Last Monday, Britain invented television… all over again. A load of people watched the same programme at the same time, at the moment of first broadcast. At one point, 9.27 million people, 34.64% of the TV audience, was watching the final denouement of the ITV peak-time drama Broadchurch . Over a third of the TV audience (8.72 million people) watched right through the episode. It broke the record for tweets during a TV drama.

In police drama, the protagonists’ surveillance and investigation of the fictional world, and their ability to enforce the law, depend on being able to move in and between places and spaces. A few years ago I wrote about ideas around seeing and knowing in relation to US police series, and working on the current AHRC-funded research project ‘Spaces of Television’ has got me thinking about space and movement in British police shows.

Guy Hibbert is no stranger to controversial drama. *No Child of Mine *– his rendering of an horrific real-life child abuse case brilliantly directed by Peter Kosminsky – was one of the most disturbing and moving British television productions of the 1990s. So I had high hopes for his recent Channel 4 one-off drama Complicit , which follows MI5 agent Edward Ekubo (David Oyelowo) in hot pursuit of a

I talked to a cab driver the day after Margaret Thatcher died. He was worried about congestion during her funeral the following Wednesday. Should he respect his birthday and take the day off, as planned, or cash in on the commemoration? The cabbie was three years old when Winston Churchill died in 1965, but he recollected that the funeral had been on a weekend, to minimize social disruption. He was right.

I have always been fascinated, perhaps even obsessed, with my eyes.

In 1986, in a now infamous *Saturday Night Live sketch, William Shatner told fans *at a *Star Trek *convention to ‘Get a Life!’.

I do not intend all my blogs to be about 3D, but two days at the excellent 3D Creative Summit, organised by Ravensbourne, has provided a number of useful ideas on which to ruminate.

Even before its first episode was transmitted in April last year, The Undateables (Channel 4, 2012- ) polarised opinion.

I’m not a great sports fan. I enjoy the Olympics, tennis and darts when they happen to be on the telly, but I’ve never suffered the agonies and ecstasies of loyally supporting a particular team or following a specific sport. That is until I discovered Formula One.  I’m not sure what it was about Formula One that drew me in a few years ago.

Ricky Gervais’ sitcom Derek concluded its first season around the time Michael Haneke’s Amour won the Oscar for best foreign language film, and my viewing of both overlapped in a way that made comparison perhaps a bit more obvious than it otherwise would be. At first glance these two figures could not seem more different: on the one hand Gervais – portly comedy innovator who (along with lanky co-writer

I was surprised to hear from the editor of CSTonline that no one had yet covered the topic of this week’s blog, the HBO comedy drama series Girls (2012-), created by and starring Lena Dunham. Surprised because the series, following the lives of a group of white, middle-class women in their twenties who live in New York City, has been met with both a huge amount of critical acclaim and