I’ve left Mexico and moved back to my beloved, benighted, lonesome home of LA. Improbably, in balmy temperatures, there are skaters on the Pershing Square rink that I look down on from my loft. It’s some distance from Coyoacán and my neighbor/protestors who saw themselves as the southern wing of Spain’s indignados : The week before I left Mexico City, we had a major earthquake.
Steven Peacock’s recent observation that many academic analyses of television too often become ‘systematic, determined to “solve” the text’s engagement with a specific subject’ is a timely reminder that our evaluation of television art would do well to avoid treating it like a puzzle.
I had never been a particular fan of Dennis Potter, but this was different. The film noir atmosphere, the unreliable narrator, ambiguous events and characters, the explicit play with the genres of fiction, both popular and elite, the edgy, coruscating dialogue… And the music. It was my first experience of TV where you never quite knew where you were, and that was the point.
“I haven’t anything to be – except this.” Dushane, Top Boy (Channel 4, 31.10 – 3.11.11) Channel 4’s Top Boy ended last night after less than 4 hours of screen-time.
As yet another week on British TV draws to a close I am moved to wonder what has happened to our television industry and my TV watching habits.
Google, that old faithful of lazy scholars undertaking armchair proxy research, tells us that about 280,000 sites offer “Television is Dead”. The expression even has its own site though the title is slightly misleading. “TV is Dead” has a million more and Britain’s Channel 4 has a series.
What to make of Boardwalk Empire ? HBO’s costume drama set in the USA during Prohibition reminds me of one of those fascinating objects that often crop up on Antiques Roadshow . One can admire from afar the detailed textures and evident craft of the thing without having much of a clue as to its function. Everything looks so good – the fabrics, the sculpted light, the big complex stage of the boardwalk itself;
ITV celebrated the 50 th anniversary of Candid Camera on UK screens with an archive show, originally broadcast on 28 December 2010. Ideal, I thought, for my course on TV history.
It is hard to imagine that Autumn is around the corner as we all bask in a late heatwave. And as I sit in front on my computer on the hottest day ever in October (since records began) I am pondering TV’s Autumn season so far.
I watch pirate television. Will you forgive me some narcissography in this first blog, given that enticing new status? I live in Mexico City, the biggest in the world. It also lays claim to more political demonstrations than anywhere else, more film clubs than Paris, more abortions than London, and the region’s most corrupt police force. My landlady lets me use her cable service. She dug a hole in the wall between her loft and mine.
Late last year John Caughie published an essay (in *Screen *vol 51 no 4 [Winter 2010]). Entitled ‘Mourning Television: the other screen’ his article characterised contemporary television in terms of decline, decadence and loss. I have responded to this elsewhere ( Screen vol 52 no 4 [Winter 2011]) but here I want to address its key moment of *praise *for television which comes at the end of the