I am on a big search – and it will be a long and protracted search – for a new meaning. Not of life (well, that as well, but that’ll last even longer), but of what it means to watch television. Yes, I have discovered doubt: I no longer trust my old instincts. And so I will spend 2015 – this is at least one of my new year’s resolutions – on thinking through what it means to watch television today.

We’ve all seen One Born Every Minute , 24 Hours in A&E , Educating Essex (or Yorkshire ), The Hotel … But how many people know that these are ‘fixed rig productions’? And how many know what that actually means, beyond the fact that they have an unholy amount of robotic cameras festooned around the place?

After my last blog on academic work culture almost brought the CST site down I was going to resort to less fraught ground today and write about the brilliance of Claudia Winkleman.

It is perhaps a little cheeky to borrow a blog title from Robert Graves’ autobiography, but after all the complimentary things I’ve said about *I, Claudius *over the years, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind. This will be a relatively short piece, as I am currently mired in essay marking, while also preparing a lecture for next week.

Tony Ageh, the BBC’s one original thinker, spoke at Royal Holloway earlier this week. Those expecting a standard defence of the ‘BBC licence fee’ were in for a shock. He proposed a complete rethinking of the concept for the digital age. “We used to be broadcast beings. We are now internet beings. We should ask what the Licence Fee buys us when we, as citizens, are under attack from all sides.

How come Television Studies rarely discusses the roles film plays in broadcasting?

Cathy Johnson’s “Working ourselves to death” will go down in CST -history as the blog which nearly brought the system down, so heartily did it resonate with so many of us! In this piece, I want to continue the conversation about overwork and attachment and ask some, potentially uncomfortable, questions about the ways in which self-exploitation becomes discursive justification for exploiting others.

Originally kicked off by Steve Allen half a century ago, The Tonight Show remains iconic television. NBC’s show and format was made most famous by Johnny Carson during his run in the 60s, 70s and 80s, and subsequently infamous by Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien. Leno who was taken on board, dropped, taken back, and dropped again over his 22 years as a host, while O’Brien lasted less than a year.

You have to feel sorry for Broadchurch creator, Chris Chibnall.

I’ve been looking forward to the new Adam Curtis documentary Bitter Lake for some time. He is a provocative, exciting and necessary filmmaker who has the rare capacity and courage to make challenging programmes that openly and directly challenge our ideological, economic and political systems. On the BBC.

A few weeks ago, Amy Poehler and Tina Fey hosted their third Golden Globes Awards, with much being made of their long-standing, real-life friendship in the lead up to the event (see here and herefor some examples). This made me think back to an article that I co-wrote with Karen Boyle in 2012 which looked at the depiction of same-sex friendship between Poehler and Fey’s characters in the film *Baby Mama *(McCullers,