Since debuting on the UK’s digital terrestrial television service Freeview in March 2015, I have been enthralled by the Horror Channel. Part of the reason for my enchantment is linked to my ‘aca-fan’ interests as from April 2014 to late March 2016, Horror had been re-running episodes of ‘classic’ Doctor Who (e.g. those initially-broadcast between 1963 and 1989) on a daily basis.
The recent death of Andrew Sachs made me feel nostalgic and I re-watched Fawlty Towers . So much has already been said and written about this most celebrated of British television programs, but Sachs’ death renewed discussion of Fawlty Towers ’s success. One point was the reminder that when the program was first pitched to the BBC, a memo was written heaping scorn on the quality of the writing of the pilot script.
Who wants to be Chair of the BBC? As it happens, nobody really. Who wants to be a director of Channel 4? As it happens, Ofcom recommended Althea Efunshile, former deputy chief executive of the Arts Council and a BAME woman.
Since CSTonline was last published at the end of June we have seen some seismic political shifts – the UK has voted to leave Europe in a total Brexit shocker, we have another female Prime Minister (let’s hope that’s all she has in common with the other one) and the US has just voted in a reality-TV star for President. Who would have thought that such huge changes would happen in a quarter of a year?
Watching the seventeenth series of Big Brother UK, broadcast on Channel Five this summer, and perusing the headlines about the show which proliferate on news sites like Metro , the Mirror and Mail Online , one could be forgiven for forgetting that in 2010, Big Brother UK, the reality television phenomenon of the twenty-first century, was pronounced dead.
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.
British history is full of strange and disturbing noises. They rebound and echo, providing a constant reminder to future generations of the violent noises of the past- signalling colonial atrocities, and the stifled disenfranchised voices of class and gender inequalities.
I like old things. When I was a teenager my granddad entrusted me with my great grandfather’s fob watch, and it always gave me a thrill to think that I was holding something of (it seemed at the time) inestimable age. It was probably only manufactured in the early twentieth century, but I carried it to school with pride;
I am currently suffering from a massive dilemma. The last episode of Undercover (BBC, 2016) is sitting on BOB waiting for me to watch it and I just don’t dare to. Don’t get me wrong, I thought it was a terrific drama: the pleasure of getting to watch Adrian Lester and Sophie Okonedo in fully fleshed-out parts was something that television doesn’t afford us often.
The hit television comedy Absolutely Fabulous is set to hit the big screen as a movie (July 1 st 2016), and as such it is worth considering the hype, the paratexts, and the anticipation that surrounds this venture.