Musings on Mad Men

 

Let me admit something right off the bat: I don’t, generally speaking, like American television It is full of, at best, mediocrities situated between what is really important on American commercial television, product. The real point of American television, along with its socialising function, is to sell consumers consumer goods. The shows are simply there to bring consumers to the idiot box so the networks can sell product.

Now don’t get me wrong there are some American television shows I quite like. I like, for instance The Twilight Zone. I like the Dick van Dyke Show. I like The Wonder Years. And I really like the knowing and multitonal Buffy the Vampire Slayer, one of the few American television shows that can, in my opinion, be spoken of in the same breath with great British and European TV shows like The Jewel in the Crown, Brideshead Revisited, Lewis, Morse, House of Cards, Dekalog, Forbyrdelsen, Broen, and Badehotellet. But these are anomalies. The less said about drek like Gilligan’s Island, Full House, The Facts of Life, and The Brady Bunch the better. Hell even France, a country where television was often considered an aesthetic wasteland by its artistic elites, has better television shows than American television these days.

This brings me to Mad Men. Mad Men of course, is a basic television show. It was broadcast on AMC, which once upon a time showed mostly American movie classics. For many, including critics, with a kind of midcult cultural capital, it is cable television where the great American TV shows are shown these days. They like to point to Game of Thrones and The Sopranos as examples of what American TV and American television auteurs can achieve if it and they (though many leave this unsaid) adopt the British writer centred limited episode model of TV. Their mantra seems to be that is not cable TV it is, fill in the blank. 

The problem with this argument, and it certainly relevant to what I have seen of Mad Men, is that most of the shows on American cable television aren't very good relatively speaking or absolutely speaking. Game of Thrones was a self important misogynist mediocrity aimed at a fanatic fandom, some of whom wanted to see tits, ass, and pussy, and they got a lot of all three during the run of the show. The Sopranos was a self important mediocrity with lots of sex and tits, something that apparently makes HBO better than American commercial television, and something that certainly draws certain viewers to it, and violence (bang, bang, shoot em up), a mafia Western for the anti-Western generation.

This brings me to Mad Men. From what I have seen of the show so far it is a self important mediocrity that wears its Hollywood social problems theme on its sleeves, something akin to being repeatedly hit by a hammer on the head. Mad Men is something I imagine Stanley Kramer, the producer and director of the 1950s and 1960s social problem Hollywood film, would have loved or even made in the 1950s and 1960s. The problem with these social problem films, however, beyond their social problem obviousness—something known to appeal to Oscar and Emmy voters and to critics at elite magazines and newspapers—is that it doesn’t feel organic. I prefer social problems to emerge organically out of a narrative.

There are other problems I had and have with Mad Men. The acting is generally mannered, presumably to hit viewers over the head with stereotypes, in this case misogynist frat boy (something actually mentioned in the first episode) stereotypes. Such an acting style doesn’t feel organic as it does in the theatre, however. Additionally,  the show wears its attempt at high art on its sleeves. It tries to tell viewers (check out that mise-en-scene) that it is clever, something some viewers undoubtedly accept because of its seriousness and the fact that it is on cable. To me it really isn’t clever. To me Mad Men is Saturday Night Live to Britain’s Monty Python’s Flying Circus. It is, in other words, sophomorically clever while Python is often truly clever. 

For these reasons Mad Men is not my cup of tea at least at present. I will keep watching to see if I will change my mind.

The Books of My Life: Doctor Who (Tulloch and Alvarado)

Doctor Who, along with the films of Alfred Hitchock, a favourite of my father's, stimulated my interest in the study of films and television shows. When I went to university in the 1970s, however, I did not become a Film Studies, a relatively new academic major and minor at the time I was in college. Nor did I become a Media Studies major or minor, an academic discipline or multi-discipline, which, like Film Studies, was relatively new in the academy at the time I was at uni. Instead I majored in Religious Studies and later took degrees in Cultural Anthropology, and History.

Despite specialising in and being socialised into certain academic disciplines during my undergraduate and postgraduate days, I long had a broader and multidisciplinary interest in theory, particularly Social Theory during my college days. I became interested in hermeneutic theory thanks to classes I took in Biblical Studies. From there it was an easy jump to the study of the giants of Social Theory including Max Weber, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and the recent theoretical fad of the moment in academia and cultural criticism, Semiology or Semiotics. 

I became very interested in Semiology and Semiotics during my undergraduate years for several reasons. The university I matriculated at, Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, was one of the major and leading centres of Semiology and Semiotics in North America at the time along with the University of Toronto. Both hosted a major Semiology and Semiotic conference every year, IU hosting it one year and the UofT the other. I attended what Semiology conferences I could, getting to meet writer Jorge Louis Borges, Umberto Eco, and the semiological anthropologist Mary Douglas in the process. While at Indiana I also took a postgraduate level course on the Semiotics of Names and a Semiology of Film Course with noted film scholar James Naremore and loved them both learning a lot about the semiology of culture in the process. What was so exciting about semiological or semiotic analysis at the time was that it seemed to promise a grand wholistic scheme that would bring together historical analysis, cultural analysis, the study of meaning, ethnographic analysis, and the deciphering of the deep structural codes at the heart of society and culture and its many "texts".

I mention all of this because John Tulloch's and Manuel Alvarado's Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text (New York: St Martin's, 1983), published in the year of Doctor Who's twentieth anniversary and which I recently reread, seems to me one of the best, if not the best, integration of historical analysis, production analysis, semiological analysis, and ethnographic analysis that came out during the era when Semiology was making its mark on the critical and academic world and particularly in academic Film Studies and in academic film journals like the British journal Screen, a journal, which, over time, integrated, or attempted to integrate, the film theory currents of the late 1960s, the 1970s, and 1980s, in France, Britain and the United States, a film theory integration that would, over time, come to be dominated increasingly by psychoanalysis and text centred analysis, a synthesis that has dominated Film Studies and by extension in Television Studies, ever since.

Tulloch's and Alvarado's book is simultaneously an insightful history of Doctor Who, an insightful history of British television and the BBC, an insightful history of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, an insightful exploration of the narrative and cultural codes reflected in and instantiated in Doctor Who between 1963 and 1982, and an insightful analysis, thanks particularly to interviews with those who wrote, directed, designed, and "filmed" Doctor Who, of the unfolding novelistic text, one that hasn't always been consistent over the years, of the British cultural institution that is now Doctor Who. As a case study, one that in turn makes use of case studies of Doctor Who episodes such as "Kinda", Tulloch's and Alvarado's book remains, at least to my mind, an example of how to do a historical, semiological, and ethnographic analysis of a television show, a film, or a work of literature.

