The latest season of Sherlock concluded on January 15th in its unfortunately characteristic vein of ill-conceived pyrotechnics, scarcely-credible plot lines and levels of reality that test the patience of its viewers.

According to the most recent iPlayer monthly performance pack (April-June 2016) – a periodical report by the BBC that examines iPlayer usage – the online service fulfilled 290 million programme requests in June 2016 alone.

Summer in New Zealand has been particularly crap so far this year (storms and flooding), so my beloved and I had to travel to the Pacific Island nation of Samoa, in search of sun, some four hours on a plane heading north into the Pacific. I also had another purpose: a significant birthday fell on January 9 ^th and I wanted to be Where Nobody Knew My Name.

About two years ago, at a dinner party, with my husband to my left, I was surprised when I turned to my right to find Nancy Ford, the woman responsible for getting me my first job on a major network television soap opera. I hadn’t seen Nancy in more than 25 years.

Here’s the pitch. Game of Thrones meets Mad Max in a post-apocalyptic wilderness somewhere North of Adelaide where a giant panda is on a lonely quest to atone for his wrongs to humanity.

Since debuting on the UK’s digital terrestrial television service Freeview in March 2015, I have been enthralled by the Horror Channel. Part of the reason for my enchantment is linked to my ‘aca-fan’ interests as from April 2014 to late March 2016, Horror had been re-running episodes of ‘classic’ Doctor Who (e.g. those initially-broadcast between 1963 and 1989) on a daily basis.

The recent death of Andrew Sachs made me feel nostalgic and I re-watched Fawlty Towers . So much has already been said and written about this most celebrated of British television programs, but Sachs’ death renewed discussion of Fawlty Towers ’s success. One point was the reminder that when the program was first pitched to the BBC, a memo was written heaping scorn on the quality of the writing of the pilot script.

I am often asked for my recommendations on what works in terms of teaching television at HE level. It’s not exactly the right time of the academic year for this, but here are some of the things I’ve learned from teaching television on undergraduate degree courses in the UK over the years.

Having previously considered the ways in which Alec Baldwin has his character Jack Donaghy run through the gamut of bad actor behaviour and bad acting in the 30 Rock (NBC 2006-2013) episode ‘Jack-Tor’ (1.5), it is now time to address the question previously raised by Martin Esslin: ‘How, in fact, does a good actor act a bad actor?’ (1987: 72) In this follow-up, we will examine the ways in which Baldwin delivers his masterclass on bad

Colombia’s narcotraficantes [narco-traffickers] emerged as a consequence of many complex factors. Washington supported the trade in drugs during its war in Vietnam as a means of funding proxy local actors, who quickly perceived potentially powerful market forces at play among the US military, and fuelled a demand that was soon repatriated.

The killing of Osama Bin Laden by American special forces may have rid the collective American psyche of a man who at times appeared to be a ghost, but it also raised another ghost.