The big question of this year’s BAFTAs was how many awards Netflix would romp home with.

The end of my university career approaches as a result of my (reluctant) acceptance of voluntary redundancy. I will finish in November 2017 after 25 years of teaching media at the University of Waikato. There is a bigger picture; by leaving in November, my colleagues will not have to go through a demeaning process of re-applying for their jobs. But they will also be hard pressed to cover all our courses and satisfy student demands.

The Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board, or BARB, tells us the who what, when, where, and how of watching British TV and computer screens. Jointly owned by ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, Sky, the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, and the BBC, it has been going in its current form for many years, shifting as required to keep track of changes caused by deregulation and the proliferation of consumer technologies.

As the media firestorm surrounding the Netflix TV series 13 Reasons Why continues apace, I have become increasingly concerned by several vaunted claims made by commentators in relation to the potential effects of the programme’s depiction of suicide.

We are inviting chapter submissions for a new edited collection focusing on gender and horror. This edited collection aims to re-examine horror in an era of remakes, reboots and re-imaginings.

The BFI Media Conference is a unique event for teachers of film and media at 16+ and in HE, bringing together an exciting mix of new and creative ideas from the worlds of the media industries, teaching and research.

The International Journal of Digital Television has published a special issue on Television Formats . A variety of topics from the field of Television Format research are covered in the contributions by Jean K. Chalaby and Andrea Esser, Joe F. Khalil, Martin N. Ndlela, Michael Keane and Joy Danjing Zhang, Wenna Zeng and Colin Sparks, Enrique Uribe-Jongbloed and Ethel Pis Diez, Paul Torre, and Tom Evens and Andrei Richter.

Transformations of Television Industries Transformations of Television Consumption Practices Transformations of Televisual Aesthetics, Narratives and Identities 21 ^st Century Transnational and Transmedia Television Practices Wednesday the 13 ^th of September to Friday the 15 ^th of September, 2017, University of Westminster, 309 Regent St, London.

A long time ago, in a galaxy not so far away, Friday nights were (all too briefly) enlivened by a pair of young scamps with a penchant for critiquing popular culture, whether mounting toy-based parodies of contemporary film and television, utilising Star Wars figurines to skewer trash TV formats, or dispensing Vinyl Justice to the mad, bad and (occasionally) dangerous of rock ‘n’ pop.

** ** In a recent Sight and Sound article (March 3 2017) Nick James made an interesting observation about BBC1’s latest historical/period drama, Taboo (BBC1, 2017, Scott, Hardy et al). Likening its look and characters to an Alan Moore graphic novel (“ From Hell ”), Taboo , according to James, has a “peculiar iconography” that “yearns to be linked…with the shadows…only graphic novelists care about.” (James,

First, and for the record, let me state that I’m not a huge fan of superheroes.