One of the most interesting things, at least to me, that Tulloch and Alvarado explore in Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text, and there are many, is that apparently eternal Sisyphean question and conundrum that remains at the heart of television and film studies practitioners: who, if anyone, is the author of a television programme or a film? The issue of film authorship is an issue that goes back at least to the 1920s and the early years of film criticism. Early auteurists focused particularly on those directors regarded as artists, people like D.W. Griffith and, later on art cinema auteurs like Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini. Beginning in the 1950s auteur analysis was extended by the pioneering French film journal Cahiers du Cinema,  the pioneering British film journal of the 1960s, Movie, and the director focused writing of that American translator and adapter of French auteur theory, Andrew Sarris, to commercial directors in the Hollywood cinema. Auteurists who focused their gaze on Hollywood directors focused increasingly on the themes and visual styles of certain directors and used these, as evidence, of the veracity of auteurist theory, as evidence of the signature or marks of individual auteurs "writing" in the seemingly commercial and mass produced film culture that was Hollywood. 

It is important to remember three things about this post World War Ii auteurism. First, proponents of the theory, particularly those connected to Movie and Andrew Sarris, did not claim that every director was an auteur, only some of them. Second, advocates for auteur theory did not claim that only directors were auteurs. Those connected to Movie along with Sarris also looked at the authorial roles genre, writers, and the broader contexts of movie making, for instance, admittedly sometimes more in theory than in practise, played in "authoring" film and television texts. Third, many of the proponents of auteurism argued that auteurism was a policy and not a catechismal doctrine, though this too is often more in theory than in practise.

As was the case with many of the pioneers of auteurism, Tulloch and Alvarado, explore the layers of authorship--societal, cultural, historical, production--in Doctor Who. Tulloch and Alvarado, for instance, explore, the impact, or limited impact, of gender conventions or codes and changes in gender codes, narrative codes and changes in narrative codes, visual codes and changes in visual, codes associated with mise-en-scene, writing codes, genre codes and manipulations of genre, and historical factors and historical dynamics, all of which produce the Doctor Who text, an approach to film and television authorship that is simultaneously contextual, social, cultural, production centred, ethnographic, and historical, at the same time. Tulloch's and Alvarado's approach to auteurism, one that reflects in microcosm the approach of the book in general, should put the lie to those in Film Studies, Television Studies, and Literary Studies who maintain that auteurism is little more than contextless post-Enlightenment romanticism, though it hasn't and it likely won't.

Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text was supposed to be the first book of two on the show by Tulloch and Alvarado. The second was to focus on how readers or the audience interpreted Doctor Who. Eventually, Tulloch publshied several papers on audience or reader's response to Doctor Who in his and Henry Jenkins book Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek (London: Routledge, 1995). The essays on Who in that book, it seems to me, all of them by Tulloch, constitutes, along with Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text, a classic in Television, Film, and Literary Studies that offers a viable and, in my opinion, analytically superior alternative to the far too often simultaneously contextual and contextless crystal ball textualism of so many contemporary Television, Film, and Literary critics.

 
 

The Books of My Life: ITV Cultures

 ITV, British Independent Television, has been a part of my life since the 1970s. My teenage years and my subsequent adult years have been filled with ITV programmes like Upstairs Downstairs (London Weekend Television, 1971-1975), Brideshead Revisited (Granada, 1981), The Jewel in the Crown (Granada, 1984), Inspector Morse (Central Independent Television and Carlton, 1987-2000), Lewis (Granada and ITV, 2006-2013), Vera (ITV, 2011-), and Endeavour (Mammoth, Masterpiece, Endeavour, 2012-). These shows, along with shows on the BBC like Doctor Who (1963-1989, 1996, 2005-), The Forsyte Saga (1967), Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969-1974), Shoulder to Shoulder (1974), I Claudius (1976), The Good Life (1975-1978), Fawlty Towers (1975-1979), Butterflies (1978-1983), House of Cards (1990), and the Beeb's adaptation of the Shakespeare plays (1978-1985), to name just a few, showed me how good, how intelligent, how compelling, how dramatic, how tragic, and how funny television could be, particularly when compared with the often at best mediocrities that populated the airwaves of the three  commercial networks that dominated American television before the 1980s, CBS, ABC, and NBC.

The anthology ITV Cultures edited by Catherine Johnson and Rob Turlock (Maidenhead, Berkshire, Eng: Open University Press, 2004) explores the economic, political, cultural, and geographic history of Britain's first commercial network, ITV, and its regional franchises across the UK, from the advent of commerical televison in 1955 to the early twenty-first century. Chapters look at the institutional history of ITV and the changing economic and regulatory ecologies within which it had to operate (Johnson and Turlock), whether it is possible to construct a canon of ITV television shows (John Ellis), and the role of patron and publisher Lew Grade played at Associated Television, one of ITV's original regional franchises, and Incorporated Television Company, which Grade owned until it was bought by ATV, and which produced programmes for the franchise (Jonathan Bignell). Other chapters look at ATV's The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955-1959) which was co-written and co-produced by Brits and Americans (Steve Neale), and London Weekend Television's Upstairs Downstairs (Helen Wheatley) and its nuanced engagement the neo-Victorian and Edwardian movement of the 1970s and with second wave feminism in its narrative and its mise-en-scene, both of which were successfully sold overseas, and LWT's strategy of making "quality" programmes not only for the domestic market but also for overseas markets at a time when the cost of making dramatic TV programmes was skyrocketing and which, as a result, brought much needed monies into ITV's coffers free of the levy regulators laid on ITV advertsing revenue (Rod Allen). Another chapter focuses on the only failure of an ITV regional franchise, Wales's West and North Television, as a result of its limited number of broadcast translators, the tensions between the BBC and the Independent Television Authority (ITA), the body that regulated commericial television in its early years, particularly over TV broadcasting in Wales, the commerical and public service remits mandated for ITV, commitments WWN met by broadcasting Welsh programming, and WWN's financial inexperience and lack of financial expertise (Jamie Medhurst). Still another chapter looks at Independent Television news, the news provider for all ITV franchises, which has been caught between ITV's commercial and public service remits, between commercialism and profit and its mandate to serve the public good, and both profited and suffered as a consequence (Jackie Harrison). Finally, two chapters explore the ITV talk show Trisha (1998-2010) and the ITV game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire? (1998-2017, 2018). Sherryl Wilson and Matt Hills argue respectively that what some academics and scholar fans see as trash television actually have, in the case of Trisha and its thereapeutic aspects, a public service component, and, in the case of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, a degree of creativity in its mise-en-scene. Millionaire also has, Hills argues, an appeal to game, quiz, and puzzle enthusiasts, some of whom are scholar fans who can put Millionaire into its commerical and public service contexts. A very helpful timeline of ITV history ends the anthology.

