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The period between 1965 and 1975 is considered to be the golden age of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s television drama. The 1960s and the 1970s marked the shift in values and culture of British television. During these times, the established traditions were questioned and rewritten and the tastefulness of TV programs altered. The boundaries of creativity were also transgressed in this era of British television. This chapter highlights several television dramas and a number of plays which tested the boundaries of British programming and contributed to its eventual development.

British superheroes draw from a distinctive local tradition of superhero media. A look at the long tradition of portrayals of superheroes in British media suggests that these superheroes offer a different interpretation of the phenomenon that undermines classic and - by implication - American concepts of superheroes. For the past 40 years, most British television shows concerned with the adventures of superheroes have taken a keen interest in the corrupting, comedic or downright ridiculous aspects of a world in which certain individuals are endowed with superhuman powers. This chapter offers an historical account of British superheroes and analyzes three contemporary superhero shows in detail - My Hero (2000-2006), No Heroics (2008), and Misfits (from 2009) – thereby producing a taxonomy of British television responses to the superhero phenomenon.

This chapter focuses on interviews that feature the contemporary perspectives of Black Britons working within the London television market. Issues for discussion with the interviewees included representations of race and class, programming and opportunities for minorities, empowerment and opportunity, Americanisation as an influence, the birth of Black-owned Identity Television, presence, diversity and the future of Black Britons on BBC television. Subjects include recent BBC Director of Multicultural Programming Jan Oliver, cultural critic Stuart Hall, actor Treva Etienne, journalist Neema Kambona, BBC presenter Brenda Emmanus, journalist Kadija George-Sesay and BBC Diversity Manager Cyril Husbands. Follow-up interviews years later continue these discussions of, among other issues, newer programmes, current representations, and future possibilities for diverse programming. By comparison, their concerns exemplify the challenges still facing these professionals of colour when dealing with the hegemony and patronage of the BBC and the British television industry. Through a series of open-ended questions, media professionals comment on the BBC and its broadcast policies. These discussions occurred within the 1990s and were considered a turning point by some for racial representations on British television. Each question and subsequent response reflect decades of personal experiences with the service.

This chapter explores a multitude of publications on British television history that have both hailed and deconstructed the policies and influences of the BBC. Since 1922, the organisation has attempted to serve audiences with an intention to inform and acculturate them on every subject deemed acceptable. Within its development, a public service agenda was an essential part of programming practices, influenced greatly by Sir John Reith, who, despite his extreme dislike for both politicians and television, later served as the Director-General of the organisation during its first sixteen years of service. Prior to his departure in 1938, the first public demonstration of the Baird Television System took place and audiences had a choice of musical variety programmes, and a host of dramatic teleplays and informational talks, each demonstrating the ability of television to hopefully do what BBC radio had done for nearly fifteen years: entertain and inform a variety of publics on current, global and national events.

This chapter discusses the formation of and the critical response to a canon of British television drama in terms of a conflict between aesthetic modernism and critical realism. It notes that some of the critics' responses to Beckett's work in the 1970s reflected the critical debate of the time over the politics of naturalistic versus avant-garde form. It determines that Beckett's television plays are placed within a complex dialectic of critical discourses around the aesthetics and politics of television drama, and part of this debate is about the address to the television audience. Finally, this chapter tries to link critical work on Beckett's television plays with discursive models of how television audiences were imagined by critics, television institutions and authors.

This chapter examines how BBC radio and its practices created possibilities for the recognition of African-Caribbean voices, as they discussed life in England years before the arrival of Windrush, and just before television re-emerged as a cultural force. It also examines how programmes created for West Indian audiences changed foci, and began to offer varied, personal perspectives on life for African-Caribbean immigrants. It outlines the influence of radio upon the BBC Television Service, management directives and pre-war programming. Beginning in 1939, the programme Calling the West Indies featured West Indians troops on active service reading letters on air to their families back home in the Islands. The programme later became Caribbean Voices (1943–58) and highlighted West Indian writers who read and discussed literary works on the World Service. These programmes offered rare opportunities for West Indians to discuss their perspectives on life among white Britons and subsequent social issues.

This chapter provides a profile of the television-series writer and creator Jack Rosenthal, who was born in 1931 in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, the second son of Sam and Leah. His parents were working class and Jewish, elements of his background that characterised all his work. Rosenthal was delighted to be commissioned in 1961 to write for Coronation Street, a soap opera set in a milieu he knew well. Almost everything for which his writing became famous stems from Coronation Street, including his interest in the underprivileged and the underdog, and their salty, everyday discourse and Englishness. Rosenthal's career paralleled and was integral to a formative period in the history of British television drama and he worked for the independent television company Granada before becoming a freelance writer in 1962. Throughout his career, his writing was characterised by the same kinds of comic verbal trope. Despite his many industry awards and nominations, Rosenthal's archive contains several examples of plays that were never televised or filmed.

