'A waking dream': text, television, and transformation

I have to admit that I've been agonising for several days over what this blog update should cover, not for lack of material but a superfluity of it. I could have led with my ongoing research trips to the British Film Institute library in London, or Jonathan Foyle's guest appearance at Leicester University's consistently excellent New History Lab (http://www.newhistorylab.org/) to give a talk on 'Buildings and Places, conveying history in the 21st Century'. Jonathan was justly impressed by both the New History Lab's commitment to sharing research and their equal commitment to the dissemination of tea and home-made cake as a necessary complement to learning.

I could have written about my delight that I and my colleague, J, have moved into our office with recently installed I.T, shared library of books about television, and a biscuit tin that could be Time Lord technology, given how much is crammed into it; equally, I could have written about my disquiet that office residency does seem to have improved my productivity. I would have liked to think that my studies were dependent upon myself alone rather than my location but it seems that, for me, 'a room of one's own' does indeed help in achieving focus and clarity. Additionally, the office is on the sixteenth floor, which makes it a room of one's own with a view! (Cue groans and cries of 'Don't cross the streams!', I suspect.)

The subject of my update is, however, one which will be taking up a large part of my time over the next two weeks. I recently submitted several abstracts for upcoming conferences and one of them has been accepted to be presented as part of the Studies in Youth Culture conference at University of Leicester (http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/english/news/conferences/youth-in-studies-conference). The conference in question is an interdisciplinary postgraduate conference focussing on

"the nature, experience and depiction of youth – in its broadest definition – across history, culture and disciplines."

My paper will investigate representations of adolescence within the 1969 television adaptation of Alan Garner's The Owl Service by Granada Television. The Owl Service was published in 1967, subsequently winning the Carnegie and Guardian Awards, and focuses on the subsumption of the individual, adolescent subjectivities of Gwyn, Alison, and Roger by a repeating mythic pattern from Welsh mythology, the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi. Myth and adolescence are cognate borderlands in The Owl Service, inescapable schemas of revelation, transformation, sexual jealousy and betrayal, heavily inflected with the implications of belonging and exclusion through nationality, class, and localism. Granada Television adapted it two years later; an unusual choice for Sunday evening serialisation.

The Owl Service is remarkable as a contemporary transmedia text because of its intersecting avant-garde concerns and devices, the most notable of which are Garner's contrapuntal use of subjective time from the characters' perspectives and an overarching mythic temporality productive of narrative but destructive of individual people, generational conflict as children approach adolescence and an identity independent of their parents, and the resulting negotiation of these tensions of autonomy, authority, and sexuality both textually and as part of a rubric of 'appropriate' children's programming. In the year following its transmission, ITV submitted The Owl Service for consideration in the Prix Jeunesse International. It was subsequently rejected, Peter Plummer the series' producer stated, because

"the jury in Munich found it 'deeply disturbing' and questioned whether it was not indeed reprehensible to offer such material to young people".

Certainly, as both text and television, The Owl Service pushes the boundaries of representations of adolescence and the associated aesthetic and audience expectations. Filmed on location and in colour at a time when both were rare, and situated within a developing cultural discourse of the 'teenage', a concept and term that was only a few decades old, it was an revolutionary production at a time of social change and also, my paper will suggest, not coincidentally, a shift in Granada's contract that expanded their schedule to include the weekend and therefore also expanded their audience. A little controversy is always good for the bank balance. In addition, Granada could attempt to cultivate a new adolescent audience who, like the boys of the remand home where part of the programme was filmed, understood Alan Garner's assertion that The Owl Service was about "this lot of kids who can't get on with their parents." Whether viewers' parents also understood, or were willing to understand, is perhaps a disjunct that Granada were counting on as part of their marketing strategy. However, given the difficulties accessing ITV written archive material that Catherine Johnson and Rob Turnock cite in their introduction to ITV Cultures: Independent Television Over 50 Years, my representation of The Owl Service production as deliberately controversial at a textual level and aesthetically innovative at production level is necessarily speculative and dependent upon textual analysis and associated paratexts.

However, one of those paratexts is the utterly delightful Filming the Owl Service: A Children's Diary, written largely on location by Garner's children and containing such pre-Charlie and Lola gems as Adam's 'When we got back I had trouble with my sums. It has been nearly my worst day yet,' and Ellen's summary of ravioli as 'spaghetti bags with meat in them'. In addition to these bon mots, the book also reveals that circumstance forced filming to relocate from the production team's original location in Wales to Poulton Hall in the Wirral. Poulton Hall is not generally open to the public so I was delighted when the owner agreed to my request to visit and also stated that he would show me around and share his memories of filming. Researching on location, literally, is something of a departure for me as most of my previous work has depended solely upon textual analysis, but I'm hoping that my visit to Poulton Hall will be able to illustrate and elaborate upon my notions of how location filming, mise-en-scene, and post-production helped, in Bignell's phrasing, to 'suture' together notions of national and regional identity and landscape, and also create spaces of alterity which visually suggest myth, adolescence, and transformation.

I'm excited to be moving my research out into the wider field, but one thought tarnishes the bright gleam of opportunity: I'm going to have to leave the biscuit tin. It's a wrench, Reader.

Dilemmas and 'allegorical conundrums'

At my last supervision session, my thesis supervisor asked me to think about three key tasks: writing a case study of ITC's 'The Prisoner', locating and analysing production documents, and narrowing my research to several potential thesis titles. All of these have, in their own way, raised questions and issues; the last, however, is the only one for which I have found a macro. The internet never fails.

At the moment, my thesis research is broadly television fantasy programming from 1955 when ITV became Britain's first commercial television channel and its second ever terrestrial provider, preparing the way for what John Ellis describes as a move from the 'era of scarcity' in television to an 'era of availability' from the 1970s onward. What the establishment of ITV also does, of course, is complicate the idea of British television as having a 'public service remit', which was part of the foundations of the BBC. Consequently, the television industry as well as the discipline of television studies is always redrawing and renegotiating the cartography of 'quality' and 'popular' television. My remit runs up until 1994, the year prior to Channel 5's licensing, so I have forty years of British television from which to identify and study potential texts, and, problematically, some of the programmes which could provide profitable research may be 'missing, believed wiped', due to lack of recording and archiving technologies and epistemologies in early television. In such cases, reconstruction from written documents, paratexts, and interviews may be the only methodology available, and it's arguable whether this approach actually provides a holistic perspective on the programme in question. It seems a little like speculative archaeology at times, a Schliemann-esque attempt to draw cultural and geographical maps from fragments of fiction. Forty years of a developing television industry and the telefantasy genre is just too broad to cover with any hope of clarity and comprehensiveness. 

One of the focuses my supervisor has suggested is examining gender and sexuality within selected programmes of the period in question, and that idea has a lot of appeal. Some of my other research interests are feminist SF literature and queer theory, and applying some of the theory from these fields to British telefantasy could be both productive and fascinating. I suppose my main reservation with this idea is that it might be too easy for me to slip entirely into the theoretical, and neglect the production and reception contexts of the programmes I'm studying. Coming from a literature background, it's often very easy for me to concentrate on textual analysis to the detriment of other methodologies. Were I to narrow the thesis down to something like class, regionality and nationality across my texts, that might encourage me towards more methodological scope and flexibility, especially given the reification of the middle-class within and via the BBC and the regional shifts and focus of the ITV contracts.

Fortunately I still have a while before I need to make a definite decision and nail my colours to the thesis mast, so to speak, so I'll mothball the cardigan and glasses for the time being. In the meantime, it's back to looking at horror as an analogue for capitalism in 'The Prisoner'.

Be seeing you.