Reading The League of Gentlemen: study of the creation process of a comedy / horror series

Television production’s ‘hidden labour’ lies concealed behind what we see on our screens. This thesis investigates the creation of The League of Gentlemen, a show that is considered a ‘special moment in television’, unpacking the end product and mapping the critical elements within the show’s creation process, to make this ‘hidden labour’ visible. It examines the The League’s production ecology to understand how this cultural breakthrough came to be, and contributes to broader discussions about the BBC’s broadcasting environment and comedy production in the 1990s. This thesis is the first study of The League that combines a detailed textual analysis with production studies, media history and media anthropology. Through its multi-method approach this study yields new insights into the creation process of The League. Through a very detailed analysis, this case study illuminates how the initial idea and the key textual devices (location, character and narrative) developed through various media and creation stages, revealing who and what shaped this process. Through original interviews it gives a voice to various contributors, including the costume designer and the producers, who are often overlooked because of the strong authorial signature of the writers/performers. Therefore, the study sheds light onto some of the ‘hidden professions of television’ and updates our understanding of the creation process and the final product in the light of these new insights. The study of The League’s creation process illustrates that each production is unique and faces different challenges. It reveals that despite major structural and cultural changes at the BBC in the 1990s, which some considered a crisis inimical to creativity, innovation and craftsmanship, there was still room for innovation and creative freedom. The 1990s were not simply a period of crisis in BBC programme making, as some commentators suggested at the time, but an exemplar of how the production ecology was changing. As this study shows, while comedy production is clearly constrained by larger organisational structures and strategies, it also depends crucially on the individuals involved in making comedy, and how they work together. This study highlights that culture production is the sum of all the small moments that happen on the ground - in the corridors of media organisations, in TV studios, during phone conversations - and during the many little decisions made by thinking, feeling and interacting individuals. It is the coming together of these small moments that shape what we see on our screens

The Hands Behind the Cans

Nowadays, walking around any city is a guarantee of seeing graffiti, while the public transportation are still a good canvas for writers. It is a well-established social phenomenon and has catch the attention of ethnographers, academic artists and other scholars that have entered the worlds of graffiti writers to explain their origins, trajectories, motivations, their identity construction, their conception of the self and their role and relation with society at large. However, still there is no synthetic effort of categorisation that provides understandable and communicable approaches to graffiti in the real world. From some sectors graffiti is still something to “deal with”. Generally speaking, authorities and dutyholders consider graffiti as threat a security and safety issue, turning it into something that needs to be addressed. For social workers, for instance, graffiti can be a means of communication with certain youth sectors or even a tool for social cohesion generation. Departing from this perspective, Graffolution was designed: an EC funded project for generating awareness and advance in the provision of best practices for tackling graffiti in Austria, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom. The first rule encountered is no-one-size-fits-all and referring to graffiti and graffiti writers, this requires a complex understanding of the phenomenon, their trajectories as well as individual and collective dispositions. The aim of this paper is to provide a consistent typology of graffiti writers, offering a comprehensive picture of whose are the hands behind the graffiti cans. This serves a double level purpose: advancing at the theoretical level putting forward the sociocultural approaches to careers and social backgrounds provided by ethnographic approaches, as well as capturing the complexity of the phenomenon to serve as an operative conceptual basis for practitioners, professionals and decision makers. In doing so, the analysis is made on the transcripts obtained for 22 semi-structured interviews, carried out in the four participating countries. The transcripts have been analysed according to the “persona” methodology, which constitutes a systematic and novel approach and a qualitative technique for clustering information. As a result, three main categories have been defined according to important ambitions, challenges and stages of typical ‘journeys’ or ‘pathways’ of actors. These findings contribute to form a basis of a) highlight the misconceptions around graffiti as a petty crime, and b) offer a guide to understand graffiti writers under a socio-cultural perspective

Center, periphery: theory

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Behind the Scenes: Costume Design for Television: There are Many Things you Don't Know About the League of Gentlemen

Focusing on the award winning costume designer Yves Barre’s work for The League of Gentlemen (BBC, 1999-2002), this article explores the role of the costume designer in television production. Using an anthropological method that combines original interviews with Barre, Steve Pemberton (one of the writer/performers) and Jon Plowman (the executive producer) as well as second hand material such as DVD extras, the article provides insight into the show’s creative process. The underlying objective is to shed light on the costume design process – an understudied stage of television production

In search of a commons of centers - reviewing values and methods designed to assert benefit, harm or opportunity among uncommissioned visual urban practices

Photographer Martha Cooper points out that artists and graffitists define street art as pictures and graffiti as words (Cooper, 2016). Meanwhile, municipal authorities, property and transport managers may tell us that street art is framed by what is legal and graffiti by what is illegal. This is not an article about art versus crime, rather it is about disparate and commonly accessible centers for discussing and understanding value, in ways that look toward easier dialogue across and between long-separated specialisms concerned with unsolicited visual urban practice and efforts to manage those. To Cooper the processes of painting and urban play are at the center, to authorities legal, political and commercial demands lie far closer to the center. Each of us who variously associate or engage with uncommissioned street art, urban creativity or graffiti, bring new centers and peripheries, be those related to social personal interest, professional occupation, or spatial action. Artists, creative practitioners, urban managers, land owners, cultural consumers, transport providers, academics, activists and self-proclaimed vandals, each reframe what we bring to this terrain through highly disparate values and indicators that we consciously or unconsciously attribute to these informal visual urban practices. This article draws on findings from a recent major European research project, Graffolution, plus separate socially responsive design-led insights gathered through the Graffiti Dialogues Network via the University of the Arts London, plus interviews with a wide range of individuals, diversely concerned with graffiti and related practices. It sets out to identify and discuss some of the value-sets and indicators which some consider as central and others consider peripheral in experiencing, managing, creating or otherwise intervening in urban contexts through visual practices. The article refers to cases that merge diverse value centers, in varying success, and discloses a number of immediate opportunities for prototyping new common and accessible ways to understand and respond to different centers and peripheries of value

Graffolution D2.1 - Graffiti vandalism in public areas and transport report and categorisation model

The first publically accessible deliverable the UAL team has led on for Graffolution. Others will be available in due course. This report (D2.1) builds the starting point and foundation of Graffolution's research activities. It delivers information from an extensive literature review focusing on the extent of graffiti vandalism in Europe with specific concentration on public areas and transport. Early insights showed that the available data on the extent of graffiti vandalism is very fragmented which makes a consistent European wide analysis challenging

Methodologies for research

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio