A ‘Billy Fluff’ is a moment in Doctor Who from 1963 to 1966 when William Hartnell, the lead actor playing the Doctor, ‘fluffs’ or blows one of his lines. Some are legendary, including ‘anti-radiation gloves’ and ‘cinders floating about in Spain’. But a collection of them on YouTube is only six minutes long.

One of the games played in the run-up to the BBC Charter renewal process (a process which is likely to be particularly brutal this time) is for critics to identify those programmes which can be used by BBC negotiators to put the Corporation in its best light, for audiences but particularly for politicians.

Since 2015 various news outlets have been reporting plans for Steven Spielberg to create a new television adaptation of the 1932 novel Brave New World and since 2013 a film adaptation by Ridley Scott has been in the pipeline. The book by Aldous Huxley was last adapted for TV in 1980 and filmed in 1998.

I’ve spent the last year or so researching how television was domesticated in Britain from 1946 until 1976. Following Lynn Spigel’s approach (in a U.S. context) in Make Room for TV (1992), I’ve been using domestic magazines as one of my main sources.

The BBC is under threat like never before. That seems to be the consensus about the two events of past weeks: a budget raid by the Chancellor that saddled the BBC with absorbing the £630 million cost of free TV licences for the over-75s, a seemingly hostile charter review process, kicked off with a Green Paper and the appointment of an advisory group by the new culture minister John Whittingdale.

Although starting its operations as a commercial venture in November 2015, the new online BBC Store has been under discussion for some time, gaining regulatory approval early in 2013. Its aim is to provide access to a wide range of BBC programmes for a fee.

This paper aims to explore, and expand upon, a theme I recently raised at The Media Across Borders conference, Roehampton University (June, 2015), in relation to global television formats and the transnational. In particular, it aims to consider the concept (and in some respects, the term) of ‘Self-Exoticism’, its relationship to transnationalism, but more significantly, how it is represented and constructed in contemporary television.

With recent debates and discussions surrounding the government’s Green Paper and the BBC’s Charter review (how the BBC should be funded; whether it distorts the market; if it should be self-regulated; and so on.) I have found it quite easy to become lost in arbitrary and abstract notions such as “value for money” based on my naturally biased consumption of BBC products and services.

Providing a certain sense of symmetry, my first blog of the academic year returns to the same theme I examined way back in July, when I looked at options for bringing ‘old’ TV into the digital age.

I am long overdue a new television set. To my embarrassment, my television set is second hand, occasionally cuts out and sits atop an ugly prefabricated television stand that clashes with the surrounding 1950s-era furniture.  I have considered purchasing a 1950s-era television set but it would not, of course, be WiFi enabled and internet-ready.