A couple of things struck me while reading ITV Cultures. First, I was struck by how a television network that was initially regionally structured in order to avoid Londonocentrism and regionally structured in order to emphasise regional programming, was, over time, centralised in London. Second, I was struck by how ITV's regional franchises were, thanks to the relaxation of governmental regulation, concentrated into fewer and fewer hands over time. Both centralisation and concentration, of course, are the legacies of the revival and triumph of sectarian laissez-faire liberalism or neoliberalism after the late 1970s and the neoliberal takeover of the Conservative Party and even parts of the Labour Party. Finally, I was struck by the similar impact the coming of cable television and satellite television had in the UK and US. They ended the duopoly, at least on one level, that was ITV and the BBC in the UK and the cartel that was CBS, NBC, and ABC in the US. This, in turn, allowed neoliberals to argue that now that there were so many different television stations out there in the terrestrial and digital universes, governmental regulation could be relaxed and competition and diversity could be left to the market. Given that the market produces much of the same product, however, and given that Channel Four, which came on the air in 1982 with the remit to produce product for the part of the part of the market that was largely ignored in the age of governmental regulation, is no longer that different from other commercial channels, the logic of the neoliberal argument can certainly be questioned.

ITV Cultures should be a must read for those interested in the history of broadcasting and the history of broadcasting in the United Kingdom. Highly recommended as an introduction to the economic, political, cultural, geographic, and, if to a much less extent, the demographic aspects of commercial British television and beyond.

Musings on the Brave New World of Digital Television

 

Jean Baudrillard in his brief and fascinating monograph The Mirror of Production argued that the world has undergone at least three communication revolutions--oral, representational, and postmodern--and that these communication and cultural revolutions, which are tied to economic change, are as important and consequential if not more important and consequential than the economic transformation from traditional (hunter-gatherer, agricultural), to industrial, and to post-industrial. Marx's approach to the transition from the feudal to the capitalist, Baudrillard asserts, for instance, was grounded in a representational cultural and ideological communication formation pointing up just how consequent, important, and central cultural and communication change was and is.

The transition from analogue to digital television in the early twenty-first century has foregrounded for me again just how important cultural and communication changes and the relation between these cultural changes and economics is in human history. In the brave new world of on-air commercial digital TV there are, as far as I can tell, two broad types of digital television networks. There are, to name a few, the Me-TV, Antenna TV, Start TV, Get TV, and Decades TV networks of the brave new digital TV universe. These TV networks operate as TV networks typically have in Australia, the UK, Canada, and the US during my lifetime. They show TV shows complete or slightly edited (commercials have increased over the years) in acts with commercials as part of the televisual flow between the acts. 

Then there are the TV networks which, in my case, can be found on more fly-by-night and less economically sound TV stations such as that of WYBN in New York's Catskills Region. WYBN, a TV station that is more dreadfully incompetent technologically than I have ever seen from a TV station during my 67-year-life. WYBN's Retro TV and Classic Reruns TV, for instance, are the television equivalent of capitalist snake oil salesmen and flim flam men. They buy shows on the cheap, shows that haven't been seen on the airwaves for decades, something that actually makes them of interest for the historian, and may even be in the public domain, and stick them around the commercials that dominate the televisual flow of the networks on the station. For these stations and networks, the commercials that run around and over the TV shows cutting them into fragments rather than acts in the process, are the raison d'etre and at the heart of these TV stations and its several networks. WYBN and these networks appear to care little about the fictional and non-fictional TV shows they broadcast and care all about the monies fragmented TV brings from showing the commercials that are the real stars if probably not the real draws of the networks and station. 

I know endless commercials with fragments of TV shows in between are not of interest to me which is why I avoid WYBN like the covid plague these days. I tried to watch the 1957 film The Pajama Game on Classic Reruns TV and WYBN last week but gave up because of the slicing and dicing and commercial saturated bombing of commercials during the film in the wee hours of the morning to such an extent that it was no longer possible to make sense of the film. I have not watched WYBN since. Others, if Facebook posts are representative, also seem to have a problem with the commercial dominated WYBN as well. WYBN's Facebook page, which once allowed comments, no longer does. It doesn't even allow you to contact or message this king of incompetents anymore though a contact email address does remain on the page. I understand the reason for this; the station got hammered on Facebook for its everyday incompetencies, its commercials running over the beginnings of shows, its commercials running over the ends of shows, its commercials fragmenting shows, and its regularly disappearing networks, particularly Retro TV and the now sadly disappeared France-24. Interestingly, now one can only share the commercials that now dominate the WYBN Facebook page just as they dominate the station in general. All this, of course, tells you everything you need to know about WYBN.

I want to come back to Baudrillard again as I end this post. Baudrillard was categorised by commentators as a postmodernist theorist during his intellectual lifetime. In one understanding of postmodernism, one Baudrillard emphasised, the switch from a representationally dominated cultural formation to a postmodernist cultural formation has brought with it Disneyfication or simulation, the confusion of the simulated "fake" with the representationally "real", and the conflation of the "real" and the "fake". In this scenario the commercials that are the stars of WYBN represent the conquest of simulated magical commercial capitalist "realism". On the other hand, one might argue that the fact that commercials are at the heart of WYBN's Retro TV and Classic Reruns TV simply foregrounds what has always been at the real pecuniary rather than the fake entertainment and, to a much lesser extent, informational heart of American TV, commercials and their magic system. TV has always been and always is all about the profit.

The Books of My Life: Queer as Folk

In his BFI monograph Queer as Folk (London: BFI, BFI TV Classics series, 2007) Glyn Davis explores what he calls the "groundbreaking" TV serial, Queer as Folk. Commissioned by Channel 4, written by Russell T. Davies, and produced by Nicola Shindler's Red production company, this show in which virtually the central characters were gay or lesbian, was broadcast in two series of eight and two episodes respectively, went out over the air in 1999 and 2000.

In his monograph Davis, drawing on secondary research and published interviews, explores the cultural pedigree of Queer as Folk; the economic and cultural contexts of why Channel 4 commissioned the show; the backgrounds of Davies and Shindler; the production of the show, if perhaps too briefly; the collaborative nature of the making of Queer as Folk; the look of the show and how mise-en-scene related to character and broader economic context; the central theme of the show; the narrative structure of the show; and the impact the show had and the political controversies it left in its wake. Along the way, Davis notes that Queer as Folk broke the stereotypes and caricatures of gays and lesbian characters that had been the stock and trade of TV shows in the UK and US over the years; points up the inclusivity at the heart of the show; notes the sexualised gaze of the show which, he assumes, drew viewers to identity with its gay and lesbian characters; points up the centrality of created families to the show; notes the theme of unrequited love at the heart of the first series of Queer as Folk; and explores the common no more than 1 to 2 minute segments the show was divided into, a practise most modern television shows follow.

