Elke Weissmann

Excluded from the Institutional Habitus: The Joint Student Experience.

This article examines the student experience for a particular cohort, namely the joint honours students, at a post-1992 university in the United Kingdom. These students are enrolled in degree courses that combine two subjects at one university. Little attention has so far been given to such students whose experience is decidedly different from that of single honours students. By using a mixed methodology including quantitative and qualitative questionnaires, focus groups, individual interview and ethnography, the article attempts to highlight elements of the student experience that are unique to the joint provision. It will draw on the concept of ‘institutional habitus’ to argue that joint honours students experience their time at university often in isolation and as excluded from the institutional norm.

Paying for Fewer Imports The BBC License Fee 1975—1981 and Attitudes toward American Imports

This article investigates the impact of the BBC license fee negotiations between 1975 and 1981 on the relationship between the broadcaster and American programming. It highlights the increasing dependence of the BBC on imported programming and on the export of content to America due to a series of below-inflation increases that left the BBC financially weakened. The article’s main concern, however, is with the management of attitudes toward American television that were exploited by key executive personnel in the United Kingdom for political ends: the campaign for a higher license fee. The author argues that the successive campaigns during the late 1970s exploited fears of Americanization to emphasize the lowering of quality in the output on the BBC, which connected to debates around public service ideals and hence, to the legitimization of the license fee. The campaigns ultimately also affected public attitudes, which increasingly registered American programming in relation to the lowering of standards on the BBC.

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.

Ephemeral TV – Special edition:

One night in Miami, still dazed from a week on an Atlantic liner, I began watching a film and at first had some difficulty in adjusting to a much greater frequency of commercial ‘breaks’. Yet this was a minor problem compared to what eventually happened. Two other films, which were to be shown on the same channel on other nights, began to be inserted as trailers. A crime in San Francisco (the subject of the original film) began to operate in an extraordinary counterpoint not only with the deodorant and cereal commercials but with a romance in Paris and the eruption of a prehistoric monster who laid waste to New York. (1974: 91–92)

Conventionally beautiful: Contemplative images in the personal reflective narratives of Who Do You Think You Are?, The Monastery and The Convent:

This article examines the hybrid documentary series Who Do You Think You Are?, The Monastery and The Convent in relation to their ability to update the documentary format. It asks if new forms of engagement with documentary subjects are enabled by the impact of light entertainment and reality television genres. It argues that although the generic mix contributes to the situation of truth in the tension between the public and the private, it is a set of static images, used particularly often in reflective moments, that facilitate a more introspective and intrinsic form of learning. These images resemble closely those used in popular anthologies of poetry or meditation books, in that they foreground their poetic function and hence appear to offer something to look at rather than primarily conveying additional meaning.

Drama counts: uncovering Channel 4's history with quantitative research methods

Quantitative research methods have largely been used in sociological approaches of television studies, but less so to uncover institutional or textual histories. This paper attempts to extend the use of quantitative research methods for television studies by introducing readers to a database collected about television drama shown on British terrestrial television between 1970 and 2000. It argues that quantitative research methods can falsify existing hypotheses as well as reveal relationships that have previously been overlooked. In particular, this paper investigates Channel 4s history in regards to American imports and argues that we need to understand Channel 4s increased reliance on imports – countering the hypothesis that new broadcasters decreasingly import programming when they become established – by investigating its particular history. This history shows several overlaps with the American network NBC in regard to target audiences which made NBC comedy particularly interesting to Channel 4 in the 1980s and 1990s.

Watching CSI: A study of British audiences watching Channel 5 and 5 USA

Despite consumption patterns gradually changing, the notion of flow remains a key concept drawn on by scholars to understand television. As a concept, ‘flow’ is connected to an understanding of the difference of television from other media as far as the viewing experience is concerned: rather than a single film, audiences encounter a number of small units that are combined in the process of audiences’ sense making. In this understanding, ephemera become as important as programmes as they interlink to create a meaningful whole. On the other hand, John Ellis argues that the more typical form for television is actually the segment which contains a separate meaning within itself. Using an audience ethnography, this article argues that in the experience of audiences, the concepts of flow and segmentation are both in evidence. Rather than seeing them as opposing, therefore, they must be understood as complementary in order to fully account for audiences’ experiences and sense making of television.

Schauspielerische Qualität und narrative Innovation in CSI: Den Tätern auf der Spur

Amerikanische Fernsehserien gelten seit den 1990er-Jahren weltweit als qualitativ wertvoll. Dies ist besonders uberraschend angesichts fruherer Bewertungen von Serien wie Die Dornenvogel (ABC, 1983) und Dallas (CBS, 1978-1991), die auch in den 1980er-Jahren noch regelmasig als Kitsch und Melodramen kritisiert wurden. Inzwischen werden amerikanische Serien, vor allen Dingen wenn sie vom Kabelkanal HBO produziert werden, jedoch als Qualitatsstandard vorgefuhrt.

Transnational Aesthetic Influences and Performance

The previous chapter has already drawn attention to the importance of aesthetic choices to the success and failure of imports. It highlighted that the opulent sets and high fashion of US soap opera and similar aesthetic choices in later ‘high end drama’ (Nelson 2007a) meant that UK distributors and viewers could draw on a tradition of pleasures associated with US drama that fitted well into stereotyped assumptions about US riches. In comparison, UK Northern Realism with its emphasis on working-class life and politics represented a style that emphasizes the social reality of the working classes, proved too different for US distributors even if US audiences clearly found pleasures in these dramas.

US and UK Television, 1970 to 2010

In order to understand why UK and US broadcasting have emerged as transnational systems, it is important to understand the broader historical, political and economic contexts that shape the relationship between the UK and the USA. In this chapter, a historical overview of UK and US broadcasting is set within the background of their political and economic histories and their shared culture. The overview of their histories indicates close trade relations which are cemented by a shared liberal (and later neo-liberal) ideology which also affects the media industries (Hallin and Mancini 2004, Wiener and Hampton 2007). Such similarities also allow for the relatively easy trade of cultural product and in particular television drama which both countries increasingly rely on as a consequence of deregulation and audience fragmentation.