Christine Geraghty

Aesthetics and Quality in Popular Television Drama

This article seeks to extend the debate about evaluating television by focusing specifically on television drama. It reviews some of the reasons why such evaluation has been difficult in cultural studies but suggests that by refusing evaluation in relation to television cultural studies academics are opting out of a key debate in broadcasting and failing students who in their own viewing and practical work are making evaluative judgements. The article suggests that rather than looking for one set of television aesthetics, as Williams, Ellis and others have done, a more precise approach might attend to particular television categories, in this case television drama. The article compares the position in film and in television, suggesting that one of the problems is that television lacks a critical culture in which evaluation is openly discussed. It offers a framework for assessing individual programmes and, through an analysis of some textbooks on teaching television, indicates how this tactic would open up the rather narrow approaches to evaluation that currently concentrate mainly on ideological questions of representation.

Exhausted and Exhausting: Television Studies and British Soap Opera

This article responds to recent shifts in television studies and argues that those developments have resulted in the invisibility of the most popular form of British programming, the soap opera. Through analysing existing work on soaps it demonstrates that a critical orthodoxy has arisen, which stifles further analysis of the genre. Drawing on a range of possible approaches - including realism, melodrama, textual analysis and the role of the family - it is argued that the genre requires a reappraisal which not only takes into account its generic development but which also acknowledges the complexity of it as a aspect of television culture.

JANE AUSTEN MEETS GURINDER CHADHA: Hybridity and intertextuality in Bride and Prejudice

Adaptation has been a feature of cinema since its beginning but the adaptation of classic novels has always prompted complaints about lack of faithfulness. The emphasis on intertextuality in theories of adaptation has been helpful in adaptation studies in prying apart the notion of a faithful reproduction of one text by another. Robert Stam in particular has argued that source texts are themselves formed through a dense network of textual relationships. Adaptations, therefore, can no longer be understood as depending on a single source but are ‘caught up in an ongoing whirl of intertextual reference and transformation, of texts generating other texts in an endless process of recycling, transformation and transmutation, with no clear point of origin’ (31). Stam stresses the multicultural dialogue that can take place across different versions of classic novels such as Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe while postcolonial theories have controversially influenced films such as Rozema’s Mansfield Park (1999). Indian cinema consistently and controversially uses other films for sources, and one particularly interesting example of intertextuality has been the use made by Indian cinema of classic 18thand 19th-century European novels that provide plots centring on romance, inheritance and feminine frustration. Films like Kandukondain Kandukondain (Sense and Sensibility, 2000) and Maya (Madame Bovary, 1992) have updated and transformed classic novels so that the heritage mise-en-scene of the classic adaptation gives way to the architecture, music and colour associated with Indian culture. Such films repay study but in this article I want to look at a film that takes intertextuality a stage further, Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice (2004). This film, made in three continents, funded in part by the British Film Council and co-produced by Miramax, offers an extreme example of the layering of references on which intertextuality depends. It makes explicit the hybrid process in which elements from its source in Jane Austen’s classic novel are brought into a relationship with generic features taken from Indian cinema and British cinema and television, features that are themselves a product of interaction and change. The film follows the plot of Pride and Prejudice quite closely in terms of the characters and the narrative events, even down to the embarrassing artistic performance (of the snake dance) by one of the younger sisters. Like many recent Austen adaptations, Bride and Prejudice takes the romance narrative as central, setting up a series of obstacles and confusions until compromises allow the central couple to be finally established. The barrier between the couple is not so much class as national identity; the film’s Elizabeth, renamed Lalita, defends India, as well as her family, in

Women, Soap Opera, and New Generations of Feminists

At a time when television (TV) studies was still an emerging subject, the soap opera attracted a number of high-profile studies, largely conducted by feminists, that also set the agenda for TV studies as a whole. While the soap opera no longer finds the same level of attention, the scholarship of that time remains important to the work of feminist TV researchers of different generations. In this dossier, five researchers, three of them emerging and two of them mid-career, reflect on the importance of the scholarship to their own work and careers, how their own work expands on it and what it tells us about problems that feminist TV scholarship might encounter tomorrow.

