Fifty years ago this weekend, BBC2 began, with a technological fiasco. Everything that could go wrong, did , from power supply to headline reading. These were the days when signals were routinely interrupted, aerials regularly required agile tweaking, and repairmen stood ready to come to your home.

WARNING – THIS BLOG CONTAINS SPOILERS. I was pleased to see Anthony Smith and CST finally engage with what I’ve described elsewhere (slightly hyperbolically) as the televisual equivalent of Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe : T rue Detective . I agree with much of what Smith says about the pleasures of what he calls its genre uncertainty, but I want to take a different tack with it

Before sitting down to write, I decided to cast an eye over this week’s television schedule, alighting almost immediately on two examples of a genre which has long confounded and intrigued me: the celebrity documentary.

As the UK moves closer to the end of its annual academic teaching period and we are becoming reflective and perhaps also a bit optimistic about the future, I am struck by one big question: what does it mean to teach television today? A few weeks ago, in his CSTonline Blog, Toby Miller made a case for the continuation of television in its most traditional of forms.

For those not familiar with EastEnders , the last few months may nevertheless have yielded glimpses of Dot Cotton (Branning) via the actress, June Brown, who has played her since July 1985 and who has been publicising her autobiography.

I have taken a strange interest in ratings in the last year or so, an interest that admittedly developed not long after I started watching the first season of Hannibal .  For all of its critical acclaim—here’s a recent example from Matt Zoller Seitz —the show seemed like it would meet an untimely death at the hands of network cancellation last June.

It is ten years since the final episode of HBO’s hugely popular series, Sex and the City (1998 – 2004) aired*. *This anniversary is being marked by a conference held at the University of Roehampton next week on the 4 ^th of April, entitled ‘ Sex and the City Ten Years On:

In 1969 Alan Lovell wrote a seminar paper on ‘British Cinema: The Unknown Cinema’, ‘unknown’ because of the paucity of scholarly work on British Cinema at the time – a situation which, in 1997, Lovell noted was no longer the case. Until relatively recently the same could have been said of British Television, given the paucity of academic study of television.

On 5 March, the BBC announced that BBC3 would become an online-only channel, subject to  approval by the BBC Trust. It would be replaced on the digital broadcast spectrum by a new BBC1+1 service, following the success of ‘plus one’ channels for the other terrestrial broadcasters. This move has huge implications for the BBC.

A great deal of hand-wringing has taken place since the decision to cut BBC3 as a terrestrial television channel, particularly on the pages of The Guardian – where everyone from Steve Hewlett to Boyd Hilton to Mark Jackson has mused on the implications of the decision for the Corporation’s commitment to youth audiences, weighed against the relatively minor cost savings that will be made (Hewlett’s

Hey there marshmallows!  Veronica Mars is back. I’ve been thinking about *Veronica Mars.  *On the 12 April 2013, I blogged about the exciting news of the *Veronica Mars *Kickstarter campaign, in which TV creator Rob Thomas and actor Kristen Bell sought crowd funding to produce a cinema reunion film for their much loved teen hardboiled detective series.