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.