Revisiting Play School: A historical case study of the BBC’s address to the pre-school audience

Although clearly recognised in broader institutional histories of British children’s television as a significant moment in the BBC’s address toward the pre-school child, Play School (BBC 1964-88) has not been the focus of sustained archival analysis. This arguably reflects the fact that a good deal of work on children’s television in Britain adopts either an institutional or an audience focus, and the study of programmes cultures is often more neglected. This article seeks to revisit Play School using available historical documentation – including memos, scripts and press cuttings - from the BBC Written Archive Centre, as well as early surviving episodes (principally from 1964). In doing so, it seeks to explore how it fitted into BBC’s historical address to the pre-school child, how it intersected with discourses on pre-school education, and the range of institutional and social contexts surrounding its emergence. Key Words: Play School * Pre-school television * BBC * Child audienc

Multivariate data analysis: The French way

This paper presents exploratory techniques for multivariate data, many of them well known to French statisticians and ecologists, but few well understood in North American culture. We present the general framework of duality diagrams which encompasses discriminant analysis, correspondence analysis and principal components, and we show how this framework can be generalized to the regression of graphs on covariates.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/193940307000000455 the IMS Collections (http://www.imstat.org/publications/imscollections.htm) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Extending the double ramification cycle by resolving the Abel-Jacobi map

Over the moduli space of smooth curves, the double ramification cycle can be defined by pulling back the unit section of the universal jacobian along the Abel-Jacobi map. This breaks down over the boundary since the Abel-Jacobi map fails to extend. We construct a `universal' resolution of the Abel-Jacobi map, and thereby extend the double ramification cycle to the whole of the moduli of stable curves. In the non-twisted case, we show that our extension coincides with the cycle constructed by Li, Graber, Vakil via a virtual fundamental class on a space of rubber maps.Comment: 35 pages, 1 figure. v2:Exposition heavily revised (and hopefully improved). Main results unchanged. There was a gap in the proof of lemma 3.14; it is replaced by the construction in lemma 6.1. v3: Extended to include the `k-twisted' case, where one allows powers of the relative dualising sheaf. v4. Final version, to appear in J. Inst. Math. Jussieu. Comments still very welcom

Dark matter signals in deflected mirage mediation

We investigate the parameter space of a specific class of model within the deflected mirage mediation (DMM) scenario. We look at neutralino properties and compute the thermal relic density as well as interaction rates with xenon direct detection experiments. We find that there are portions of the parameter space which are in line with the current WMAP constraints. Further we find that none of the investigated parameter space is in conflict with current bounds from the Xenon10 experiment and that future large-scale liquid xenon experiments will probe a large portion of the model space.Comment: 4 pages, contribution to proceedings for SUSY0

‘You don’t need influence … all you need is your first opportunity!’: The Early Broadcast Talent Show and the BBC

Popular histories of the reality talent show often position programmes like Opportunity Knocks as key generic precursors to the popular formats of today. But the visibility of such shows in such popular histories - and in popular memory - disguises the fact that the genre has been almost totally neglected in both television historiography and celebrity studies. In drawing upon archival documentation, this article looks at early examples of the broadcast talent show in Britain, with a particular focus on radio’s Opportunity Knocks, and examines the institutional and cultural discourses which surrounded them