Elke Weissmann

*With deep-felt thanks to the respondents.*

There is a wonderful video on YouTube that shows David Morley being
interviewed about his time at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies (CCCS) and his and Charlotte Brunsdon's work on *Nationwide*.
The video looks like it might be from the late 1980s, early 1990s, and
Morley is in quite a reflective mood/mode, explaining how he came to the
CCCS and how he came to do the work he did.

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What is fascinating about the video, and relevant to this blog, is that
he highlights what roles the academic environment as well as the wider
political context played in the development of the *Nationwide* project:
his interest in the popular programme derived from a context of
political upheaval through strikes, political activism and so on and an
academic culture in sociology at the London School of Economics where
the representation of politics in newspapers was widely studied, but the
role of television largely overlooked. His contact with the CCCS caused
the gradual shift of the project from traditional news programmes to the
most popular programme on television that engaged with the news, namely
*Nationwide* (BBC, 1969-1983). Thus, one of the first studies to take
popular television seriously was clearly born within a particular
cultural and political context in which politics itself, as it was
represented in the media, was a topic around which the academy came
together.

As you remember, if you've read [my blog from a few weeks
ago](https://cstonline.net/european-cultures-of-television-studies-1-to-be-continued-by-elke-weissmann/){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}, I am interested in the cultures that shape our
television studies. Our subject continues to struggle with cultural
legitimacy, but it is also clear that it is more culturally legitimate
to study some programmes over others. I wanted to find out if this
differed from country to country and if there was a connection between
the cultural legitimacy of television and the establishment of
television studies as a subject field. My assumptions were originally
that there would be quite significant differences between countries, and
although my findings have indicated that this is indeed true, there are
also thematic similarities which I am hoping to highlight in these next
few blogs.

I contacted a few colleagues from across Europe to gain a sense of what
they thought had shaped television studies in their country. I asked
three simple questions: How do people in your country (both from
universities and from outside them) react when you say that you
research/ teach television? Why do you think television studies has/has
not become a serious subject in your country? Why do you think
television in your country is now/is not being taken seriously? I
received responses from Denmark, Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia,
Hungary, Italy, Portugal and that honorary European country called
Canada. The responses varied in length and depth, and indicated rather
complex (and sometimes paradoxical) cultures in which television studies
operate.

The key shared theme in the responses was the role of politics. In many
countries, television is studied because it is connected in some form or
another to the political culture of the country. This can be quite
apparent as in the example of Italy where the media mogul Silvio
Berlusconi also became a dominant politician, serving four times as
prime minister (for an overview of some of the issues regarding
Berlusconi's time in power, see [Ginsborg
2005](https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=YTFIetz-CC8C&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=silvio+berlusconi&ots=eBEHTJghDl&sig=9ScrKJL5aCK3VXOZGN3p1vOYSNE#v=onepage&q=silvio%20berlusconi&f=false){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}). And sometimes it can be less apparent, but still
visible in the fact that television becomes a legitimate object to study
in the context of journalism. In this blog, I want to lay out how this
operates in the countries from which academics responded, starting with
the 'concern' about television's role in regard to politics.

Television has been taken seriously in several countries for many years
because it remains perceived as a potentially bad object which can be,
as Manuel José Damásio, Head of Film and Media Arts Department at the
Universidade Lusófona in Lisbon, Portugal, put it, 'instrumentalised' by
politicians. Damasio pointed in particular to the dictatorship when
politicians used television for political purposes, and he pointed to
studies that investigated the role of public service broadcasting under
the dictatorship (see [Traquina
1995](http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/016344395017002004?journalCode=mcsa){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}, [Carvalheiro and Silveirinha
2015](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14680777.2015.1028423){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}, [Jiménez
2013](http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/intellect/ijis/2013/00000026/00000003/art00003){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"} on the role of TV in the transition to democracy). In
Portugal, the public perception of television as influencer of political
opinion makes the study of it legitimate, as much as the fact that
television is also able to reflect certain repressive systems. Milly
Buonanno, in her response to my email, highlighted that similar things
are noticeable in Italy, though there, this concern often led to a sense
of snobbery towards popular Italian television. She described a
watershed moment in the 1990s when degree programmes in 'Sciences of
Communication' became available for the first time which made the study
of television possible and legitimate. However, at the same time, she
also found a continuation of the disregard for television by some groups
in the academy. She recalled:

