Remembering British Television

Audience, Archive and Industry

Kristyn Gorton, Joanne Garde-Hansen

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781844576630
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Películas y vídeos

This original book asks how, in an age of convergence, when 'television' no longer means a box in the corner of the living room that we sit and watch together, do we remember television of the past? How do we gather and archive our memories? Kristyn Gordon and Joanne Garde-Hansen explore these questions through first person interviews with tv producers, curators and archivists, and case studies of popular television series and fan communities such as 'Cold Feet' and 'Doctor Who'. Their discussion takes in museum exhibitions, popular televison nostalgia programming and 'vintage' tv websites.

1 REMEMBERING TELEVISION’S PAST

This chapter addresses how we are called upon to remember television and the various ways in which remembering is made possible – whether through academic research and debate, monographs and textbooks, personal and professional memoirs or popular memory more generally. In so doing, it will consider what sort of official and unofficial histories of television are created and valued, and how this influences our understanding of the ways in which we inherit British television and the experience of television viewing. Johnson and Turnock have pointed out that there are ‘absent histories’ (2005, 1) of ITV, for example, and there has been a marginalization of histories of other broadcasters due to the dominance of the BBC’s corporate and organizational memory. Thus, we may need to consider less the history of television in the epistemological sense and more its memory in the materialized sense. That is, the production of television as ‘a certain kind of organized and inferential knowledge’ that is distinct from memory seen as ‘not organized, not inferential at all’ (Collingwood [1946] 1999, 8). While there is a gap, in part addressed by Helen Wheatley’s important collection Re-viewing Television: Critical Issues in Television Historiography (2007), we are not re-viewing television here. This chapter does not offer an alternative history or a neglected history, rather we suggest an approach that considers the ‘question of value [that] has become inescapable’ (Johnson and Turnock 2005, 36) because ‘broadcast television is both huge and intimate’ (40).

Remembering television within the locatedness of a British experience has become an increasingly polarized issue in recent years, with key players writing and rewriting that experience for popular memory purposes and to make statements about the nation, the regions and the relationship of these to a global market economy. There is a sense that a ‘bad’ cultural inheritance of television may lead to dangerous nostalgia and creative stagnation if left to the whims of the market, an uncritical audience or some global and corporate media company. A scenario which can be rectified if we can only remember well such texts as Cathy Come Home (1967) and its television auteur. In a 2016 Guardian interview, the British director Ken Loach (referring to programmes such as the highly successful Downton Abbey, ITV, 2010–15), hit the headlines by saying: ‘This rosy vision of the past, it’s a choice broadcasters make […] “Don’t bother your heads with what’s going on now, just wallow in fake nostalgia”. It’s bad history, bad drama. It puts your brain to sleep’ (Jackson 2016). Yet, Caughie warned that the ‘dangers of such nostalgia’ for the period ‘1965–1975 identified as the Golden Age of television drama’ where ‘very dull plays and unremarkable evenings’ are ignored ‘are clear, particularly when an unrecoverable and idealized past is used as a stick with which to beat the all-too-material present’ (2000, 57). Suggesting there is a social contract to be had with past television raises important questions in the material present about who now gets to speak about television’s past and determine what is important to remember and inherit.

Of 1960s and 1970s British television texts such as Cathy Come Home (1967) and the increased broadcast of films and football on television, Ed Buscombe stated some time ago that we must study television because it is there, it is influential, and knowledge of its public impact would lend itself to public control over the medium (1974, 8). Furthermore, in the later UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) report Media Education in the United Kingdom: An Annotated Bibliography (1983, 13), Len Masterman cited Buscombe’s text as ‘an early exploration of issues and practice in Television Studies. Sections on “Why Study Television?” and “What should one teach about television?” are followed by descriptions of seven different television courses and a “model” course’. Now that television has transitioned from being there, in an identifiable place (toward which furniture is turned and impact has been felt), to being potentially nowhere in particular (mobile and digital) as well as all over the place (ubiquitous),¹ how and why should we study television and its history today when there is so much of it and yet, at the same time, a feeling of scarcity concerning its past? One response is to remind ourselves of the four reasons Masterman used to frame his 1983 UNESCO paper and to reapply these to the new context of something happening to television as it is turned into heritage and memory: ‘“who” constructs’ representations of past television; ‘what “techniques” are used which enable’ constructions to ‘pass themselves as true and authentic’; ‘what “values” are implicit’ in representations of past television; and ‘how are these representations read by their audiences?’ (Masterman 1983, ii).

This chapter, then, focuses upon key academic texts within television studies and touches on the voices from within the Industry to draw attention to the sources that have been and are being used to officially write that history so that we can begin to address how television’s past is being presented. In later chapters, we are particularly interested in what has been left out and missed from a ‘personal memory’ perspective (i.e. production cultures and industry/worker narratives; heritage managers and fans) and what kinds of figures are remembering British television in a digital age and for what reasons. Here, television is not only a form of valuable cultural heritage but is also the intangible heritage of a single person as much as collective or popular memory. ‘Why is it popular to remember the past in this way in the first place?’ asks Spigel (1995, 23). Perhaps because television gives us legitimate access to ourselves as chroniclers of our own social histories: the small screens of our own lives. As Piper has recently asserted:

Formal histories of television and broadcasting have attended more assiduously to the ‘big picture’ than to the micro possibilities of engagement, avoiding the question of what television has meant, if anything, to the successive generations who devoted so many leisure hours watching it. Instead, television historiography has veered upwards towards the epic, the aesthetic, and the political, focusing on nation-states, hegemonies, institutions, advertisers, producers, and, selectively, programmes.

(Piper 2015, 123)

Yet, many television historians (including producers) have declared their own personal passions, small experiences, family lives and micro possibilities of engagement that have never been very far from the page (see, for example, Jane Root’s 1986 Open the Box).

TV studies and TV history

In Television Studies (2012, 119) Gray and Lotz summarize television history research as all-encompassing referring to British and American television studies. In a chapter entitled ‘Context’ they make the point that ‘a great many book length studies of television history transcend these imposed classifications [texts, audiences, industries] so flagrantly as to embody a category all of their own by depicting the environment around programs, audiences, and industries, not just their details’. While, in contrast, it is only in the fourth edition of The Television Handbook (2013) – which does not contain a chapter on history – that we have the inclusion of very brief sections on ‘History and the MTV debate’ and ‘Reality TV history’, neither of which refer to the extensive histories that have been written on either of these genres (see Inglis 2010 and Holmes and Jermyn 2004 respectively) nor to any specific national framing of television. Television history is then, it seems, either all over the place (touching upon, speaking about and incorporating all aspects of social, cultural, economic, industrial, communicative, creative and common experience) or nowhere, absent from the study of television.² To construct a story of television with little reference to television history and memory reproduces mythologies of a medium of ephemerality, flow and forgetting, or leaves the task to the corporations and media companies, who are unlikely to day-light difficult pasts. Therefore, the dominant issue raised within the histories of television focus heavily on the tensions between inclusion/exclusion and materiality/ephemerality. Indeed, one of the difficulties that academic scholars raise in studying television’s past is the fact that there is simultaneously too much television and yet so little of its past exists (see The History of Forgotten Television Drama Project 2013–16 as addressing this issue).

How, then, does television studies as an area of research and scholarship teach its students about this past? How is this past framed by and positioned within the story of the development of television in the United Kingdom? How do television historians situate this social and cultural past as something worthwhile and pertinent? Equally important, in the light of the 2016 Charter renewal for the BBC where ‘Great British’ television was used as leverage, is to understand how television’s past is selected to make a case to the public about access and engagement to works of art, entertainment and information that they are compelled to pay for. One could argue that television’s history has been read as the history of broadcasting, policy, regulation and competition (Briggs 1961–70, 1979, 1985, 1995; Curran and Seaton 2010; Seaton 2015) belying a ‘national television’ of national texts, genres and auteurs, as one might define a ‘national cinema’. As the BBC commissions its latest official history provisionally entitled The BBC: A Century of British Life to be written by Professor David Hendy, the focus is not to be on broadcasting, technology or policy but on ‘persons’.³ Who those people will be, how their importance will be determined and whether that ‘British Life’ will include memories in the widest possible sense of those who have produced television are important issues for scholars of television history and for those critical of how television history has been written in the past.

We cannot escape the sense that while television ‘may have become our leading global medium’ (today we have new audiences in China, fansubbing their favourites through VPNs, the rise of Netflix or the growth of TV franchises) ‘its history is deeply bound up in the identities of nations’ (Hilmes 2003, 1). It is on this point that television history overlaps with memory studies, wherein we are required to know about television’s history as a form of collective memory that has been controlled ‘in the interests of social order, political control and preservation of central cultural and economic hierarchies’ (Hilmes 2003, 1; and see Bennett, Mercer and Woolacott 1986). British television in its texts, audiences and industries is, then, as much about the administration of memory as it is about the politics of identity,⁴ a key change of emphasis we shall return to. It is timely to consider this, as the BBC has attracted increasing criticism over the perception of its assumed role as ‘the chronicler of our time’, states Loach (BBC Entertainment New 2016) in his recent news article on ‘fake nostalgia’, with the resources used to tell its own history again and again and again. Furthermore, and to follow Piper’s (2015) perspective cited above, the history of television has been presented in a particular way, and that inevitably leaves gaps. How these gaps are filled, if at all, determines how far television can be measured and valued along different axes for different cultural actors and audiences: women or non-white producers and consumers of television being one such axis.

There are, then, several important texts of the early 2000s that focus on British television history, such as Lez Cooke’s British Television Drama: A History (2003, 2015), John Caughie’s (2000) Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture and Jonathan Bignell and Stephen Lacey’s (2005) edited collection titled British Television Drama: Past, Present and Future. These not only emphasize the importance within British television history of the dramatic form, but also the way in which this form defines British television history and culture. It also demonstrates that other television, such as factual, news, entertainment and sport, are often overlooked in these kinds of histories. The desire to underscore national monumental television texts and the emergence of télévision d’auteurs is not at all surprising when we are reminded that British television began life following ‘a pattern established by the late Victorians and the Edwardians for the administration of other national utilities like water, gas, and electricity’ (Caughie 2000, 26). We are then back to thinking about television as a (cultural) resource (in need of management, good governance and administration) and, we argue, this accords with the late nineteenth-century concern with ‘cultural inheritance’, those developing theories of history and early understandings of ‘memory’ as ‘preserving and transmitting energy’ (Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi and Levy 2011, 106). As a symbol of that energy, British television drama, while not quite a national cinema, has been and continues to be considered distinct from cinema, and is a key learning point that distinguishes the cultural value of this developing form.⁵

Lez Cooke’s 2015 second edition of British Television Drama is divided chronologically – we move from the early developments of television drama in the 1930s, 40s and early 50s, decade by decade, to television drama in the ‘digital age 2002–2014’. The decades are loosely marked by sociocultural history, such as the chapter on ‘Television drama and Thatcherism’ reflects. Caughie’s (2000) book takes a similar journey through a chronologically defined past, making reference to certain markers such as the ‘golden age’ and ‘non-naturalism’ to signal developments in television’s aesthetic landscape. Bignell and Lacey’s (2005) collected book is structured as ‘Institutions and Technologies’, ‘Formats and Genres’, and ‘Representations’, which speak in large part to some of the defining approaches to teaching television studies in many countries, and the main pillars of media studies in the United Kingdom and more broadly. All three convey the past-ness of British television as stages of development but the continua of cultural policies of preserving, storing and rebroadcasting television are much less obviously addressed. However, all these books show forth the almost metabolic value of British television drama to the country’s resource infrastructure (energy and culture in combination) and something of immense cultural and creative value for heterogeneous and multidirectional reasons (texts and audiences in combination). That the internet now provides new platforms, pathways and transmedia opportunities for British television drama is not lost on these researchers as they update their books to take account of the rapid rise of internet dramas and the new appetite for British television heritage as a high-end commodity to global audiences.

In summary, reviewing some television studies textbooks has shown that there is often a section on television history, such as Bignell’s An Introduction to Television Studies (2004) which concentrates on the proliferation of histories that can be told in order to encourage the reader to approach the subject critically and not as one cohesive history. Centring on issues such as television’s ephemerality, again the ‘golden age’ the development of technologies and institutions, and a focus on television formats and forms, the chapter/section titles reiterate a certain kind of ‘official history’ in the demarcation of what is important to learn or study about British television. This can be summarized as a multidirectional approach that locates studying television as being at the intersection of histories (and stories) of industry, policy, audience, aesthetics, society and culture (macro and meso scales of analysis) while offering some potential pathways into micro-analysis of audience taste.

Reviewing television histories

In the introduction to her collection Re-viewing Television History (2007) Wheatley reflects on the question of television history and the historiography of television, which at the time was just beginning to flourish. As someone who teaches television, Wheatley recognizes, as do we, that the question of why do television history often comes up. Indeed, we are sometimes left wondering what we want our students, who are there to also learn about film and television production, to take from the module. What is it about television’s past that they need to know? How will knowing this past enable them to be better television producers or media managers? In part, this is to break through the nostalgia that permeates looking back at television production and expose the real cultural work, sometimes the ‘dirty work’ underpinning the rise of creativity within the television industry. As Caughie notes: ‘the day-to-day experience of the people involved was probably much as professional life always is: a mixture of satisfactions and frustrations, victories and defeats, bureaucratic hassles and creative surprises, moments of excitement punctuated by long stretches of routine’ (2000, 57).

For Wheatley, ‘an “enriched” sense of television history helps to make sense of television’s past as well as its current importance’ (2007, 3). But what does an ‘“enriched” sense of television history’ look like, especially when television’s past continues to be somewhat ephemeral, difficult to obtain or determinedly forgotten? Moreover, the act of reading about television’s past usually means that you begin to construct a sense of that past based on the versions available to you. As Jacobs has argued: ‘The danger here is that television history gets reconstructed around what survives for viewing rather than what is actually shown’ (2006a, 112), as well as the known pathways to remembering by a creative class. That danger becomes more present when the reconstruction is made around what is readily available online. Spigel argued some time ago that ‘television even erases its own past; it selects only a few programmes for syndication and leaves out countless others’ (1995, 31), this remains an issue today.

Wheatley (2007, 5) also notes that television studies often ‘inherits the industry’s propensity for claiming “the next big thing” or “the never before seen”’, and this is a point Spigel confirms in her article entitled ‘TV’s Next Season?’ (2005b). The ‘new’ is often privileged in the television landscape and in our discourse around watching television, to the extent that it seems meaningless to view television historically at all. Yet, Wheatley is keen to challenge ‘the new’ as an historical concept in itself: ‘a discourse of “newness” isn’t necessarily a new phenomenon’ thus we should ‘hold fire on our period of remembrance for the object in historical television studies’ (2007, 5). While, this attention to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Remembering Television’s Past
• 2. Remembering Television Production: Producer-ly Memory
• 3. Television’s Treasures and Archival Values
• 4. The End of ‘Experience TV’ at the National Media Museum
• 5. Caring for Past Television: The Case of Children’s Television
• 6. Nostalgia and Paratexual Memory: Cold Feet (ITV, 1997–2016), Reminiscence Clip Shows and ‘Vintage’ Television Websites
• 7. Regenerative Television Memory?: Crafting Doctor Who
• Conclusion: Television’s Mnemonic Warriors – From Mr Getty to Me
• References
• Index
• Imprint