Centre for Law, Society and Popular Culture Westminster Law School Television drama, law and national identity Symposium Announcement and First Call for Papers: Friday 6 September 2019, University of Westminster Television drama plays a seminal role in the cultural life of nations, and the way in which it depicts national identities merits scholarly exploration.

British TV and the Working-Class Homecoming: Stand Up, Nigel Barton/ The Land of Green Ginger “It’s like a tightrope between two worlds… and I’m walking it!”- Nigel Barton Programme Stand Up, Nigel Barton (1965, The Wednesday Play) The Land of Green Ginger (1973, Play For Today) As university fees sit at record highs and the cost of accommodation and living in major university cities continues to spiral, the gap

About 20 minutes into ‘The Woman Who Fell to Earth’, the probationary PC Yasmin Khan (Mandip Gill) – provoked by her own recent alien encounters – returns to the station for an update on the evening’s activities: YASMIN: I’m just wondering whether there’s been anything else out of the ordinary tonight. RAMESH : It’s the nightshift in Sheffield. Everything’s out of the ordinary.

I’ll start this piece with a confession: that in recent years I’ve fallen slightly out of love with Doctor Who . I liked Peter Capaldi’s Doctor, though I felt he was never as well served by the stories and scripts he had to deal with – new Who ’s equivalent of Sylvester McCoy, perhaps? And the series never seemed to have a stable time on Saturday nights, having to accommodate a certain celebrity dance show.

For a long time The Doctor’s Aussie fans had to wait longer than their UK counterparts for new episodes. The darkest times were around the first run of the Eccleston and Tennant era, where we once famously didn’t get our Christmas episode until close to Easter. There were, of course, other ways to time travel to achieve equality, but let’s just say this created a torrent of problems.

Jodie Whittaker’s debut as the thirteenth Doctor seems to have been a success. Among many others, Hannah Mays in the Guardian reported the high viewing figures for the first episode: An average of 8.2m viewers watched Whittaker’s first outing as the Doctor, beating the ratings for political thriller sensation Bodyguard, which attracted 6.7m viewers when it debuted in August.

Disclaimer: A different version of this blog appeared in The Conversation There’s a freshness of purpose to this episode from its very first moments, as a new aspect ratio immediately gives way to remediating YouTube, with Ryan Sinclair (Tosin Cole) vlogging about the “greatest woman” he’s “ever met”. When the Doctor’s gender-shifting has been such a topic of press coverage, it’s an opening that teases the viewer, playing with

Call for chapter proposals Moments in Television: Complexity/Simplicity ; Epic/Everyday ; Sound/Image ; Substance/Style Deadline for chapter proposals 19th November 2018   Part of The Television Series, Manchester University Press Series editors: Jonathan Bignell, Sarah Cardwell, Steven Peacock

The “quality” and “post-quality” television moments of the early twenty-first century have resulted in a number of television shows that engage with gender in interesting ways, some advancing critiques of feminism or post-feminism ( UnReal, The Handmaid’s Tale ), others offering new ways of thinking about genderqueer and transitioning individuals ( Transparent, RuPaul’s Drag Race ), and still others thinking about gender at the

Proposals are invited for a one-day symposium to be held at the London School of Economics on 5 ^th April 2019. A pdf version of the call for papers can be found here. As the work of filmmakers including Jill Craigie, Kay Mander and Marion Grierson testify, women have played a significant part in the early decades of British documentary and informational filmmaking.

It’s first week of teaching, two and a half weeks after the conference, and an element of the glow still lingers – as so often after a conference, there are moments that still vividly live in my memory.