> Having spent ten years of my academic career teaching television in a
> Faculty of Political Sciences (*the place matters* \[emphasis in the
> original\]), I have fully experienced the underestimation and
> disregard of television (the medium, the studies, the scholars) on the
> part of the scholarly community that boasted belonging to more
> prestigious and historically consolidated disciplinary fields.
> Surprisingly enough (or maybe not) students were not immune from this
> syndrome, which not so rarely took political facets; especially during
> the 1990s. At the time the media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi became a
> political leader, and I often engaged in long discussions with groups
> of students, trying to counter-argue their claims that courses on
> television eventually served the interests of Berlusconi.

While in Portugal, this concern with television's influence on the
public (but also the recognition of its potential to facilitate change)
has led to a situation where television emerged as an important subject
for academics and students to study, in Italy the opposite was true, at
least in some circles. Here some people apparently believed that
television was so powerful that it couldn't even be critiqued and taken
apart by scholars: they too might run the risk of being duped. Between
Portugal and Italy, then, we see very traditional understandings of
television as causing direct effects (which are understood to be largely
negative; for a nice overview and one model, see [Ball-Rokeach and
DeFleur
1976](http://jtc501.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/45289390/Ball-RokeachDeFleur.pdf){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}). While in Portugal the answer of the established elite
seems to be to empower society through media literacy ([Aufderheide
1993](https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED365294){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}), in Italy the response by a similar elite was, at least
at one historical point, one of complete rejection of the medium.

A final example that falls into this line of argument, though taking
perhaps a more neutral stance, is Slovakia which, similar to Portugal,
has produced a number of studies on television during the communist
regime (see amongst many others [Mihelj
2012](https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/dspace-jspui/bitstream/2134/13215/3/Mihelj2012TVEntertainmentEasternEuropeRepository.pdf){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}). As David Levente Palatinus highlighted, however, 'in
many cases what happens really is the realisation of a socio-historical
study of the past that has more to do with academia processing and
finding ways to negotiate and come to terms with the past rather than
actually looking at television as "television". In most of those studies
"television" is instrumentalised, used as a "trope" to facilitate the
(re-)creation of social, cultural, political and economic narratives
re-assessing the past.' Here, then, television is seen as part of a
larger system of culture and politics which needs to be evaluated in
order to make sense of the past. What is interesting about these three
examples is that their responses to television in relation to politics
seem understandable in the light of their political cultures (and I
appreciate that this is generalising quite a bit): Portugal has embraced
the media literacy path as a result of having come through a period of
dictatorship which is now a while ago and hence can be looked at from a
level of distance, critically and constructively. Slovakia similarly has
come through such a period of political oppression but is not yet quite
ready to approach television as a medium with critical distance, but
rather needs to work through the trauma of the period itself. Finally,
Italy, a supposed democracy with a past of dictatorship that is now
nearly beyond the reaches of living memory, observes that in a
democratic system, the media are powerful enough to allow for someone as
politically and personally problematic as Silvio Berlusconi to rise to
the ultimate political power (and I am sure similar soul-searching is
going on in the USA at the moment).

In these three countries (and elsewhere), television appears as powerful
in all narratives regarding politics. And it is, then, perhaps little
surprising that its study is often influenced heavily by sociology,
communication studies and journalism: subjects interested in
power-relations but also subjects that recognise audiences as
(potentially) active. In this respect, Germany offers an interesting
insight into what kind of television can be studied: within one of their
two subject associations (the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Publizistik und
Kommunikationswissenschaft -- German Society for Journalism and
Communication Studies), television can be studied from the point of view
of 'journalism, news, the public sphere, classical communication
theories and media effects' (anonymous communication). Considering that
in Germany the trauma of the Nazi period still dominates a lot of
political and cultural action, including Germany's investment in the EU
([Marcussen et al
1999](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/135017699343504)), it
is perhaps hardly surprising that the country's attitude to television
is similar to the one in Italy, with a pinch of Portugal -- studying
television in relation to politics and in relation to its potential
negative effects on people's political will remains important in order
to stave off another fascist regime.