As with a lot of academic books, and particularly books written on film and television, Davis' archivally anemic book would probably have been better as an article rather than a 100 page plus monograph. Davis' excellent and interesting "Introduction" to Queer as Folk lays out, in microcosm, what he is going to say about the show in the pages that follow. That said, anyone with an interest in British television and queer television and studies in general will find much of interest in this monograph.

The Books of My Life: Seven Up

In 1964 ITV broadcast a documentary called Seven Up!. As Stella Bruzzi notes in her monograph Seven Up (London: BFI, BFI TV Classics series, 2007), Seven Up! was the brainchild of an Australian and a Canadian working in Britain who wanted to explore the impact of class on the present and futures of English girls and boys. To get at the impact of class on English youth the makers of Seven Up! chose ten males and four women, some from the upper class, some from the middle class, the class the Up Series celebrates, claims Bruzzi, and some from the working class, and one minority. "Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man", Seven Up!, quoting Ignatius of Loyola, declared. The fourteen were asked questions, some where shown at play, some at school, and all were brought together at the end of the 40 minute long "episode" at the zoo so that the camera and the voice of god narrator could "observe" how the fourteen interacted with each other.

As Bruzzi notes, Seven Up! was initially a one off. ITV, however, decided to revisit the participants in a second installment in the series in 1970, Seven Plus 7. Since then ITV and Michael Apted, one of the researchers in Seven Up! and now the chief interviewer and director starting with the third installment in the series, have revisited as many of the participants who wanted to be participate every seven years in 21 Up (1977), 28 Up (1984), 35 Up (1991), 42 Up (1998), 49 Up (2005), 56 Up (2012), and 62 Up (2019). the most recent installment of the series. As a result, as Bruzzi notes, the Up Series has become one of  the most celebrated and iconic documentaries and perhaps the most celebrated and iconic documentary series ever, has been mimicked by a host of other Up like documentaries, and has influenced a host of documentaries that came after it.

Bruzzi's monograph on the Up Series is a good workmanlike exploration of the series. In her monograph Bruzzi briefly explores the influences on the series, the contextual background to the series, the production of the series, the "participants" in the series, the influence of the series, and the "narrative" structure of the series. Bruzzi's monograph is enhanced by interviews with two of the "children", Michael Apted, and executive producer Claire Lewis.

Bruzzi's monograph puts Up into the context of the realist tradition of documentary cinema with its emphasis on exploring everyday life and the direct documentary tradition. Bruzzi also explores the changes in the series over its 66 year history. Bruzzi argues that the Up Series changed with 28 Up, transforming itself from a series focused collectively on class with most of the interviews conducted along the class based lines of the "children", to one in which interviews were conducted individually with the 'participants. Bruzzi argues that the tragic trajectory of one of the lives of one of the "children", Neil, was one of the main factors for this change to a more individualistic format, as were changes in the television documentary form itself as television documentaries became more focused on the lives of individuals in the 1970s and 1980s.

The Up Series has stuck with this format ever since. As a result of this change from a more collectively focused documentary to a more individualistically focused one, a change marked by a change from the juxtaposition of posh participants to working class "participants to individual interviews, Bruzzi argues, the narrative of the Up Series changed somewhat and, like other documentaries that focused on individual lives, used the individual lives of the "children" to make points about the broader social and cultural contexts of the lives of the "children" As Bruzzi notes, over the years the "children" and particularly Neil, have become kind of "reality" stars and the Up Series became a forerunner and role model of the "reality" shows of the late 20th century and early 21st. Many of the "participants" also became, very early on in the series, critics of how the series portrayed giving the series a reflexive quality. This was one of the reasons, as Bruzzi notes, that some of the "children" refused to participate in later installments in the series.

If you haven't seen the Up Series it is definitely worth your time. If you are looking for a good guide to this documentary bildungsroman, Bruzzi's introduction and exploration of it, is also worth your time. Bruzzi's textual analysis of the series alone is probably worth the price of admission  even if some might like to see more production analysis of the series grounded in a greater degree of archival research.

The Books of My Life: The Singing Detective

Film and Television Studies academic Glen Creeber seems to have carved out an academic career, in part, by writing about Dennis Potter, the author of the highly regarded BBC television shows Pennies From Heaven (1978) and The Singing Detective (1986). The bibliography of Creeber's book The Singing Detective (London: BFI, BFI TV Classics series, 2007), in fact, lists four other books and articles Creeber has published on the Gloucestershire born Potter.

In his monograph on Potter's The Singing Detective, Creeber reprises the much made criticism of auteur theory, the notion that there are some film and TV authors, that such an approach doesn't take into account the fact that film and TV are collaborative media. The fact of the matter, however, is that Movie critic and University of Warwick academic Victor Perkins argued as long ago as 1972, in his book Film as Film, that film was indeed a collaborative medium but that in some instances the director acted as conductor of a film bringing all of its plot, narrative, and mise-en-scene aspects of a film together just as a conductor brings together the score and all the instruments of an orchestra in a performance of, for example, Mahler's First Symphony. Somewhat ironically, Creeber goes on to argue, after giving us his auteurist straw man, that while a number of people--costumers, editors, directors of photography, set designers, and so on--contributed to the making of The Singing Detective, Potter and the director Jon Amiel were the primary auteurs of the serial, a perspective not dissimilar to that of Perkins.

In The Singing Detective Creeber argues that Potter's serial is a complex array of discourses: Christian, romantic, psychoanaytic, generic (a hybrid of the musical, the musical comedy, the detective story, film noir), semiotic, modernist, and post-modernist. Fascinatingly, Creeber's book likewise is a compex array of discourses: Christian, romantic, psychoanalytic, generic (a hybrid of the musical, the musical comedy, the detective story, film noir), semiotic, modernist, and post-modernist. Creeber's book is such a dialogical hybrid, in fact, that it is sometimes difficult to ascertain whether Creeber is arguing that Freudian psychoanalysis is transcendental, is a Bergerian social and cultural construct that has taken on a cultural life in the post-late 19th century West, or both. And while Creeber has interesting things to say about the Freudian aspects of The Singing Detective I was more convinced that at its heart Potter's work was more a pilgrim's progress and a paradise lost and refound, and more a critique of Calvinist theodicy, than a Freudian tale of therapeutic salvation.

