THIS BLOG CONTAINS SPOILERS Someone once asked me “What’s the difference between apocalyptic fiction and dystopia?” I had to think about it for a bit, but then I came up with, “The world goes to hell suddenly in apocalyptic fiction and the people who remain have to deal with it. In dystopias the world has been hellish for quite some time and dealing with it has become a routine.”

On the 8 ^th and 9 ^th of November I had the pleasure of attending the British Promax conference with my colleague Paul Grainge as part of our AHRC-funded project on the promotional screen industries.  Promax is the industry body for the TV marketing industry, covering all of the companies and disciplines involved in the promotion of channels and programmes within the British television industry.

The BBC is currently engulfed in a crisis that has already led to the resignation of the new Director-General George Entwistle after just 7 weeks in the job. Like several previous BBC crises, this one centres around journalistic standards. The difference this time lies in the issue: the reporting (or rather not reporting) of a story involving the BBC itself.

For the past two years I’ve been the research fellow on the ‘History of Television for Women in Britain 1947-89’ project.

Yet again, the US Presidential election was a televisual one. Yet again, we were told it was not. No matter how many people follow the election cycle on TV, no matter how much time and money the campaigns spend on it, there remain internet bores/boors who won’t face facts. Their cybertarian obsessions lead them time after time—it’s actually decade after decade now—to proclaim that ‘legacy media’ are on the way out in the United States.

A scandal of some magnitude has hit the BBC over the past weeks. ITV’s Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy Savile , which aired on 3 October 2012 to some 2.44 million viewers, lifted the lid on the dark side of Sir James Wilson Vincent Savile, OBE, KCSG. For those of you that don’t know the story: Savile was a TV and radio presenter whose career spanned over fifty years.

As part of a project on multiplatform public service content, I’ve been examining the changing meanings of the term ‘multiplatform’ at the BBC. In one of my last interviews (at least for a while) at the BBC on the topic last week, I felt compelled to ask whether the meaning of multiplatform had changed so much, it was now a “dirty word”, to be avoided as much as possible.

Even in our near-miraculous coverage of the Olympics, I would say that we’ve taken – joyously – our capacity to present and distribute existing forms of content to their natural limits rather than innovate to discover genuinely new forms of content. Yet it’s the quest for this – genuinely new forms of digital content – that represents the next profound moment of change we need to prepare for if we’re to deserve a new charter.

I am swimming, swimming in a sea of liquid camera movements, dissolves, reflections, blue pools, deep oceans, lavish spectacles, messy births, intimate bodily exchanges, bad romances, trashy sex, bright lights, swirling colours, big windows, runny eyes, wet wounds, red blood, DNA, semen, salty tears, moist mouths, saliva, and beads of sweat.

October is one of my favourite months of the year. In the build up to Halloween, it seems that the world around me is finally catching up with my enthusiasm for all things gothic, gruesome and macabre.  Black and orange become the colour of the day; shops fill up with bat-shaped party decorations, ghoulish candy, and vampire or witches costumes;

As a practicing textual analyst and historian of British television drama between the sixties and the eighties, I have a methodology that is so distinct in my field as to possibly be unique. I gain my knowledge of British television drama by watching as much of it as is it humanly possible to do, with the aim of eventually having seen the majority of what survives and is available.