On the other side of this political coin is the social interest in
television as a reflection of society, culture and political context.
This was observed by several respondents. The most straight-forward
answer came from Anne Marit Waade who is Associate Professor at Aarhus
University. She wrote: 'It is easy for both academics and people outside
of academia to see the relevance and importance of both researching and
teaching television. My own research focuses on television drama, and TV
drama has become a significant mirror and storyteller in contemporary
culture, something that many people relate to'. Television here is not
just reflecting culture and society back to itself, but is -- as
storyteller -- part of the myth making in that society. Importantly,
culture here seems to be understood as very democratic and levelled;
everyone has access to television, and could potentially participate in
this myth making. From the point of view of a British academic who
watches these dramas in a different context, this emphasis on equality
might appear part of the social utopia of Scandinavia's welfare state,
even if this might be under threat ([Bergman
2011](https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=LnevBwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=bergman+scandinavian+welfare+state+2011&ots=jMuB5iP3XJ&sig=FAweTIusfF6BAH9ryK2Yd3nyCLc#v=onepage&q&f=false){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}). But even in other countries, the role of television as
myth maker is widely appreciated. In Hungary, Zoltán Dragon suggested,
television has become the main entertainment medium for young adults who
come to study with him. And it is television series that have
particularly peaked their interest. In the Czech Republic, domestic
serial television drama is both lauded and derided, as Irena Reifova
made clear:

> Television is taken very seriously as it used to be a major and
> unparalleled source of distraction, helping (almost literally) the
> whole nation to work through the grim and stereotyped everyday life
> during the totalitarian era, namely in the 1970s and 1980s. Domestic
> television drama, especially serial television drama, used to be a
> sort of cult television of the day \[...\] Television drama was not
> explicitly viewed as low-brow popular culture; it was more played up
> by taking it as a form of semi-artistic genre and national culture.

As a distraction from the everyday under the totalitarian regime,
television serial drama must surely appear as suspect, and indeed,
Reifova went on to describe that the new generation of these dramas 'are
condemned as mass culture for cultural dupes'. Yet, at the same time
they were also seen as something akin to art. This suggests a
paradoxical relationship of the elite in the Czech Republic to these
dramas -- one which celebrates the form to an extent (perhaps as an
example of national culture where film and television aren't that
separate as far as production cultures are concerned; Szczepanik,
forthcoming); but displays the same concern about its effects on the
*populus* as elites in Italy and Portugal. Indeed, Reifova also narrated
the story of the Czech version of the REF (the British Research
Evaluation Framework) where the chair of the panel looking at media and
communications publications 'automatically excluded all publications on
television from the database arguing that it deals with television so it
must be popularising work', thus suggesting a traditional hierarchy of
art as only consisting of elite cultural forms.

::: {#attachment_5601 .wp-caption .alignleft style="width: 225px"}
[![An example of a Czechoslovak Communist Soap Opera that can now be
re-watched on
DVD](https://cstonline.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Czech-Communist-Soap-Opera-215x300.jpg){.wp-image-5601
.size-medium loading="lazy" decoding="async"
aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5601" width="215" height="300"
srcset="https://cstonline.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Czech-Communist-Soap-Opera-215x300.jpg.webp 215w, https://cstonline.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Czech-Communist-Soap-Opera-323x450.jpg.webp 323w, https://cstonline.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Czech-Communist-Soap-Opera-100x140.jpg.webp 100w, https://cstonline.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Czech-Communist-Soap-Opera.jpg 381w"
sizes="(max-width: 215px) 100vw, 215px"}](https://cstonline.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Czech-Communist-Soap-Opera.jpg)

An example of a Czechoslovak Communist Soap Opera that can now be
re-watched on DVD
:::

What is fascinating about these approaches -- including the more
negative one that Reifova described -- is that they are more heavily
influenced by cultural studies and philology. Reifova emphasised that in
the Czech Republic four universities now put significant focus on
studying television as a 'social, cultural and aesthetic force'. In
Denmark, Waade said, television studies originated first in Danish
language, culture and media and film studies courses. And in Hungary,
television is currently often studied in the context of philology,
again, because the medium is understood to contribute to the narratives
of a culture, be that Hungarian or as in Dragon's case American culture.
Such an approach thinks of television much more as generating narratives
and myths, as indicated above, which are interpreted and re-imagined by
people watching them, leading to new narratives and myths. Television,
then, does not simply appear to relay power, as in the more negative
understandings of television's role in political life as evident in
Portugal, Italy, Slovakia and Germany, but operates within the cyclical
relations that create a living culture.