In the end what Creeber's monograph on The Singing Detective, a serial I very much enjoyed when I first saw it in the 1980s, pointed up to me again is that most books on film and television shows simply aren't as entertaining, moving, and thought provoking as that which they are trying to interpret. I found Creeber's monograph to be, despite an attentiveness to the religious dimensions of Potter's work, pretty much standard, one might even say generic, film and TV criticism by a film and television academic embedded in a fin-de-siecle socially and culturally constructed academic film culture.

The Books of My Life: Our Friends in the North

Playwright and screenwriter Michael Eaton explores the origins, making of, and impact of BBC 2's and Peter Flannery's critically acclaimed 1996 TV series Our Friends in the North in his BFI monograph Our Friends in the North (London: BFI, BFI TV Classics series, 2005). Our Friends, which began life as a play in 1982, is the saga of four young Tynesiders--Nicky, Mary, Tosker, and Geordie--as they make their ways through the countercultural and swinging, yet corrupt sixties, to the corrupt and seemingly hopeless Thatcher seventies, eighties, and nineties.

In his monograph Eaton eschews the dominant academic approach to television and film in favour of a more historical and aesthetic approach. Eaton, in particular, does an excellent job of putting Our Friends in the North in its fascinating yet ultimately depressing historical contexts. Our Friends was, as Eaton notes, grounded in the broader political, particularly housing and political party, and police corruption contexts of the 1960s through 1990s, the same era the show covers.

Interesting book on a superb television show. I recommend it to anyone interested in the intersection of the personal, the historical, and the political in television land. If you haven't, by the way, seen Our Friends in the North, see it.

The Books of My Life: The World at War

I don't recall when I first saw Thames Television's Second World documentary The World at War. I must have seen it sometime in 1973 on American television. It was first broadcast in the US in September and in October on ITV in the UK. I do recall being very impressed by the show. I remain impressed with The World at War some fifty years later. it remains one of the best documentaries I have ever seen.

Taylor Downing's The World at War (London: BFI, BFI TV Classics series, 2012) uses interviews with those who made the documentary, including The World at War's general Jeremy Isaacs, archival research, much of it in the archives of the Imperial War Museum, which provided extensive help for the programme, and memoirs to explore the origins, personnel who worked on the documentary, production, narrative structure, music, footage used in the show, and critical and public reaction to the The World at War. Downing argues that The World at War, one of the first British documentaries to move away from the historical recreation model of documentary, remains much watched today because of its use of oral histories, many of them with common men and women who survived the war, its multi layered narrative form, and, in particular, its escape from the typical structure of many war documentaries, that manichean binary of heroes and villains.

Recommended for those interested in British television, British television documentaries, World War II, documentaries, and World War II even if, for me, there is to much of the anecdotal in the monograph.

The Books of My Life: The Office

Drawing on interviews with creators and production personnel and historical and cultural analysis Ben Walters (The Office (London: BFI, BFI TV Classics series, 2005)) explores the origins of the BBC Two docusoap The Office, a television which was transmitted for two seasons and a two part Christmas special between 2001 to 2003.

Like any social and cultural phenomenon The Office, as Walters notes, did not originate in a vacuum. Walters argues that on one level The Office is a product of the dog eat dog world of neoliberal corporate capitalism and the fears, anxieties, alienation, and absurdities of clerical office work in that brave new postmodern world of neo Ebenezer Scrooge capitalism. On another level, as Walters notes, The Office is the product of the merging of situation comedy and the documentary, a trend that can be seen in the rise of narrative form reality TV stretching back to An American Family (PBS, 1971) and its British cousin The Family (BBC, 1974) and the impact of these docudramas on films like the mockumentary This is Spinal Tap (1984), situation comedies such as The Royale Family (BBC, 2006-2012), and and mock news shows like Brass Eye (C2, 1997, 2001). On still another level, as The Office co-creators Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, note in interviews, The Office is the product of the movies of Woody Allen--one presumes Take the Money and Run (1969) in particular--and American situation arc comedies such as Seinfeld (NBC, 1989-1998).

Though The Office has always left me somewhat cold Walters books is an interesting book on an interesting TV series. I recommend it to anyone interested in documentaries, situation comedies, the history of television and film, and the impact of neoliberalism on the media.

The Books of My Life: Edge of Darkness

Between the 1970s and 1980s British television drama changed, writes John Caughie in his book Edge of Darkness (London: BFI, BFI TV Classics series, 2007). The 1970s saw the decline of the single play with its theatrical look and which had been a prominent part of British TV since its beginnings and the subsequent rise of the quality television serial with its more filmic look. Among these new dramatic quality serials was Troy Kennedy Martin's Edge of Darkness.

Edge of Darkness was first transmitted between 4 November and 9 December 1985 on BBC Two and almost immediately rerun on the more popular of the BBCs channels, BBC One. Caughie's book explores the production contexts of the serial and what writer Kennedy, director Martin Campbell, producer Michael Wearing, designer Graeme Thomson, musicians Eric Clapton and Michael Kamen, and the actors, among them Bob Peck, Joe Don Baker, and Joanne Whalely, brought to the show.  It explores the broader political and economic contexts of the show including Thatcherism, worker strikes, tensions between the great powers, anti-nuclear activism, environmental activism, and ecological theory. It explores the generic contexts of Edge of Darkness noting that the show novelly mixes the spy thriller with the ecological theory of Gaia and its almost magical conception of the planet.

For Caughie Edge of Darkness is, as the name of the series of which Caughie's book is a part, a television classic. Edge, Caughie notes, has been a critical favourite and was listed by a panel of TV professionals as the "third greatest TV drama of all time". The response of viewers at the time, including Caughie, to Edge, claims Caughie though with little qualitative evidence and no quantitative evidence, was one of telephilia. The show had an emotional and intellectual impact on viewers making it memorable to them in the process, so memorable that Edge carries with it the political tenor of its time in the minds of those who watched it when it was first transmitted and who rewatch it on DVD or in rerun.

Caughie's Edge of Darkness is an interesting book about a very interesting television serial. Recommended to those interested in the history of British television, quality television serials, the spy thriller, and the impact of great power tensions and the environmental movement on television.

The Books of My Life: The Likely Lads

In 1964 The Likely Lads, written by Dick Clement and Ian La Fresnais, was first transmitted on BBC Two. Later, when it was rebroadcast on BBC One, Clement's and Le Frenais's realistic and naturalistic comedy about two Northern working class best mates, Terry Chambers (James Bolam) and Bob Ferris, (Rodney Bewes), became, according to Phil Wickham, one of Britain's best loved situation comedies running for three series, ending in 1966. The likely lads, in fact, became so popular with TV audiences that BBC One, Clement, and La Fresnais brought Terry and Bob back to the small screen in 1973 in a second programme, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, which ended in 1974. In 1976 the lads made their last appearance in the film The Likely Lads.

