Jonathan Bignell

Docudramatizing the real: Developments in British TV docudrama since 1990

ABSTRACT The article discusses the reasons for the growth in television docudrama in Britain since 1990. These stimulating factors include regulatory frameworks, especially the Broadcasting Act of 1990 that affected existing television institutions by introducing increased competition and budgetary pressures. Challenges to television documentary from falling audiences, and to drama from rising costs, also led to a reconfiguration of British television schedules and the emergence of new hybrid programme genres. The pressures of this changed environment led the hybrid form of docudrama to take on some of the functions of history programmes, social affairs, political investigation and responses to key events such as the September 11, 2001attacks. Docudrama makers were increasingly required to seek co-production finance and distribution deals with overseas television channels. Docudrama was already controversial because of its relationship with antecedent documentary and dramatic traditions, but the post-1990 British contexts presented both new problems and new opportunities. The relative immediacy of docudrama and its engagement with public affairs, married with its performativity and personalized mode of address, equipped docudrama to respond to challenging circumstances. It could fulfil the capacities of the television medium for both social extension and intimate involvement in a period when its component genres faced significant obstacles in doing so.

Beckett on screen: the television plays

Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Production 2 Broadcasting contexts 3 Institutions and authorship 4 Intertexts 5 Evaluations 6 Afterword Bibliography Index

TRANSATLANTIC SPACES: Production, location and style in 1960s–1970s action-adventure TV series

This paper argues that transatlantic hybridity connects space, visual style and ideological point of view in British television action-adventure fiction of the 1960s–1970s. It analyses the relationship between the physical location of TV series production at Elstree Studios, UK, the representation of place in programmes, and the international trade in television fiction between the UK and USA. The TV series made at Elstree by the ITC and ABC companies and their affiliates linked Britishness with an international modernity associated with the USA, while also promoting national specificity. To do this, they drew on film production techniques that were already common for TV series production in Hollywood. The British series made at Elstree adapted versions of US industrial organization and television formats, and made programmes expected to be saleable to US networks, on the basis of British experiences in TV co-production with US companies and of the international cinema and TV market.

Programmes and Canons

the analysis of programmes, as locations for the understanding and critique of television aesthetics, institutions and audiences. Whether considering concepts of genre, the politics of representations, the activity of audiences, or the diachronic changes in television culture, the force of critical argument rests to an important degree on the citation of programmes as the evidence on which conclusions are based. These citations of programme examples then come to form a canon of privileged material, especially when they are re-cited in subsequent work and disseminated in pedagogical contexts. Studying television relies on constructing canons of programmes that represent important historical processes and turning points, and this article considers that issue especially in relation to the history of British television drama. The methodological issue at stake here is how programme examples shape theorists’ and students’ understanding, but examples are necessarily both representative and also exceptional. Each is there to represent a larger context and history, and thus performs its function by being equivalent or exchangeable with other programmes that are similar to it. Yet each must also exceed the field it stands for, and be more than typical, just because it was chosen rather than an alternative. The selection of one example rather than another will always have a rationale, whether that is a pragmatic issue of its accessibility or familiarity, or a theoretical one relating to its formative role, subsequent influence, internal complexity or some other reason for privileging it. So there is a contradiction inherent in methodologies that work by selecting examples, since representative-ness and selection lead in different directions while both are conducive to the construction of canons. The duality in what a programme example is and does is not just an interesting theoretical crux that argues for reflexive and deconstructive attitudes to doing television studies. It is also a political and economic matter that affects how books get published, how research gets funded, and how university courses are designed. As far as educational courses are concerned, the predominant organisational principle Programmes and Canons

