted to diagnose what is at stake in the most popular programme types, such as reality TV, situation comedy and drama series. This has centred on questions of how aesthetic quality might be discriminated in television programmes, and how quality relates to popularity. The interaction of the designations āŗpopularā¹ and āŗqualityā¹ is exemplified in the ways that critical discourse has addressed US drama series that have been widely exported around the world, and the article shows how the two critical terms are both distinct and interrelated. In this context and in the article as a whole, the aim is not to arrive at a definitive meaning for āŗthe popularā¹ inasmuch as it designates programmes or indeed the medium of television itself. Instead the aim is to show how, in historically and geographically contingent ways, these terms and ideas have been dynamically adopted and contested in order to address a multiple and changing object of analysis
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Transatlantic spaces: production, location and style in 1960s-1970s action-adventure TV series
This paper argues that transatlantic hybridity connects space, visual style and ideological point of view in British television action-adventure fiction of the 1960sā1970s. It analyses the relationship between the physical location of TV series production at Elstree Studios, UK, the representation of place in programmes, and the international trade in television fiction between the UK and USA. The TV series made at Elstree by the ITC and ABC companies and their affiliates linked Britishness with an international modernity associated with the USA, while also promoting national specificity. To do this, they drew on film production techniques that were already common for TV series production in Hollywood. The British series made at Elstree adapted versions of US industrial organization and television formats, and made programmes expected to be saleable to US networks, on the basis of British experiences in TV co-production with US companies and of the international cinema and TV market
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How to watch television? Pedagogy and paedocracy in Beckettās television plays
This article responds to scholarship on Beckettās television plays that regards them as positive interventions which encourage the viewer to reconsider the conventions of the medium, and that raise the cultural standards of television drama. In making claims about how the plays address and educate their viewers, critical approaches shift between conceptions of audience. This analysis of Beckettās plays on British television reconsiders their aesthetic strategies, their relationship with television culture, and the dominant assumptions of critical writing about them by examining the parallel between conceptions of the audience and conceptions of the child in writing about television and Beckettās television plays
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The spaces of the Wednesday Play (BBC TV 1964ā1970): production, technology and style
The BBC television drama anthology The Wednesday Play, broadcast from 1964-70 on the BBC1 channel, was high-profile and often controversial in its time and has since been central to accounts of British televisionās āgolden ageā. This article demonstrates that production technologies and methods were more diverse at that time than is now acknowledged, and that The Wednesday Play dramas drew both approving but also very critical responses from contemporary viewers and professional reviewers. This article analyses the ways that the physical spaces of production for different dramas in the series, and the different technologies of shooting and recording that were adopted in these production spaces, are associated with but do not determine aesthetic style. The adoption of single-camera location filming rather than the established production method of multi-camera studio videotaping in some of the dramas in the series has been important to The Wednesday Playās significance, but each production method was used in different ways. The dramas drew their dramatic forms and aesthetic emphases from both theatre and cinema, as well as connecting with debates about the nature of drama for television. Institutional and regulatory frameworks such as control over staff working away from base, budgetary considerations and union agreements also impacted on decisions about how programmes were made. The article makes use of records from the BBC Written Archives Centre, as well as published scholarship. By placing The Wednesday Play in a range of overlapping historical contexts, its identity can be understood as transitional, differentiated and contested
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Children of the world on British television: national and transnational representations
This article analyses comparative representations of childhood in British television programmes shortly after 1968, focusing on transnational broadcasting and international co-productions. Television played a relatively conservative role, limited to programmes associated with pedagogical, public service aims. However, programmes engaged with adultsā insight into the importance of listening to children and attributing them with greater agency and voice, recognition of diversity in childrenās culture, and the need to communicate with both adults and children about social problems, not least of which were problems affecting children themselves. Comparative representations of British childhoods had already been made for British television, the most celebrated being the documentary series 7 Up (1964-). It follows the life stories of the same seven-year old children from different social classes and geographical locations around the UK, for a new programme every seven years. In the 1971 edition the children were asked their views about politics, race and sex, implicitly critiquing British class privilege and opportunity, and expressing a desire for social change linked with experiences of childhood. However, transnational projects representing and comparing British childhoods with those in other nations rarely appeared on British television. The live broadcast Children of the World (1971), hosted by US actor and UNICEF representative Danny Kaye, representing childrenās lives in 45 countries, fitted a model for upbeat global simulcasts exemplified by Our World (1967), and was produced by an international consortium including the BBC in Britain, but it was not screened within Britain. Programmes made for children did investigate and compare childhoods in different countries, however. The 1971 BBC television series If You Were Me, an international co-production, showed boys and girls from different countries swapping lives with each other, foregrounding similarity and difference. The British commercial ITV channel used a 1971 French film to launch an educational series for adults, Children to Children (1973), addressing childhood as experienced in various national contexts. Its short documentaries of widely differing styles were part of an outward-looking agenda preceding Britainās entry into the Common Market. With reference to these examples, the article assesses the significance of the internationalization and universalization associated with 1968, inasmuch as it underlay television representations of childhood
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