Phil Wickham's The Likely Lads (London: BFI, 2008) explores the Northern setting of The Likely Lads and Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, the depiction of class and the dramatic changes that impacted class throughout the the 1970s in both shows, the representation of gender in both shows, the structure and form of both shows, and the reasons why The Likely Lads and became so successful. Wickham argues that class is portrayed sympathetically but not sentimentally by Clement and La Fresnais, that Terry was more of a fatalist when it came to class status than Bob while Bob was more of a striver trying to achieve a middle class life, something he achieved to some extent in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, that both shows were more fair in their depictions of women than critics historically have been willing to admit, that the show is character driven, and that the success of the The Likely Lads and Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads was due to both shows mix of realism, fatalism, sense of place, drama, and comedy, comedy that audiences could laugh with rather than at, comedy that worked in such a way that viewers recognised themselves in the show.

Sadly half of the 20 episodes of The Likely Lads--two were found recently--are missing due to the BBC policy of wiping. I recommend Wickham's book for anyone interested in television, television situation comedy, British comedy, class, and best mateship in 1960s and 1970s England.

The Books of My Life: The Beiderbecke Affair

For many contemporary critics and historians of post-World War II British television Alan Plater belongs in the pantheon of television writers along with Dennis Potter, Alan Bennett, Alan Clarke, Andrew Davies, Lynda la Plante, John Clesse and a few others. Plater, who also wrote for film, radio, the book trade, and the stage, began writing for television in the 1960s. He is remembered for writing several plays for both the BBC and ITV,  for writing several episodes of the groundbreaking Z-Cars (BBC, 1962-1978), for his adaptation of Olivia Manning's Fortunes of War (BBC, 1987), for his superb adaptation of Chris Mullin's A Very British Coup (Channel 4, 1988), for writing several episodes of Midsummer Mysteries (ITV, 1997-), and for writing several episodes of the wonderful Lewis (ITV, 2006-2015), one of my favourite TV programmes.

One of Plater's best known and most beloved works for television was his The Beiderbecke Affair (Yorkshire Television/ITV, 1985), a reworking, of sorts, of his ITV serial Get Lost (ITV, 1981). As William Gallagher notes in his solid monograph The Beiderbecke Affair (London: BFI, BFI TV Classics series, 2012), the plot, what there is of it--Plater as Gallagher tells us was more a character man than a plot man--of both Get Lost and The Beiderbecke Affair centres on two schoolteachers, in the case of The Beiderbecke Affair schoolteachers at the aptly named San Quentin High School in Leeds, Trevor Chaplin (James Bollan) and Jill Swinburne (Barbara Flynn) along with several other eccentric characters who find themselves trying to solve two related mysteries, why did Trevor not get the Beiderbecke albums he ordered from a catalogue mail order service raising money for the Cubs and why is someone trying to pull the plug on this community catalogue mail order service?

Gallagher, drawing on script analysis, interviews with Plater, Bollan, director David Reynolds, Yorkshire TV's David Cunliffe and Paul Fox, title sequencer Diana Dunn, and Frank Ricotti, composer of the memorable Bix Beiderbecke like jazz soundtrack--Plater is a devoted lover of jazz-- explores, in workmanlike if unspectacular paint by the topical numbers fashion typical of much of the writing on film and television these days, the history, writing, plot, acting, and mise-en-scene of the The Beiderbecke Affair. For at least some, Gallagher's lack of exploration of the broader sociological contexts of The Beiderbecke Affair likely makes it of limited interest to those academics interested in the broader contexts of television shows and the mass media in general. Additionally,  Gallagher provides only limited exploration of the two sequels to The Beiderbecke Affair, The Beiderbecke Tapes (Yorkshire Television/ITV, 1987) and The Beiderbecke Connection (Yorkshire Television/ITV, 1988). Finally, one can only wonder why the BFI and Palgrave Macmillan decided to put a scene from The Beiderbecke Connection on the cover of a book about The Beiderbecke Affair.

Recommended for those interested in British television. As for the show, The Beiderbecke Affair, which is one of those wonderfully eccentric and whimsical British dramedies with an emphasis on character, is well worth watching.

The Books of My Life: Bleak House

Christine Geraghty's monograph Bleak House (London: BFI and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, BFI TV Classics, 2012) nicely interweaves historical analysis, genre analysis, narrative analysis, mise-en-scène analysis,  and technological analysis, in its exploration of BBC One's critically acclaimed 2005 adaptation of Charles Dickens's novel, Bleak House.

Geraghty puts the 2005 BBC adaptation of Bleak House into historical context exploring the history of British television adaptations of classic novels including adaptations of Dickens novels and other adaptations of Bleak House. She puts Bleak House in economic and cultural contexts arguing that the 2005 adaptation must be seen as part of the BBC's attempt to broaden the audience for adaptations of classic novels through its use of narrative strategies, specifically its mix of soap with its character structures, character development strategies, and cliffhanger strategies, through its mixing of the bildungsroman and the mystery,  and through its use of new visual strategies, specifically its use of HD cameras, its framing strategies, its camera angle strategies, its almost documentary like quality, and its quick pace, She explores the cultural contexts of Bleak House by focusing on ithe mise-en-scène of Bleak House and its setting, décor, and visual strategies, strategies used, she argues, to underline character traits or to provide secret or hidden information about characters, character relationships, and locational relationships. All of these economic and cultural strategies combined, argues Geraghty, is what puts the classic in the BBC's 2005 adaptation of Bleak House. I am, by the way, not so sure that Bleak House is the classic Geraghty argues it is. It suspect that it takes both time and distance, before we can say what is and what is not not a "classic". And then there is the issue of the social and cultural construction of artistic canons...

I highly recommend Geraghty's monograph to anyone interested in television criticism broadly and adaptations of classic novels for TV more specifically. Though I wished for more mise-en-scène analysis in the final chapter, as opposed to a review of critical responses to Bleak House's mise-en-scène, Geraghty's book provides, in so many ways, a model of how contemporary television criticism should be done.

Musings on Concon "Criticism": The Case of Les Misérables...

I have been watching Andrew Davies's and the BBC's adaptation of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables over the last several weeks. While recognsing that beauty and value are in the social and cultural eyes of the beholder, I have found Davies's adaptation of Hugo's massive classic a superb adaptation of the book, an adaptation that draws the viewer deeply into the drama and deeply into the realities of inequality that typified 19th century France.

