Christopher Hogg

Acting in British Television

This book offers the first in-depth exploration of acting processes in contemporary British television production. Centred around sixteen new interviews with celebrated British actors, including Rebecca Front, Julie Hesmondhalgh, Ken Stott, Penelope Wilton and John Hannah, this rich resource delves behind the scenes of a range of British television programmes in order to examine how actors build their characters for television, how they work on set and on location, and how they create their critically acclaimed portrayals for the screen. The book investigates actors’ work across five diverse but popular television genres: soap opera, police drama, medical drama, comedy, and period drama. The books discussion of landmark television productions and its critical and contextual post-interview analysis of actor insights makes a valuable contribution to scholarship across Television Studies; the study of theatre, performance and acting; as well as Cultural Studies and Media Studies more broadly.

Cracking the USA? Interpreting UK-to-US TV drama translations

For well over half a century, British TV drama production has both inherited from and aimed to appeal to nations and cultures beyond the UK, particularly the lucrative (yet notoriously tough) US TV market. However, in the context of mainstream American broadcasting, British-produced imports have never been anything more than a peripheral presence on US small screens. A currently prominent production strategy aiming to counter the mainstream US TV markets aversion to foreign-sourced drama, in an attempt to access prime-time broadcasting positions, is a process which can be labelled as UK-to-US TV drama ‘translation’: the ‘recreation’ of British-based dramas within an American cultural framework. Whilst the cultural reconfiguration of game show and reality/lifestyle TV formats has received heightened critical attention in recent years, investigation into the international translation of TV drama remains less developed. This paper investigates both the internal textual operations and the external production dynamics involved in the process of UK-to-US TV drama translation, drawing on direct interview material from industry professionals. The UK and US versions of the crime drama Cracker constitute the core translation case study, utilising the close analysis of text and production context as a lens through which to examine the mechanics of UK-to-US TV drama translation.

Re-evaluating the Archive in Stephen Poliakoff's Shooting the Past

In the increasingly fragmented, cost-conscious and competitive terrain of modern British broadcasting, such creative autonomy is atypical within the mechanics of the industry process. As Robin Nelson notes, ‘as both writer and director . . . Poliakoff’s work is as close to “authored drama’’ as it is possible to be in a necessarily collaborative, creative endeavour’ (Nelson 2006: 124). Indeed, Poliakoff’s dual credentials as writer and director compound this sense of authorship, forging links with the writer-led traditions of British theatre and television, and with more recent cinematic conceptions of director as creator. In this way, Poliakoff has generated a public image of himself as British television auteur par excellence: writing, directing and overseeing every aspect of his work. When I interviewed Poliakoff in September 2007, he made clear that he could no longer imagine working on a television piece with less artistic control than he presently enjoys, a far cry from the circumstances of the majority of creatives currently working within the prevailing production-line methods of the television industry. Further linking Poliakoff’s work to the televisual branding of ‘quality’ and ‘authored drama’ is the aura of must-see, special event television which surrounds the publicity and scheduling of his output. For

The punk-rock king: Musical anachronism in period film

Music has a powerful indexical ability to evoke particular times and places. Such an ability has been exploited at length by the often-elaborate soundscapes of period films, which regularly utilise incidental scores and featured period songs to help root their narrative action in past times, and to immerse their audiences in the sensibilities of a different age. However, this article will begin to examine the ways in which period film soundtracks can also be used to complicate a narrative sense of time and place through the use of ‘musical anachronism’: music conspicuously ‘out of time’ with the temporality depicted on screen. Through the analysis of a sequence from the film W.E. (Madonna, 2011) and the consideration of existing critical and conceptual contexts, this article will explore how anachronistic soundtracks can function beyond ‘postmodern novelty’ or ‘nuisance’ to historical verisimilitude, instead offering alternative modes of engagement with story and history.