A ‘Billy Fluff’ is a moment in Doctor Who from 1963 to 1966 when William Hartnell, the lead actor playing the Doctor, ‘fluffs’ or blows one of his lines. Some are legendary, including ‘anti-radiation gloves’ and ‘cinders floating about in Spain’. But a collection of them on YouTube is only six minutes long.

British history is full of strange and disturbing noises. They rebound and echo, providing a constant reminder to future generations of the violent noises of the past- signalling colonial atrocities, and the stifled disenfranchised voices of class and gender inequalities.

During a recent trip to New York City my TV nerd colleague and I attended two show tapings. If you never have done this, I can highly recommend it – the TV lover’s equivalent of looking inside someone’s bathroom cabinet to see what makes them tick. Not that I’ve ever done that last thing – seriously- honestly. Well, maybe.

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015-) is a Netflix comedy produced by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, and follows the life of 29-year old Kimmy Schmidt (Ellie Kemper) in New York City after her rescue from an underground cult.

Television often has subtitles in my household and not just when we are watching Euro-dramas on BBC4. I hadn’t given much thought to this until I read an excellent article on the topic by Maggie Brown in the Royal Television Society’s magazine (Television, May 2016), entitled ‘Sounding off about the unheard’. I thoroughly recommend it, particularly to anyone who teaches film/video making.

I like old things. When I was a teenager my granddad entrusted me with my great grandfather’s fob watch, and it always gave me a thrill to think that I was holding something of (it seemed at the time) inestimable age. It was probably only manufactured in the early twentieth century, but I carried it to school with pride;

I guess we have all had the experience of pointing a remote device at the wrong point of focus, and wondered why nothing was appearing on the screen. Or having sat on the TV remote accidentally, to create mayhem on the screen. That might be the only times we have become more aware of our dependence on the remote.

I am currently suffering from a massive dilemma. The last episode of Undercover (BBC, 2016) is sitting on BOB waiting for me to watch it and I just don’t dare to. Don’t get me wrong, I thought it was a terrific drama: the pleasure of getting to watch Adrian Lester and Sophie Okonedo in fully fleshed-out parts was something that television doesn’t afford us often.

In this blog post I want to challenge the separation of ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ paratexts as divergent trajectories within what Jonathan Hardy (2011) has named the ‘commercial intertextuality’ of contemporary television series. To do this, I’m going to respond to Jason Mittell’s recent post for In Media Res where he suggests exploring the affective, rather than purely interpretive, meanings that paratexts generate.

I’m in Colombia, doing some research on a plaque unveiled by Prince Charles in Cartagena two years ago that briefly commemorated a British fleet trying to starve the inhabitants into submission and make the United Kingdom an occupying power in South America. The plaque lasted just a few hours before being “transformed” by an activist engineer, then removed by the municipal government, following mass Twitter protests.

Part Two:  Whose Show? [ Part Two of “GENRE OUT OF THE BOX” delves further into the connection between genre and gender] In Part One, I explored the genre hybridity of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, and began my inquiry into how the hybridity impacts on the construction of gender in the series,