Stephen Lacey

Some Thoughts on Television History and Historiography: A British Perspective:

‘suffered from a lack of historical studies’ responding instinctively to ‘a frantically contemporary agenda.’ He compared this situation unfavourably with both British film studies and the study of television in the United States, noting that there is little that engages with ‘historical scholarship on programme culture.’ This was certainly accurate when it was written, but the picture is somewhat different now, particularly where the history of television drama is concerned, and, six-years on, we are seeing the kind of scholarship whose absence Corner lamented. The result is that the history – or, rather histories, since there is more than one in play – of television drama are coming into view in a new way, at a time when the technologies of dissemination and the conditions of television viewing are changing in profound ways. The following is indicative rather than comprehensive, but it is worth surveying some of the work that has been done. To begin at (or near) the beginning: early television drama has been thoroughly documented by Jason Jacobs, who demonstrated that drama from the era of live television had an aesthetic of its own and was not simply stage drama shoehorned into the studio. John Caughie, too, has revisited both the history of early television and the moment of the 1960s, the era of the BBC’s ‘Wednesday Play,’ in its cultural and historical contexts. There have also been important era-specific accounts of early television, particularly Janet Thumin’s study of the gendered nature of drama and its audiences in the 1950s, which Corner notes. (The influence of contemporary feminist scholarship on the construction of television histories more generally has been significant, especially in the area of popular drama and its audiences [see Charlotte Brunsdon]). The study of historical television drama has also begun to draw on the perspectives of practitioners and professionals. The collection edited by Jonathan Bignell, Madeline Macmurraugh-Kavanagh and myself contains essays dealing primarily (though not exclusively) with the 1960s and 1970s, and includes accounts by directors, writers and producers. This period, which is generally seen as crucial to the Some Thoughts on Television History and Historiography: A British Perspective

Real performance: Ordinary people and the ‘problem’ of acting in constructed documentaries

ABSTRACT This essay takes as its starting point the recent phenomenon of ‘constructed documentaries’, which require participants to act as if in a historical time or place that is not their own. Noting that there is little critical consensus about, though much interest in, what kind of ‘acting’ is undertaken, the essay explores some of the problems and issues that arise, drawing on an essay written by the actor/director Michael Kirby (‘From Acting to Non-Acting’). Kirbys methodology is applied to two ‘BBC Cymru Wales’ constructed documentaries, The Coal House (2007) and Coal House at War (2008). It is argued that ‘acting’ in such programmes is not a fixed state; rather, participants move along an acting/non-acting continuum, which frequently requires them to hold two time frames—of their ‘real’, contemporary world and their reconstructed world—in tension. The analysis is informed by research with audiences of both series.

Making our own history: some reflections on drama in universities

This article is written out of the desire to continue the debate started by previous contributors to STP concerning the history and current condition of drama as it is taught and researched in UK universities. Its author is the current Chair of the Standing Conference of University Drama Departments, although he is writing here in a personal capacity. The article accepts Connolly’s characterisation of the current situation as the product of neoliberal ideology, ‘economism’ and ‘commodification’ and uses this analysis as a framework within which to consider some of the immediate and longer term issues facing the discipline, including student recruitment and graduate employment. The analysis also looks beyond the university sector and considers the implications for higher education of the pattern of decline in the number of school students taking General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSEs) and A levels in drama and performance. The article is not pessimistic, however, arguing that neoliberal hegemony is not complete and that there is space to influence debates as neoliberalism falters. There is now a good deal of evidence of the value of drama as an educational and cultural force in the public domain, and it is up to the discipline to exploit it. The healthy state of the discipline’s research culture, as revealed by the 2014 Research Excellence Framework results, is also a cause for celebration.

Screening Wales: Portrayal, Representation and Identity: A Case Study

In 2004, the BBC took the decision to re-launch what had been one of its fl agship programmes over the past four decades, Doctor Who (1963–89, 1996, 2005–present). In most respects this was an unremarkable decision as similar re-launches had taken place, oft en aft er signifi cant amounts of time had elapsed between series. What was intriguing about the 2004 ‘re-launch’ was the decision to produce the programme in Wales rather than its customary London base. Many long-standing Doctor Who fans read the decision negatively, assuming that the programme had been sent to a far-fl ung outpost of the BBC to die. Th is was expressed very strongly during the audience research phase of a study for the BBC Trust and Audience Council Wales carried out by the authors of this article along with Dr Ruth McElroy and Dr Rebecca Williams in 2009–101. Th e study examined the complex question of portrayal in television drama from and about Wales in the context of the huge international success of both Doctor Who and Torchwood (2006–present) in the period 2005–9. One particular audience group made up of self-selecting ‘fans’ of Doctor Who living in Wales articulated very clearly the expectation at the time of the programme’s re-launch that the BBC was putting it out to grass and that this was based mainly on the decision to produce it in Wales:

Too theatrical by half

I am a Principal Lecturer in the Department of Contemporary Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University. I have written on British theatre in the 1950s and 1960s, notably British Realist Theatre: The New Wave in its Context, 1956–1965 (Routledge, 1995). Given an abiding academic and personal interest in cinema, it was a short step to writing about film in the 1950s, too. Stephen Lacey Tuf768uf765uf772uf765 uf769uf773 uf76euf76f doubt that British theatre has been very important to the development of British cinema, and – the input of television in general and Channel 4 in particular notwithstanding – it remains so, as a quick glance at the number of film adaptations from stage plays from the 1980s and early 1990s testifies. This is clearly the case in the 1950s, not least because a great many films have their origins in the theatre. I estimate that of the 1,033 British films of the 1950s listed in David Quinlan’s British Sound Films, some 152 were based on stage plays. However, the provision of source texts is not the only issue, and this figure should be set alongside the 330 films in the decade that were based on novels and short stories, the 18 that came from radio and the 22 adapted from television. If theatre seems more important than other media to the cinema of the 1950s, then it is partly because there are deeper connections, and it is worth reminding ourselves of some of these. The institutions of theatre and cinema were, by the 1950s, bound to each other. Many of the dominant personnel of the cinema – actors, directors, technicians and writers – had backgrounds in the theatre. Even such luminaries of the period as Kenneth More and Dirk Bogarde began as stage actors. (More began in variety before moving into films via the legitimate theatre and Bogarde worked in both provincial repertory theatre as well as the West End before becoming a screen actor.) However, it was not a relationship between equals. Theatre occupied a higher cultural status than film, lending it a credibility and legitimacy that was needed by a medium conscious of its inferior status. This was particularly apparent in the attitude of many stage actors towards their screen work (the physical proximity of

Book Review: The TV Detective: Voices of Dissent in Contemporary Fiction: The TV Crime Drama, Making Crime Television: Producing Entertaining Representations of Crime for Television Broadcast:

Cheers (1982–1993) NBC. Charles/Burrows/Charles Productions/Paramount Television. Girls (2012–present) HBO. Apatow Productions. Sex and the City. Michael Patrick King (2008) New Line Cinema/HBO Films/Darren Star Productions. Sex and the City 2. Michael Patrick King (2010) New Line Cinema/HBO Films/Village Roadshow Pictures. Sex and the City (1998–2004) HBO. Darren Star Productions/HBO/Sex and the City Productions. Sohn A (2008) Sex and the City: The Movie. London: Headline.

The Censorship of British Drama 1900–1968: Volume Four: The Sixties by Steve Nicholson

This excellent and much-anticipated book is the final volume in Nicholson’s history of stage censorship in the twentieth century. Meticulously researched and fluently written, it begins in 1960 and...

The Spaces of Television

There are many different ways of talking about the spaces of television, especially television drama, and many of them are represented in this themed issue. For example, there is space in its physical sense – the spaces in which television is shot, including the studio, and the uses made of location (at which point ‘space’ interconnects with ‘place’); space as it is transformed by representation, which cannot be divorced from considerations of genre and style; and space as it is framed on the screen, in which choices of camera format and aspect ratio play a part. All of these have their histories, are underpinned by technological change, production practices and institutional processes, and require a variety of methods and approaches to be fully analysed and appreciated. Space as an analytical category has been relatively under-researched but was the main focus of an AHRC-funded project, ‘Spaces of Television: Production, Site and Style’, which ran from 2010 to 2015. Based at the University of Reading, the project was led by Professor Jonathan Bignell, with two Co-Investigators, Professor Stephen Lacey (University of South Wales) and Professor James Chapman (University of Leicester); three postdoctoral researchers, Dr Leah Panos, Dr Billy Smart and Dr Lucy Donaldson; and two PhD candidates, Ben Lamb and Victoria Byard. This special issue has been edited by Leah Panos with the support of members of the project team. Full details of the project’s outputs so far can be found at our website: www.reading.ac.uk/ftt/research/spacesoftelevision.aspx. The scope of the project gives an indication of how questions of space might be thought about, particularly in their historical contexts. It examined television fiction produced in the United Kingdom between 1955 and 1994, a period running from the beginning of the BBC/ITV ‘duopoly’ period to the year of the last drama anthology series shot on video in the BBC’s Television Centre studios, Performance (1991–94). It analysed how the material spaces of production, in TV studios and on location, conditioned the aesthetic forms of programmes and how modes of production and available technologies impacted on performance, camerawork, sound and visual design. It connected institutional histories to questions of stylistic practice and mise en scene, interrogating a wide range of production practices employed and revealing the aesthetic specificity of television via its conventions of spatial representation. The articles in this issue offer a glimpse of both the variety of methodological approaches used and the spectrum of production spaces and modes considered