The first screen portrayal of Ian Fleming’s James Bond was not Sean Connery in Dr No (1962), but on television nearly ten years before. Fleming had repeatedly sought to exploit the character on screen and there were numerous failed approaches made to him about adapting his Bond novels for television, from both US and British producers, during the 1950s.
Dear Mx Leeds and Mx Harvard, I feel it only right to send this apology to you over the fact that previously on this blog I got a bit – um – disrespectful concerning the example given online of how to cite a television broadcast, i.e.: Desperate housewives, Episode 16, Crime doesn’t pay . 2009.
You find yourself amidst the worst public health crisis for a generation. The muddled thinking at the heart of government is not engendering confidence. The spectre of mass deaths and possible chaos in an under-funded health service hangs over ministerial indecision. Politics has become laughable. Comedy has become political. Great satire troubles the comfortable and consoles the afflicted.
The Covid-19 lockdown means that there’s a lot more TV viewing going on. Those TV scholars who are obsessed with Netflix and binge-watching will be missing the resurgence of broadcast TV. In Easter week, 6-12 April, “viewing to BARB measured TV grew by 23% in all time, 34% in daytime and 12% in 7pm-10.30pm peak, compared with the same, non-Easter week in 2019” according to Broadcast magazine.
The television scholar Alan McKee once asked the rhetorical question ‘is Doctor Who Australian?’, a question he immediately pondered may be a stupid one as everything about the program (cast, writers, place of production, as well as many themes) were so emphatically British. The question though, is a perfectly sensible one, and was meant in terms of audience, reception, and impact.
Look, there’s something really good I want to tell you, but I don’t quite know how I need to express it in an academic manner.
While Danish schools have been closed since mid-March and all family members are staying at home in the evenings, new kinds of programming, such as live sing-along broadcasts, are suddenly finding popularity as primetime family content By Eva Novrup Redvall, PI of the research project Reaching Young Audiences
Seeing the request to let us know what we are watching during the REMAIN INDOORS 2020 marathon actually got me stumped. What are we watching? What does that mean? Are we in thrall to any particular series? Can we not wait for the next episode (or just hit the ‘x’ button on the ps4 controller)? And the actual answers are, or at least until two days ago were, nothing much and, uh, no. I think a little context here might help.
Now, those of you who misspent their respective youths as badly as I did will no doubt have immediately spotted the origin of the title of my first blog of 2020 in which I singularly failed to prove that I can make an argument: Is This The Right Room For An Argument? That’s right. It originates in a well-known sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus (strictly speaking 1969-1973)… Five points for getting that.
We have emphasized an awful lot these days – and quite rightfully so – about the need for subjects to be communicated by ‘different voices’. Absolutely! Couldn’t agree more. But I didn’t expect to have the notion brought home to me quite as effectively as when I attended – of all things – Slapstick!, a festival celebrating silent comedy.