October is one of my favourite months of the year. In the build up to Halloween, it seems that the world around me is finally catching up with my enthusiasm for all things gothic, gruesome and macabre.  Black and orange become the colour of the day; shops fill up with bat-shaped party decorations, ghoulish candy, and vampire or witches costumes;

As a practicing textual analyst and historian of British television drama between the sixties and the eighties, I have a methodology that is so distinct in my field as to possibly be unique. I gain my knowledge of British television drama by watching as much of it as is it humanly possible to do, with the aim of eventually having seen the majority of what survives and is available.

28 September 2012 To what extent should academics be engaging with industry, and how? What relevance does academic research in television studies have for industry anyway?

FRESH MEAT, CHANNEL 4, THURSDAYS 10PM The second season of the hour long comedy drama Fresh Meat prompts the obvious question: why is this the first successful comedy about students since… well how long exactly?

My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die! The Child is father of the Man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety. —   William Wordsworth from ‘My Heart Leaps Up’ (1802)   Many critics have misperceived Ken Burns as a romantic.  I’ve never seen him that way.

After the spectacle and drama of live television during an obsessive month of watching the Olympics and Paralympics, the television schedules began to turn to something like normal in the beginning of September and it became clear that new drama was being pushed as a main selling point.

Image by Lauren Thompson There has been something of an auto-ethnographic turn in some quarters of recent television scholarship, with a number of academics reflecting on their engagement with television as viewers and as scholars.

’Dear Mr Miller John Lewis PLC has let us know that you recently bought TV equipment. However, we can’t find a record of a TV license for this address.’ The quotation above comes from a letter I received, signed by Carl Shimeild, Operations Director of TV Licensing in Britain . I don’t know what that title means, like virtually every job description I have encountered since arriving here.

As television criticism goes, HBO’s The Newsroom probably set a new record for the number of scathing, negative reviews that it received.

‘Performance and Television Space’, a one day symposium held at the University of Glamorgan’s Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries on 20 ^th April 2012, was the second in a series of three conferences organised by the research project ‘Spaces of Television: Production, Site and Style’. This AHRC funded venture, shared between the Universities of Reading, Glamorgan and Leicester, will hold its concluding three-day

It’s complicated, being an American, having the money and the bad conscience, both at the same time. (Louis Simpson from ‘On the Lawn at the Villa,’ Selected Poems , 1965) I haven’t given up yet on Aaron Sorkin’s newest creation, The Newsroom , but I’ve come close once or twice.