Television and the Popular. Viewing from the British Perspective

The academic discipline of television studies has been constituted by the claim that television is worth studying because it is popular. Yet this claim has also entailed a need to defend the subject against the triviality that is associated with the television medium because of its very popularity. This article analyses the many attempts in the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries to constitute critical discourses about television as a popular medium. It focuses on how the theoretical currents of Television Studies emerged and changed in the UK, where a disciplinary identity for the subject was founded by borrowing from related disciplines, yet argued for the specificity of the medium as an object of criticism. Eschewing technological determinism, moral pathologization and sterile debates about televisions supposed effects, UK writers such as Raymond Williams addressed television as an aspect of culture. Television theory in Britain has been part of, and also separate from, the disciplinary fields of media theory, literary theory and film theory. It has focused its attention on institutions, audio-visual texts, genres, authors and viewers according to the ways that research problems and theoretical inadequacies have emerged over time. But a consistent feature has been the problem of moving from a descriptive discourse to an analytical and evaluative one, and from studies of specific texts, moments and locations of television to larger theories. By discussing some historically significant critical work about television, the article considers how academic work has constructed relationships between the different kinds of objects of study. The article argues that a fundamental tension between descriptive and politically activist discourses has confused academic writing about ›the popular‹. Television study in Britain arose not to supply graduate professionals to the television industry, nor to perfect the instrumental techniques of allied sectors such as advertising and marketing, but to analyse and critique the mediums aesthetic forms and to evaluate its role in culture. Since television cannot be made by ›the people‹, the empowerment that discourses of television theory and analysis aimed for was focused on disseminating the tools for critique. Recent developments in factual entertainment television (in Britain and elsewhere) have greatly increased the visibility of ›the people‹ in programmes, notably in docusoaps, game shows and other participative formats. This has led to renewed debates about whether such ›popular‹ programmes appropriately represent ›the people‹ and how factual entertainment that is often despised relates to genres hitherto considered to be of high quality, such as scripted drama and socially-engaged documentary television. A further aspect of this problem of evaluation is how television globalisation has been addressed, and the example that the issue has crystallised around most is the reality TV contest Big Brother. Television theory has been largely based on studying the texts, institutions and audiences of television in the Anglophone world, and thus in specific geographical contexts. The transnational contexts of popular television have been addressed as spaces of contestation, for example between Americanisation and national or regional identities. Commentators have been ambivalent about whether the disciplines role is to celebrate or critique television, and whether to do so within a national, regional or global context. In the discourses of the television industry, ›popular television‹ is a quantitative and comparative measure, and because of the overlap between the programming with the largest audiences and the scheduling of established programme types at the times of day when the largest audiences are available, it has a strong relationship with genre. The measurement of audiences and the design of schedules are carried out in predominantly national contexts, but the article refers to programmes like Big Brother that have been broadcast transnationally, and programmes that have been extensively exported, to consider in what ways they too might be called popular. Strands of work in television studies have at different times attempted to diagnose what is at stake in the most popular programme types, such as reality TV, situation comedy and drama series. This has centred on questions of how aesthetic quality might be discriminated in television programmes, and how quality relates to popularity. The interaction of the designations ›popular‹ and ›quality‹ is exemplified in the ways that critical discourse has addressed US drama series that have been widely exported around the world, and the article shows how the two critical terms are both distinct and interrelated. In this context and in the article as a whole, the aim is not to arrive at a definitive meaning for ›the popular‹ inasmuch as it designates programmes or indeed the medium of television itself. Instead the aim is to show how, in historically and geographically contingent ways, these terms and ideas have been dynamically adopted and contested in order to address a multiple and changing object of analysis.

HOW TO WATCH TELEVISION?: Pedagogy and Paedocracy in Beckett's Television Plays

This article responds to scholarship on Becketts television plays that regards them as positive interventions which encourage the viewer to reconsider the conventions of the medium, and that raise the cultural standards of television drama. In making claims about how the plays address and educate their viewers, critical approaches shift between conceptions of audience. This analysis of Becketts plays on British television reconsiders their aesthetic strategies, their relationship with television culture, and the dominant assumptions of critical writing about them by examining the parallel between conceptions of the audience and conceptions of the child in writing about television and Becketts television plays.

The Spaces of The Wednesday Play (BBC TV 1964–1970): Production, Technology and Style

The BBC television drama anthology The Wednesday Play, broadcast from 1964 to 1970 on the BBC1 channel, was high-profile and often controversial in its time and has since been central to accounts of British television’s ‘golden age.’ This article demonstrates that production technologies and methods were more diverse at that time than is now acknowledged, and that The Wednesday Play dramas drew both approving but also very critical responses from contemporary viewers and professional reviewers. It analyses the ways that the physical spaces of production for different dramas in the series, and the different technologies of shooting and recording that were adopted in these production spaces, are associated with but do not determine aesthetic style. The adoption of single-camera location filming rather than the established production method of multi-camera studio videotaping in some of the dramas in the series has been important to The Wednesday Play’s significance, but each production method was used in different ways. The dramas drew their dramatic forms and aesthetic emphases from both theatre and cinema, as well as connecting with debates about the nature of drama for television. Institutional and regulatory frameworks such as control over staff working away from base, budgetary considerations and union agreements also impacted on decisions about how programmes were made. The article makes use of records from the BBC Written Archives Centre, as well as published scholarship. By placing The Wednesday Play in a range of overlapping historical contexts, its identity can be understood as transitional, differentiated and contested.

James Bond’s Forgotten Beginnings: Television Adaptations

This chapter analyses the neglected story of James Bond’s early life in television. There were numerous approaches to Fleming about adapting his Bond novels for television. In 1954 the American CBS network broadcast Casino Royale as a live TV drama, the first screen Bond, but for decades afterwards it remained a ‘lost’ programme. The novel Dr. No, leading to the first Bond film adaptation, derived from a pilot episode for a Bond television series that was never made. A cycle of 1960s British and American television series such as The Avengers, Danger Man and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. drew on Bondian iconography and narrative tropes. These were echoes of an absent television Bond, whose remediations illuminate questions of medium specificity, adaptation and genre.

Performing television history

An expanded conception of performance study can disturb current theoretical and historical assumptions about television’s medial identity. The article considers how to write histories of the dominant forms and assumptions about performance in British and American television drama and analyses how acting is situated in relation to the multiple meaning-making components of television. A longitudinal, wide-ranging analysis is briefly sketched to show that the concept of performance, from acting to the display of television’s mediating capability, can extend to the analysis of how the television medium ‘performed’ its own identity to shape its distinctiveness in specific historical circumstances.

Agents, beneficiaries and victims: picturing people on the land

This chapter analyses the conventions of rural representation in photographic and film images from the collections at the Museum of English Rural Life (University of Reading, UK). Their iconography is in dialogue with stated and unstated assumptions about the role of the English countryside, for example in relation to food production, the preservation of rural life and rural heritage, the role of technology and patterns of labour. The people visible in the MERL images were the agents of change, and its beneficiaries and victims. To study these images opens up a new way of understanding modernity and technology, changes in rural work, leisure and heritage.