A few Fridays back, my wife and I had a joyous day out in Cambridge.

The research project ’Reaching Young Audiences: Serial Fiction and Cross-Media Storyworlds for Children and Young Audiences’ (RYA) seeks to provide detailed knowledge about the production and reception of film, TV and online fiction for children, tweens and teens through in-depth analysis of the current strategies for creating engaging fiction for young audiences and extensive qualitative case studies of their media use.

De Montfort University’s Cinema and Television History Institute is supporting an initiative to identify, safeguard and catalogue the film and TV collections of private collectors, which will be launched at an event at Leicester’s Phoenix Cinema on Sunday 29 ^th October.

The proposed book will consider how filmmakers of colour (predominantly, but not only Black) have explored white societies, cultures and practices. It will take as its case studies films and television series that treat whiteness, in all its complexities, not as an unmarked and naturalised position from which to speak, but as an object of inquiry and sustained scrutiny.

**CALL FOR PAPERS ** *Feminist Media Histories: An International Journal * Special Issue on Gender, Media, and Developmentalism Guest Editors: Dalila Missero & Masha Salazkina With this special issue of Feminist Media Histories we invite contributions that explore the historical role of gender within media production explicitly engaged in developmentalist projects.

Like many other contributors, I caught the TV Dictionary bug during the pandemic (bad pun intended). Making a short video and following a single idea without the pressures and efforts that go into a “traditional” video essay publication (if there is such a thing) and without the requirements of conventional scholarly-theoretical framing, appealed to me and brought a very welcome sense of play into my work routine.

The international co-production Farscape (Syfy 1999-2003; 2004) is perhaps best known for its extensive use of puppets and its (for the time) fairly explicit sexualised content. Shot in Australia with a primarily American writers room for the American Syfy Channel, the series follows American scientist John Crichton (Ben Browder) who is inadvertently thrown into deep space during a test flight.

This blog post has been sparked by the exorbitant amount of video recommendations that YouTube has offered up to me during the last few weeks after I finished season 2 of The Bear (Hulu, 2022—). In these various video essays (see list below), content creators talk about why The Bear is such a ‘perfect’ show or why certain episodes of The Bear are ‘perfect’ episodes.

Author’s note: Today’s Secret Word is […]. Whenever you see the word […] below, in honor of Paul Reubens, scream real loud. I was at WMNJ, Drew University’s student radio station, helping a student prep some new field recorders when the news of Paul Reubens’ death was announced.

Creating the video essay on The Good Life for the TV Dictionary – the entry was “see under lifestyle(s)” – was enjoyable. The hardest part was figuring out how to condense so much visually-arresting and often humorous material into a short space of time. Well, that and the way in which the nostalgic pleasures of rewatching this iconic show from the 1970s were often tempered by the realization of the nature of some of the content.

Queries about this call for papers should be directed to Rebecca Williams (rebeca.williams@southwales.ac.uk) or Christine Geraghty (christine.geraghty@glasgow.ac.uk) In February 2025, the soap opera EastEnders will celebrate its 40th anniversary. Launching in 1985, the BBC series has long been a staple on British television and remains one of the BBC’s flagship productions.