This chapter examines to what extent one may identify Hot Fuzz (2007) as an example of British national cinema. Hot Fuzz's use of relocated genre parody means that it addresses its audience in multiple but mutually reconcilable ways: as a ‘Hollywood’ movie that is not quite Hollywood, and as a ‘British’ movie that acknowledges the possible limitations of ‘British cinema’ as a concept. The chapter then identifies the ways in which Hot Fuzz references earlier examples of British television and cinema within its parodic references. The film makes significant narrative use of these inter-texts in ways that complicate the supposed direction of Hot Fuzz's parody towards American cinema. The chapter concludes that part of Hot Fuzz's appeal is the way it brings into focus various points of discussion about British cinema in the early twenty-first century, as well as offering an entertaining and economically viable response to these debates.

Since the early 1980s, massive changes have occurred in the contractual status of the industry workforce of British television. Estimates in the early 1990s suggested that sixty per cent of the workforce in British television were self-employed freelance or self-employed owners of small independent production companies. Since the 1970s, there has been a large growth in self-employment in Britain. Both women and men have seen an increase in this type of contractual working arrangement, although men have a larger number in this type of working arrangement than women. This chapter offers new insights into gender inequality over time as it is reflected in this growing form of employment status in the British economy. It explores the in- and out-of-work experiences of self-employed workers in television production in Britain in the 1990s. The chapter uses the data provided by the Television Industry Tracking Study (ITS), and examines some of the dynamic elements of employment experiences. The rest of the chapter summarises the research on self-employment based on cross-sectional data. The chapter then presents more details on the context of the changing structure of the television industry. It also discusses the models for employment continuity and the findings from modelling these elements of employment continuity of women and men working in the television industry.

With the decline of the single play on British television during the 1970s and 1980s, authored television drama increasingly took the form of the serial, or mini-series. Series and serial drama provided an opportunity to spread the costs of production, while building and retaining audiences. The single play, on the other hand, was not only expensive to produce, it could not guarantee audiences in the way that series and serials could. This chapter shows that Troy Kennedy Martin had experimented with the drama serial in the early 1960s with Diary of a Young Man and the unproduced Macheath, it was Masterspy and the transitional drama Fear of God that bridged the gap between his contributions to drama series in the 1970s and the more sustained drama serials of the 1980s. This drama provided him the opportunity to explore some contemporary concerns, within a drama serial format.

This chapter examines several of Clarke's productions from the 1980s, exploring how his crucial themes, including the gap between personal narratives and state discourses, repetition and the restriction of movement, are employed in his questioning of Thatcherite values. It covers various productions in the period between Beloved Enemy and Road, specifically his plays on terrorism and Northern Ireland, Psy-Warriors, Contact and Elephant. Throughout the chapter, emphasis is placed on the way Clarke dissected the political climate of the 1980s, particularly the discourses of Thatcherism, to discuss British television drama in the 1980s. It becomes imperative to take some account of how he was engaged in an ongoing dialogue with Thatcherite ideas, meanings and values.

This chapter summarizes some well-rehearsed debates from the early to mid-twentieth century, concerning realism and naturalism in television drama and the impact on those debates of poststructuralist and postmodern theory. This lays the ground for a more complex discussion of the assumptions about form, subjectivity and identity, production and reception that were produced on the way. Such issues help identify limitations and problems within the postmodern, ‘post-Marxist’ approaches that often dominated television criticism in the 1990s. The relationship between politics and aesthetics was most often defined through reference to the Marxist-socialist tradition and more specifically to the work of theatre practitioner and theorist Bertolt Brecht. Brecht famously developed a critique of what he termed ‘Aristotelian’ or ‘dramatic theatre’, which he defined as offering an illusion of reality that conformed to the ideology of the parasitic bourgeoisie. Usually understood as an attack on naturalism and/or realism, Brecht's analysis of this aesthetic embraced all aspects of production including illusionist staging, linear narratives, psychologically motivated characterisation and naturalistic acting.

This is a study about Tony Garnett, forty-year actor, story editor and then producer, within the context of British television, film and Hollywood cinema. This chapter attempts to describe, explicate and analyse Garnett's work. Garnett has been responsible for a considerable variety of work, including some of the most influential plays and films in British television history. Garnett is one of a small group of television producers who have helped to define what being a television producer is. He is particularly hostile to ‘auteurism’, insisting that drama production is a collective practice, artistically and socially. Auteurism in its crudest form explains the creation of ‘significant’ drama as the product of a single, authorial consciousness. Garnett has worked in a variety of production contexts across the decades, and his role as producer has altered in the process. Garnett's authorial signature is intimately connected to a realist politics and aesthetics, which is still the best way of describing the spine that runs though his work. Realism, with its various qualifiers— social, magical, hyper—and its near-synonyms (notably naturalism), is a much-debated term in cultural criticism.