One of the most interesting aspects of the show to me has been the response it has drawn from some viewers. Given the presence of Anglo-Black actors like David Oyelowo in the cast of Davies's Les Misérables the issue of "race" has reared its inevitable ugly head at sites like Amazon if among, at least at present, a minority of posters (this last may be a function of who does and who doesn't watch Masterpiece Theatre). Some are complaining and docking points from their reviews of Les Misérables not for aesthetic reasons, which are always in the social and cultural eyes of beholders anyway as I noted, but because of the presence of Anglo-Blacks in the cast. Others are complaining and docking review points arguing that the presence of Anglo-Black actors in the cast is ahistorical forgetting that Les Misérables is a work of fiction, that history is always about change and dynamic stasis, and that the demographics of the acting profession in the UK have been one of the things that has changed. In the final analysis, and somewhat ironically, the real people playing the race card are those who see the race of an actor first and foremost rather than seeing an actor as an actor regardless of his or her race. Such "reviewers" are not colour blind. They see race everywhere, in other words, including in Les Misérables.

I suspect that those making such "criticisms of Les Misérables are concons. So what do concon reviews tell us about the way a concon or flim flam conservative mind works? What does it tell us about the function of political and ideological correctness among concons? It clearly shows us that concons, though they decry others playing the race card, play the race card themselves and play it often. They, for instance, see an Anglo-Black in Les Misérables where a colour blind person would see an actor. They deduct aesthetic points from Les Misérables because they see Anglo-Blacks in Davies's and the BBC's Les Misérables. That is, as is quite evident from their posts, their only justification whatsoever for deducting points from their "reviews" of the series. It is not, by the way, the quality of the acting that is at the heart of their aesthetics, which these posts, as a general rule, fail to mention entirely. It is the race of the actor. This, of course, is patented political and ideological correctness. By the way, it is quite clear from watching this adaptation of Les Misérables that the acting because the acting in this adaptation has been of the highest quality making it difficult if not impossible for concons to play the they can't act card.

There are, by the way, two types of concons: conscious con cons and bot concons. Conscious concons claim that no one should see race while seeing race everywhere around them including in TV shows and movies. These concons are, in other words, inherently contradictory. Conscious concons manipulate rhetoric or discourse in order to manipulate the masses for their own political, economic, and cultural gain. They are, in sum, gobshites. Bot concons simply parrot or ditto the bullshite rhetoric of conscious concons. They are the manipulated masses.

The Books of My Life: Cracker

I have been watching British television since the 1960s. One of my favourite British TV genres has long been the crime or detective genre, a genre that British TV seems to have perfected over the years. Some of my favourite British crime shows include ITV's Inspector Morse, ITV's Prime Suspect, ITV's Lewis, and ITV's Cracker, all of which number among my favourite TV shows of all time.

Cracker, the subject of Mark Duguid's excellent monograph in the BFI TV Classics series Cracker (London: BFI, 2000), whose three series ran on ITV between 1993 and 1995, and which had specials broadcast in 1996 and 2007, starred Robbie Coltrane as Edward "Fitz" Fitzgerald, a psychologist who helps the Greater Manchester Police investigate and solve a series of difficult and heinous murders in that city. "Fitz" is not only a gifted psychologist, as Duguid notes, but is also an arrogant, self-centred, and selfish gambling and alcohol addict, who, because of his narcissism and addictions, is not only a genius of Holmesian proportions, but is also someone who has sometimes difficult and disastrous personal relations his wife Judith (Barbara Flynn), his two children Mark and Katie, and the other cops he works with.

As Duguid notes Cracker was created by producer Gub Neal and Liverpudlian writer Jimmy McGovern, both of whom were interviewed by Duguid for his book. During its run McGovern wrote six of Cracker's 9 episodes and two specials. Paul Abbot, later the creator of Clocking Off (BBC), State of Play (BBC), Shameless (C4), and Hit and Miss (Sky), who became a producer on Cracker in series two, wrote three episodes of Cracker including the "White Ghost" special. Thematically, argues Duguid, Cracker is centred around the themes of justice and injustice, Catholicism--"Fitz" like McGovern is a lapsed Catholic--moral choices, the impossibility of pure motives, and confession, in both the criminal and Catholic senses. In Cracker, as Duguid notes, ordinary people are often driven by circumstances, by hopelessness, despair, poverty, grief, and resentment, to commit  heinous crimes that reveal the dark recesses of their souls, dark souls that only "Fitz" seems to comprehend and understand.

Cracker proved popular during its run on ITV not only with viewers but with critics. The show rose from almost ten million viewers during its first episode to a high of 15 million in later episodes. Newspaper critics on the left, in the middle, and on the right, praised the show when it was first broadcast though its occasional explicit violence, its occasional political incorrectness, its sometime lack of realism, and its emphasis on social issues, including the Hillsborough tragedy as seen through the eyes of a grieving and angry working class Liverpudlian socialist (someone a bit like McGovern himself), were condemned by some groups, some critics, the police, and the punditocracy at the Daily Mail. Over its initial run Cracker was nominated for 14 BAFTAs winning seven including BAFTAs for best drama and three consecutive best actor BAFTAs for Coltrane.

I highly recommend not only Duguid's book but the television show itself. If you haven't seen it watch it as soon as you can. In my opinion, it is one of the great English language TV shows ever.

The Books of My Life: Inside the Tardis

What we read, just like what we are intellectually interested in, is, in large part, a product of what we value regardless of who we are. I have been a long time watcher of Doctor Who so it is not surprising that one of the books I would get around to reading at some point is James Chapman's Inside the Tardis: The Worlds of Doctor Who (London: Tauris, revised edition, 2013).

Chapman, a film and television historian who has also written on the James Bond films and The Saint and The Avengers television series's, has written a book that should be, in many ways,  a model of how one should write a book on a television series, particularly one as historically and culturally significant as Doctor Who. Chapman's book is grounded in historical analysis, genre and subgenre analysis, the analysis of discourse surrounding Doctor Who of critics and fans, and, most significantly, at least for Doctor Who from 1963 through the 1970s, in archival work at the BBC Written Archives Centre in Reading. As a result Chapman's book nicely puts Doctor Who from the first doctor to the eleventh in broader economic, political, technological, institutional (BBC, British television), cultural, geographic (UK), and demographic contexts.

Chapman's exploration of the BBC Written Archives gives Inside the Tardis a richness and texture that is missing from most books on TV shows written by the devotees of the donut hole or crystal ball textualism who generally eschew archival work, interviews with personnel involved in the making television shows, and qualitative and quantitative analysis of how viewers actually read the television shows they watch that unfortunately dominates film, television, and literary analysis these days. Chapman's work in the BBC archives not only gives richness and texture to his analysis of Doctor Who. It also allows him to put to rest several mythic sacred cows that have become common place in Doctor Who criticism, such as that, for example, which puts the reason for the demise of Doctor Who in 1969 solely at the feet of BBC One Controller Michael Grade. Chapman rightly sees the freezing of the BBC's license fee, the transformation of programming practises, the rise of new technologies, inflation, and Thatcherism as playing the leading roles for why Doctor Who was put on hiatus in 1989.

