Previous blog posts by my Adapt colleague, Professor James Bennett, on our social media research project have focused on ‘Social Media in the Television Workplace’ and social media’s impact on the production of live TV. This post shifts our focus from The Voice, as a ‘shiny floor show’ with social production by a discrete digital unit, to draw on our subsequent ethnographic observations of Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch gallery

I am often asked for my recommendations on what works in terms of teaching television at HE level. It’s not exactly the right time of the academic year for this, but here are some of the things I’ve learned from teaching television on undergraduate degree courses in the UK over the years.

We were working with our first year students on pitches for programme ideas, when I noticed something very strange: my 18-19-year-old first year students knew who Bradley Walsh was. And more surprisingly (and perhaps shockingly) still: they loved him. Don’t get me wrong, I too love Bradley Walsh.

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.

“The US network The CW celebrates its ten-year anniversary this year.” That is the opening sentence of the call for papers for an upcoming conference at the Université Bordeaux-Montaigne that makes the CW its main focus. “Network” – for the CW that has been a defining term, maybe one limiting the young station at its onset.

(First Published on 14 December 2012) Back in January America was all abuzz with the largely-media-created controversy over whether or not the quintessentially British Ricky Gervais had gone too far with his humor as host of the 2011 Golden Globe Awards. What can be got away with on the public airways has been a significant question from the beginnings of American television.

Why has the television business made it so hard for its users to find something they want to watch? It used to be so easy. You turned on the TV and instantly there was something, if you didn’t like that you could hop from one channel to another… or use the handy scheduling grid to find what was on when. There is no equivalent for the digital age.

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.

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.

I’m in Colombia, doing some research on a plaque unveiled by Prince Charles in Cartagena two years ago that briefly commemorated a British fleet trying to starve the inhabitants into submission and make the United Kingdom an occupying power in South America. The plaque lasted just a few hours before being “transformed” by an activist engineer, then removed by the municipal government, following mass Twitter protests.