Charlotte Brunsdon

Lifestyling Britain: The 8-9 Slot on British Television

1990s British terrestrial television saw a marked increase in lifestyle programming. Previously associated with daytime television, programmes on cooking, home decoration, fashion and gardening began to dominate the 8-9 early evening slot to considerable critical commentary. This article outlines the social and televisual factors relevant to this slot, while also posing questions about method in television studies. The history of hobby and leisure broadcasting is explored to clarify the innovative features of 1990s lifestyle programming and generational difference between television scholars is explored in the context of the group origins of the project. The role of the programmes in the broadcast schedules is discussed in relation to critical attitudes to banal programming.

Introduction: Screen Londons

Our aim, in editing the ‘London Issue’ of this journal, is to contribute to a conversation between scholars of British cinema and television, London historians and scholars of the cinematic city. In 2007, introducing the themed issue on ‘Space and Place in British Cinema and Television’, Steve Chibnall and Julian Petley observed that it would have been possible to fill the whole journal with essays about the representation of London. This issue does just that, responding to the increased interest in cinematic and, to a lesser extent, televisual, Londons, while also demonstrating the continuing fertility of the paradigms of ‘space and place’ for scholars of the moving image1. It includes a wide range of approaches to the topic of London on screen, with varying attention to British institutions of the moving image – such as Channel Four or the British Board of Film Classification – as well as to concepts such as genre, narration and memory. As a whole, the issue, through its juxtapositions of method and approach, shows something of the complexity of encounters between the terms ‘London’, ‘cinema’ and ‘television’ within British film and television studies.

Television Cities Paris, London, Baltimore

In Television Cities Charlotte Brunsdon traces televisions representations of metropolitan spaces to show how they reflect the mediums history and evolution, thereby challenging the prevalent assumptions about television as quintessentially suburban. Brunsdon shows how the BBCs presentation of 1960s Paris in the detective series Maigret signals British cultures engagement with twentieth-century modernity and continental Europe, while various portrayals of London—ranging from Dickens adaptations to the 1950s nostalgia of Call the Midwife—demonstrate Britains complicated transition from Victorian metropole to postcolonial social democracy. Finally, an analysis of The Wire’s acclaimed examination of Baltimore, marks the profound shifts in the ways television is now made and consumed. Illuminating the myriad factors that make television cities, Brunsdon complicates our understanding of how television shapes perceptions of urban spaces, both familiar and unknown.

London in Transition: Sites of Melancholy

This chapter reflects on the potent combination of melancholy and nostalgia that can be associated with the cinematic presentation of change in cities. Opening with a discussion of two versions of Lionel Bart’s song, ‘Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be’, the chapter argues against a generalised nostalgia for the vanished city. Instead it seeks to demonstrate the importance of attention to the particularity of what has been lost, its formal presentation and its contexts. This argument is developed through the analysis of filmic responses to the particular, planned development of two East London places at two different periods: Hessel Street (as part of mid-twentieth-century slum clearance) and the Lower Lea Valley (as preparation for the 2012 London Olympics). The discussion of two films, The Vanishing Street (1962) and What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day? (2005), which have as their topic these locations, explores the complicated meshing of time and place produced within each, and the different kinds of loss anticipated and explored. This study is concerned with the peculiar ability of film to offer its audiences images of what was once part of the material city and is now gone, and with both the tense and tone of these meditations. The ghostly cities preserved on film are always the product of particular circumstances, and should be attended to as such.

The Cinematic and the Televisual City: South London Revisited

The Cinematic and the Televisual City: South London Revisited: This essay returns to the local London discussed by Brunsdon in her 2007 book, London in Cinema to consider the depiction of South London on British television in the 1980s. Before commencing the detailed analysis of Only Fools and Horses and Desmond’s, the differential status of film and television in studies of the audio-visual city is outlined, and it is suggested that the enormous significance of television in creating images of the city has been neglected because of contempt for the medium. It is argued that it is on television, in the living rooms of the nation, that changing ideas of Britishness were negotiated and the essay concludes with a discussion of the Deptford-set detective series, South of the Border.