Well, this is a little bit embarrassing. *Blows cobwebs off blog* Can I claim that I haven't been blogging because I've been working too hard learning things? Yes, let's go with that. I haven't blogged because I was power-researching! (I have a note from my supervisor.)
Hopefully, I'll update over the next few weeks with all the things I've been doing, like my visits to the BBC Written Archives Centre, the conferences I've presented at and organised (!), teaching, organising a research seminar group and oh! so many things! See? Very busy.
What I'm actually going to blog about today is the upcoming run of open screenings of British television I've organised. My own doctoral research focuses on British television history; more specifically, British children's television fantasy from 1955 to 1994. Television is important to me, not just as a field of history but as part of my
own history. Part of the desire to work on children's television fantasy came from my own memories of it, watching
The Children of Green Knowe, and
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,
Dark Season,
Archer's Goon,
SuperGran,
The Gemini Factor,
The Snow Spider and others, as a small, bespectacled child in Scotland. Consequently, when the opportunity arose to organise open screenings over the Autumn Term at University of Leicester, I knew I wanted to show British television from the last sixty years rather than films. And because it
is University of Leicester, I could do that.
The research done on television by the Department of History of Art and Film at the University of Leicester sometimes gets overlooked in favour of its more established reputation for Film Studies and the History of Art but currently two of the PhD students within what's quite a small Department are looking at British television. One of my colleagues is researching ITV regional programming between the 1950s and the 1980s as part of a collaborative project with the Media Archive of Central England (MACE). My own work is part of the larger AHRC-funded Spaces of Television project which is a joint research project between the Universities of Reading, Glamorgan, and Leicester, and one of the co-investigators is my supervisor, Professor James Chapman, whose work on
Dr Who,
The Avengers, the
Quatermass serials and multiple other television programmes is also often overlooked in favour of his well-known research on James Bond. Television history is an important, and growing, field within academia but it often seems to get sidelined in favour of the more established visual arts disciplines.
Even in day to day life, television is passed over: in her chapter in
Formations: 21st Century Media Studies, Sonia Livingstone cites a "common-sense view that television viewing is a mindless and relaxing experience" and that television "has rapidly become 'moving wallpaper' in most homes" (175). Livingstone disputes this "common-sense view" vigorously, arguing that watching television is an active, interpretive experience which is pleasurable in its search for meaning.
The pleasure of watching television, interpreting it, unfolding it, is what led me to suggest a season of open screenings of British television from the last sixty years. British television is a rare beast, developed across all the channels as public service broadcasting to varying degrees, and has produced beautiful and radical work as well as more conservative but no less beloved programmes which have set precedents, negotiated national and regional identity, and even engaged Prime Ministers in questions of justice. I am talking here, of course, not about
Newsnight or
Panorama but
Coronation Street and the miscarriage of justice that befell Deirdre Rachid in 1998.
Arguably, most people spend more time with television than any other visual art; we talk about it at work; we remember it from our childhood. Tulloch and Alvarado described
Dr Who as an "unfolding text" and this analogy can be widened to encompass television itself. Whatever value or judgement of taste is ascribed to it, television is always complex and it is always important, and through this open screenings season, short as it is, I hope that becomes apparent.
Open Screenings 2012 programme to follow.