There is one downside to Chapman's book. It is a pity that the 1980s archives were not available for study at the time of Chapman's research and writing. Hopefully either Chapman or some other enterprising scholar can rectify this in the future.

I want to conclude by giving Chapman's book, despite its limitation, my highest recommendation. I  not only recommend it to fans of Doctor Who but for those looking for an example of how to write and write in a jargon free way about historically and culturally significant television programmes like Doctor Who. May Doctor Who live for another fifty years.

The Books of My Life: The Doctors Are In

I have been watching Doctor Who for some time now. I have seen all of the episodes of the third Doctor, the fourth Doctor, the fifth Doctor, the sixth Doctor, the seventh Doctor, the War Doctor, the ninth Doctor, the tenth Doctor, the eleventh Doctor, and the twelfth Doctor, and am looking forward to seeing the upcoming episodes of the thirteenth Doctor beginning later this year. Graeme Burk's and Robert Smith's The Doctors Are In: The Essential and Unofficial Guide to Doctor Who's Greatest Time Lord (Toronto: ECW, 2015) covers all of the Doctors up to but not including the thirteenth, which continues to be a problem inherent to this and previous books by Burk and Smith given that Doctor Who is an open text.

Some of the same problems that limited my enjoyment of Burk's and Smith's early book, Who is the Doctor, are present again in The Doctors Are In. While I have always accepted each Doctor Who episode for what it is--the social scientist and historian in me--Burk and Smith, on the other hand, like many other scholar fans, don't accept some episodes for what they are and instead rhapsodise normatively about what they would like those episodes to be. Thankfully, Burk's and Smith's polemics are not as evident in The Doctors Are In as they were in Who is the Doctor. Given the historical nature of The Doctors Are In the history quotient is ramped up while the polemic quotient is ramped down a bit making this a somewhat more enjoyable and enlightening read than the previous book for me.

The Books of My Life: Who is the Doctor

I started watching the BBC's Doctor Who way back in the 1970s when Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker, probably still my favourite Doctor, were the Doctors. I continued to watch as Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sebastian McCoy succeeded Tom Baker as Doctor Who. At first I was hesitant to watch the Doctor Who reboot that began in 2005, but once I started watching it I fell in love with the show, again, to my relief.

I just spent the last month and a half rewatching and watching, in the case of the episodes from series seven on, all of the episodes of the Doctor Who reboot. As a result I was looking for an episode guide like The Television Companion: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who by David Howe and Steven James Walker (Tolworth, England: Telos, 2003). Unfortunately, Graeme Burk's and Robert Smith's Who is the Doctor: The Unofficial Guide to Doctor Who the New Series (Toronto: ECW, 2012) is not it.

I found Who is the Doctor interesting, enlightening, eye rolling, and frustrating all at the same time. The summary sections for each episode are far too short. The reference sections raise questions about whether these references are emic, etic, or both raising the question, in turn, of whether references, if they aren't derived from primary source information, are valid. Some seem valid, others seem of questionable validity. Still others may have been ignored because not all references seem to have been derived from primary source analysis. The adventures in time and space sections were generally helpful particularly when they connected the reboot to the Classic Series, episodes of which I haven't seen since the 1970s and 1980s. The who is the Doctor sections are helpful. The stand up and cheer sections are interesting if largely subjective, which may or may not be a problem for some. The roll your eyes sections were likewise subjective and, as a result, were problematic, for me, given that they are sometimes grounded in a notion of realism that is not really an appropriate or valid "criticism" of a fictional television show. They were, for me, of the same variety and validity as those academic criticisms of Disney's Pocahontas (1995), which was not intended to be a historical documentary, as not being historically accurate enough. The trivia sections were OK. The opinion and second opinions sections were interesting but were often undermined, as is so often the case with fan criticism, by the assumption that the authors could have written better episodes than those who actually did write the episodes did making one wonder why they aren't writing each and every episode of Doctor Who. The psychic paper segments do a good job of exploring the similarities and differences between new Who and old. The biographies are far too brief.

Methodologically, I am more of an exegesis, hermeneutics, and homiletics sort of guy. In my book one must began with a critical analysis of a text, an exegesis of the text grounded in primary source material, with a summary of the text that is long enough to do it justice to it. Only then can one move on to hermeneutics or the interpretation of the text, to an exploration of what we think a text means on the basis of our exegesis. And only then can we finally move on to homiletics, to polemicising or engaging in apologetics over a text. Burk and Smith too often, it seems to me, start and end their "critical" analysis at the homiletic level and that is, at least for me, a problem.

Methodology isn't the only problem with Burk's and Smith's book. Their "criticisms" of Doctor Who's ethnic and racial lack of representation smacks of the same crystal ball tendency (the assumption and circular logic that you can learn anything you need to know about a text from the text itself) in much academic criticism these days that focuses exclusively on the text and largely jettisons any first order or primary source analysis of a television show or film. The book ends with series 6 while Doctor Who is now at series 11 making some of Burk's and Smith's "criticisms" problematic given that Doctor Who remains an open text.

As a result of all this, I will continue my search for a book on the new series of Doctor Who that is more like the Howe and Walker book, a book which seems to me, even with its faults, to be one of the best episode guides I have ever seen and read.

Genre and Academia: The Case of Deborah Jermyn's Prime Suspect

Genre, a repetitive style, is at the heart of popular literature, popular film, and popular television. It turns out it is also very much at the heart of modern academic life. This was made very clear to me recently as I was reading Deborah Jermyn’s BFI TV classic monograph on the ITV detective show Prime Suspect (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

All the usual genre suspects from film and television studies are present in Jermyn’s monograph  including a discussion of realism in Prime Suspect, a discussion of the representation of gender in Prime Suspect, and an exploration of the detective and crime genre as it relates to Prime Suspect. Given that such repetition can prove tedious and tiresome to some of us after awhile it was a welcome relief when Jermyn turned to her attention to matters that are often far too peripheral in contemporary academic film and television studies including the role creator Lynda LaPlante played in creating Prime Suspect, the difficulties LaPlante met while working on and writing the show, the role real life DCI Jackie Malton played in bringing greater realism to Prime Suspect, and the increasingly important role actor Helen Mirren, who played DCI Jane Tennison, the central character in Prime Suspect, played in the production of the show as it went on.

Jermyn’s Prime Suspect is a good if repetitive paint by the theories of the moment in academia book. Prime Suspect itself, which I have been re-watching on Blu ray is, in its first, third, fourth series first episode, and fifth series, extraordinary. Ironically, it breaks certain aspects of the genre mould it has been poured into.