The Northeast Popular/American Culture Association (NEPCA) is seeking papers on the subject of television for its annual fall conference to be held on the campus of University of Massachusetts Amherst on October 27-28, 2017. The deadline for proposals is June 1, 2017. NEPCA prides itself on holding conferences which emphasize discussing ideas in a non-competitive and supportive environment.

10 June 2017 10am–5pm, with a public screening at 6:20pm Venue: NFT3, BFI Southbank, London Featuring a Q&A with screenwriter David Rudkin Including contributions from: Roger Luckhurst (Birkbeck), Yvonne Salmon (Cambridge University), Will Fowler (BFI), Gareth Evans (Whitechapel Gallery), and more tbc.

A few weeks ago, I attended the annual MeCCSA conference, held at the University of Leeds. A dominant strand of the event centred around contemporary working cultures in the creative industries, with presentations on precarity, issues of diversity and equality within the sector and the psychological implications of ‘failure’ to name but a few.

The latest season of Sherlock concluded on January 15 ^th in its unfortunately characteristic vein of ill-conceived pyrotechnics, scarcely-credible plot lines and levels of reality that test the patience of its viewers. With ‘The Final Problem,’ co-creators Mark Gatiss and Stephen Moffatt should do what Conan Doyle was never quite able to, and finally retire the detective. Yet it wasn’t always this way.

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. And there you have it, Wastelander Panda, an Australian web series created by Victoria Cocks and Marcus Mackenzie who apparently came up with the idea while sitting in a university lecture.

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.