Who says that hearing voices is a bad thing?  As far as my television viewing habits go, I’ve been hearing them more frequently as of late, or, at least, I’ve been hearing those voice-overs that continue to characterize and add character to so many television shows.

Today’s factual TV is all about formats: repeatable, exportable templates that can generate multiple episodes in a multitude of markets. Thanks to excellent collections of case studies like Tasha Oren and Sharon Sharaf’s Global Television Formats, we can now understand the dynamics of adaptation from market to market. But what makes a successful format in the first place?

At a Royal Television Society event in February, Peter Bazalgette (formerly Creative Director of Endemol, latterly Chair of English National Opera and about to take up a new role as Chair of Arts Council England) interviewed Maria Miller MP (Secretary of State forCulture Media and Sport) about television.

In a previous post for CST I began thinking about the question of multiplatform quality.

So what will be the future of the internet? Is it a glorious new frontier that can never become a border, an ever-expanding sphere of meaning that is generated permissively and received chaotically? Or is it an increasingly controlled domain, centralized not only by state fiat but corporate advertising and consumer animation? One answer to these questions lies in an unlikely area: football on television.

In the past year as researcher on the Warwick and De Montfort Universities AHRC project A History of Television for Women in Britain (1947-89) I’ve been thinking a lot about women and situation comedy, and watching a lot of women in situation comedy.

By the time this blog is published, Utopia will have finished its six episode run on Channel 4. If Poliakoff’s Dancing on the Edge was launched with one kind of hype (see Stephen Harper’s blog), Utopia was surrounded by hype of a different nature.

One of the pleasures of researching the history of UKTV drama for the ‘Spaces of Television: production, site and style’ AHRC project is finding yet more evidence of the non-teleological and non-linear nature of TV history.

Last week the BBC revealed that the Doctor Who 50 ^th anniversary special would be shown in 3D, not only on television via the BBC HD channel, but also in cinemas.

Dancing on the Edge , the five-part BBC2 series whose final episode will be broadcast on Monday, has all the hallmarks of a late-period Stephen Poliakoff artefact: sumptuous settings; deep focus shots revealing a wealth of period detail; an Expressionist use of colour with lots of vibrant, Meaningful Red; a camera that lingers on black and white photographs;

There are times when television rules our house.   There are certain shows we watch with an intense level of concentration and involvement that even prohibits exchanging opinions until the credits roll.  At other times, television functions as background, or ‘white’ noise, much as radio once did, and perhaps still does, while other activities are taking place in the home.