Christmas is long gone and some of its televisual pleasures have been explored in the CST blogs by Kenneth Longden (https://cstonline.net/bbc-christmas and https://cstonline.net/sherlock-abominable) and Lorna Jowett (https://cstonline.net/not-so-cosy). But one Christmas special which began on Boxing Day on BBC1 still lingers on. Dickensian (Red Planet Pictures) made the usual Christmas use of a Charles Dickens’

Just before Christmas I was suffering from ‘Flue, we had just lost our third pet in a year and I was not at my best in a number of other ways. I arose from my sick bed mildly feverish by then and sought comfort in Television Drama. Not just any drama, but Doc. Martin (Buffalo Pictures for ITV, 2006-) for me the ultimate comfort television.

Long before the end of Christmas television viewing and schedules, broadcasters and production companies herald their new season of television viewing. It is part of that tradition where we say goodbye to the old year, and welcome in the new, and it is yet another example of how television has ingratiated itself into the rhythms of everyday life and the cultural rituals of a nation.

I expect many people complained this holiday season that there was very little to entice in the television schedules.

The Christmas television schedules have, for many years, introduced a sense of the Carnavalesque to the viewing experience. Broadcasters, programmes, and family favourites collude in temporarily suspending the ‘normal’ laws and rules of television viewing through one-off storylines, and, in some cases, subverting perceptions of seriality in acknowledgement of a collective cultural ritual.

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.

Stock characters in entertainment television are well known to all of us: the wise old man, the nurturing mother, and the rebellious teenager evoke images in our mind, accompanied by a set of character traits and flaws. They are stereotypical depictions of societal roles, which help us navigate through the story and set up certain expectations.

FOX’s horror-comedy series Scream Queens is the latest addition to the canon of Ryan Murphy and Co.’s anthology television series, alongside FX’s American Horror Story (2011-present), and the upcoming American Crime Story (2016). Scream Queens, named after the sobriquet for a female horror icon, is a hyper-stylised, retro-pastiche of horror and slasher cinema from the 1970s and 1980s.

Doctor Who fans were perhaps expecting a slow 2015.

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.