Jason Jacobs

The first encounter: Observations on the chronology of encounter with some adaptations of Lewis Carroll's Alice books

The article argues for the necessity of taking into account not only the chronology of adaptation but also the chronology of encounter, using as a starting point an instance of an adaptation student who had seen the 1951 Disney film Alice in Wonderland as a child many times, long before her subsequent encounter with Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It considers a selection of adaptations of Carroll’s work, including the 1950 Disney television promotion of its 1951 film and the 1966 Jonathan Miller’s BBC adaptation, to explore the probable consequences of different sequences of encounter.

From Public–Private Virtue to Cultural-Corporate Amoeba: Mr Blobby and the Rise of BBC Worldwide During the 1990s

In 1991, a BBC taskforce inquired into the organization’s efficiency. One of its reports, BBC the Entrepreneur, observed that ‘commerce is no longer incompatible with the BBC’s core businesses’ and that, ‘entrepreneurialism was a requirement of the 1980s and will still have an important part to play in the public sector in the 1990s. The BBC’s involvement in commerce signals that it is a part of the market.’ In fact, the BBC had participated in the market since the 1950s, running co-productions, selling merchandise and publications, exploiting its archive, and sponsoring exhibitions, although these activities were constrained by an overwhelming institutional sense of the virtues of public service broadcasting. However, by the 1990s, as this report indicated, there was a radical shift towards welcoming commercial values as a means to underpin and stimulate entrepreneurial behaviour. This article tracks the career of Mr Blobby, a humorous character featured on the variety show Noel’s House Party (1991–1998) as representative of this shift. We argue that, while Mr Blobby was frequently read as an emblem of simple-minded commercial degradation, he also represented a transitional and generative development in the evolution of the solid corporate metabolism of BBC Worldwide of the present day.

The persistence of television: The case of The Good Life

We argue here that rather than being threatened by new modes of delivery and of viewing, television persists and that this can be charted by examining the familiarity and recognisability of television across the post-World War II period, looking at British, American and Australian programmes, personalities and practices, including promotion. The article presents a case study of the BBC sitcom The Good Life to show some ways that television persists. It considers the sitcom genre, institutional practices, repeat screenings, particular types of spin-off programmes and the place of the show in the subsequent careers of the main actors.