Only one of the respondents however addressed the role of politics and
policies in facilitating the research in that area, and again this came
from Denmark. Waade listed amongst other reasons for why television was
taken seriously in Denmark that 'television research is supported by
established funding bodies', highlighting the supportive role that the
political context can have on the emergence and stabilisation of a
field. But she also emphasised that 'television is part of the cultural
political and public service commitments within the country', indicating
yet again how the welfare state with its focus on public service also as
far as broadcasting is concerned can help to legitimise television and
its studies. This obviously suggests that a more socialist political
environment is more supportive of television and its studies, but it
also indicates that the discourses of public service as quality and
commercial as low-brow which have plagued broadcasting from its
inception ([Hilmes
2003](https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/45112873/British_Quality__American_Chaos.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1521559969&Signature=SuCndKvQyVrzUGlvYwF67jxaOlM%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DBritish_quality_American_chaos_Historica.pdf){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}) remain central in how we make sense of and evaluate
television.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

**Elke Weissmann** is Reader in Film and Television at Edge Hill
University. She is currently considering changing this to Reader in
Television and Film, however. Her books include *Transnational
Television Drama* (Palgrave) and the edited collection *Renewing
Feminisms* (I.B.Tauris) with Helen Thornham. She sits on the board of
editors for *Critical Studies in Television*. She migrated to the UK in
2002 after realising that German television was as bad as she
remembered.

 

 

##### **References without Hyperlink:**

Szczepanik, Petr (forthcoming): 'Post-socialist Producer: The Production
Culture of a Small-Nation Media Industry', in *Critical Studies in
Television*, Vol. 13.2.


<em>
 With deep-felt thanks to the respondents.
</em>
There is a wonderful video on YouTube that shows David Morley being interviewed about his time at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) and his and Charlotte Brunsdon’s work on
<em>
 Nationwide
</em>
. The video looks like it might be from the late 1980s, early 1990s, and Morley is in quite a reflective mood/mode, explaining how he came to the CCCS and how he came to do the work he

EUROPEAN CULTURES OF TELEVISION STUDIES: POLITICS AND POLICIES

As the UK moves closer to the end of its annual academic teaching period
and we are becoming reflective and perhaps also a [bit optimistic about
the
future](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aj4wcuo9Mgo){target="_blank"}, I
am struck by one big question: what does it mean to teach television
today? A few weeks ago, in his CSTonline Blog, [Toby Miller made a
case](https://cstonline.net/tv-is-dead-by-toby-miller-2014/){target="_blank"} for
the continuation of television in its most traditional of forms. I
wholeheartedly support his arguments, also because so much of the
newness of new technology is just a digital transformation of old
practices (Twitter and chat continue talk over television, for example).
So when I use the word 'today', I am not thinking about potential
transformations of the medium as a result of new technologies. Rather, I
am wondering if there is a different transformation going on which has
much more to do with the academy than with the medium or technology.

That I am asking these questions now probably has to do with two
experiences: first, I have been asked to teach television on a second
year module, and I have been given the topics for my sessions. As a
result, I ended up giving lectures on television narratives, television
genres and televisuality. The last one, I discovered later, was supposed
to address medium specificity, particularly as far as narrative is
concerned. I discovered this when I read [the accompanying
blog](http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/feature-articles/sopranos_televisuality/){target="_blank"} which
students were given as an example of an analysis focused on
televisuality. On closer inspection, I discovered that the blog
described televisuality as 'the unprecedented ability of television to
produce virtually endless visual, serial narratives, both fictional and
non-fictional', suggesting an understanding of the term in ways
that [Jeffrey Sconce described
as](https://www.academia.edu/4353980/What_If_Charting_Televisions_New_Textual_Boundaries){target="_blank"} 'cumulative
narrative', rather than, you
know,[ televisuality](http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=h-KnOn45fZYC&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=televisuality+caldwell&ots=fzMH7s_A3r&sig=-f9eWPJeurt2Qb97mVThXdIha6E#v=onepage&q=televisuality%20caldwell&f=false){target="_blank"}.
The second experience comes from the fact that I am finding myself being
asked by several film scholars if it's not amazing that film and
television are moving closer and closer together, particularly in the
United States. I am happy to report that my first-year students would
probably respond with a similar quizzical face as I do, and point to
programmes such as *77 Sunset Strip* (Warner Brothers, 1958-1964).