Women's Fiction Still? The Study of Soap Opera in Television Studies:

about television and to academic research, or that soap opera should feature largely in such debates. Defining genres, marking out the boundaries and then crossing them with glee, is a practice engaged with by producers and viewers of television alike while genre definition, in a relatively new discipline like television studies, is a crucial way of mapping the field, of identifying precisely what it is that is there to be studied. The study of soap opera has been particularly important in the discussion of genres and debates about television as a whole. Firstly, defining soap opera was one way of separating the characteristics of television drama from drama in theatre or cinema and of assessing distinctions within television drama itself by setting soap opera against other forms such as the series or serial. More recently, the fictional elements in cross-generic programmes have been described by comparisons with soaps in the development of docu-soaps, for instance, and of the various formats of Reality TV. Secondly, how soap opera has been studied and defined has affected the development of television studies itself and continues to shape the way we look at certain kinds of issues. Work on soap opera allowed an entree for feminist work on television; it has also provided the basis for crosscultural explorations of considerable richness. Finally, in debates about the mass media, soap opera continues to brand television as a whole as a mass medium which produces particular kinds of products. That the term ‘soap opera’ is often used as a metaphor for rather tacky activity in other spheres – politics, sport, business – tells us something about how the pleasures and possibilities of popular television are defined. It could be argued that the notion that soap opera is fiction for women is largely a product of a particular contingency. Work on soap opera was developed by theorists with a strong background in feminist film theory in relation to a very particular mass media product (US daytime soaps) at a time when feminism was having some impact on the academic world and beyond. Asking to what extent soap operas are women’s fiction enables us to look at the various ways this question has Women’s Fiction Still? The Study of Soap Opera in Television Studies

Dissolving Media Boundaries: The Interaction of Literature, Film, and Television in Tender Is the Night (1985)

Long unavailable, the BBC’s 1985 adaptation of Tender is the Night has now reappeared generating particular interest in Dennis Potter’s role as adaptor. An expensive and prestigious production characteristic of 1980s television, it was nevertheless an unusual adaptation for the BBC: based on an American classic, co-produced with Showtime, featuring U.S. stars and shot in Europe. I argue that this neglected adaptation throws light on some of the key questions still at play in adaptation theory including: the different media practices in literature, film, and television; questions of authorship arising from Fitzgerald’s particular interest in cinema; the interaction between images and words. Looking particularly at the serial’s structure, its narrative voice and its handling of performance and drawing on insights from Executive Producer Jonathan Powell, I argue that it is the intertwining of the verbal and visual and the dissolving of boundaries between three different media which make this such a rewarding adaptation.

Stellar Encounters: stardom in popular European cinema

films can be studied. In a sense, these chapters stand on their own, loose from the following ones, since they deal with film in general and not exclusively with historical films. The pertinence is that the author also here pleads for the historisation of the film’s meaning. He takes distance from the semiotic theories that assign an immanent significance to films. He has a rather low opinion of the ‘Lactusserianistic’ paradigm (p. 13) wherein the meaning of films is being subjected to structuralistic (L. Althusser) or psycho-analytic analysis (J. Lacan), without any interest in the ways in which a concrete public happens to conceive the meanings of these films. He pleads for a ‘historical materialist approach’, whereby it is examined ‘how viewers might have been able to interpret films in a historical moment of exhibition, taking into account the subject matter and its treatment in itself, and the wider social context, the debates and discourses of the time which those viewers would have been familiar and which would have provided frames of reference within which to make meanings from the material provided by the film’ (p. 19). Films need to be placed in a discursive context that invariably remains heterogeneous and contradictory while likewise evolving in time. The author dislikes the concept Zeitgeist to imbue films with meaning, since it issues from the reductionist and misleading idea of the existence of social and cultural consensus. The theory from Chapter one is applied to an analysis of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), wherein the author demonstrates that this particular movie generated a host of different meanings amongst the audiences, depending on the discursive context wherein the story was set: during the 1950s, a popularised medical discourse about virility; during the 1960s, a film-analytic discourse; during the 1970–1980 years, a cine-psychoanalytic discourse. All of such readings are ‘true’. It is the task of the film-history researcher ‘to trace the diachronically changing meanings of the film as it removed from one discursive context and repositioned within another at different times’ (p. 99).