 

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In other words, the problem that I think I am facing -- and I am
wondering if others are as well -- is that I seem to be working in an
environment where the rest of the academy is starting to do television
studies and think they know what that entails. What I am ending up with
is a focus on television drama, and, worse, a focus on *programmes as
texts*.

To be fair, we might have to blame ourselves a little for this: after
all, there is a tendency in our scholarship -- and I am as much to blame
for this as others -- to focus our textual analyses on programmes rather
than other things such as trailers, brands or other ephemera. We should
maybe also not forget that there are a number of book series, such as
I.B.Tauris's *Reading...* series or the BFI's *Television
Classics* series, focused on specific programmes that substantiate these
tendencies. But at the end of the day, one of the defining texts of our
discipline wasn't about a programme,[ it was about
flow](http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=9XYfPRBR3awC&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=television+flow+raymond+williams&ots=bgCYJnzBVk&sig=OKuec5v2-VOx_cwJow_GGA5nuMM#v=onepage&q=television%20flow%20raymond%20williams&f=false){target="_blank"}.
And for me, some of the most exciting work of the early years of TV
studies was more interested in audiences (for example, [Charlotte
Brunsdon's
work](http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/content/22/4/32.extract){target="_blank"})
or trade relations than programmes (for example, [Philip Schlesinger's
analysis](http://ejc.sagepub.com/content/1/3/263.short){target="_blank"}).
Indeed, the aspect that I continue to value above all else in television
studies is that it openly subscribes to a multi-disciplinary approach
that recognises the industry, the texts and the consumption in equal
measure. To be fair, film studies is nowhere near as mono-disciplinary
as I am making it out to be here. But my experience of having my subject
area (pre-)defined for me has made me wonder about the dominance of
specific approaches within that field, too.

So, what does it mean to teach television today? In a module that
introduces students to key concepts of television studies, surely ideas
of flow, distraction, intimacy, liveness and immediacy should still
matter? Of course, these concepts developed in the context of the
dominance of specific approaches in their related disciplines (including
film studies) that are specific to the time when they first entered our
vocabulary. And the number of concepts will have to be expanded to
consider other aspects, including issues of production, distribution and
real audience engagement. But surely they are still useful, particularly
as the role of the live event for television has become amplified in
recent years, and new media attempt to create an even more intimate and
immediate experience for audiences. Is there a space to get students to
think about television as a medium that offers particular pleasures and
forms of engagement that derive from much more than the scope of the
programme text? What do you think? And more importantly: what is
teaching television today like for you?

 

**Elke Weissmann** is Reader in Film and Television at Edge Hill
University. She is currently considering changing this to Reader in
Television and Film, however. Her books include *Transnational
Television Drama* (Palgrave) and the edited collection *Renewing
Feminisms* (I.B.Tauris) with Helen Thornham. She is vice-chair of the
ECREA TV Studies Section and sits on the board of editors for *Critical
Studies in Television*. She migrated to the UK in 2002 after realising
that German television was as bad as she remembered.


As the UK moves closer to the end of its annual academic teaching period and we are becoming reflective and perhaps also a bit optimistic about the future, I am struck by one big question: what does it mean to teach television today? A few weeks ago, in his CSTonline Blog, Toby Miller made a case for the continuation of television in its most traditional of forms.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

EUROPEAN CULTURES OF TELEVISION STUDIES: POLITICS AND POLICIES

TEACHING TELEVISION: WHERE DO I START?