PART II S4C was launched on November 1, 1982 – the night before Channel 4’s launch – and Euryn Ogwen, as head of programmes was responsible for constructing the new channel’s first hour. I was ten years old, and watching the first hour in the office of my father’s television company, Screen ’82, in Aberystwyth.
PART I In this first section Euryn Ogwen discusses the beginnings of S4C, and the specific meaning and genealogy of the logo, taking us up to the very first second of the new channel, Sianel Pedwar Cymru… Dafydd Sills-Jones: Ready? Euryn Ogwen Williams: Ready.
Oooohhh… BBC One’s Line of Duty (2012-2021 maybe sort of) was a bit good wasn’t it? Wasn’t that captivating television? In fact, I may have mentioned that before. Apologies. Sorry.
The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal. — John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (207) The spy is the quintessential protagonist for our digital globalist era. A secret agent works undercover, slips in and out of various aliases, while piecing together bits of information that sometimes lead to a deeper understanding of what’s going on.
Why is there so little TV scholarship about TV and sport? Compared to the reams about Netflix, there’s hardly a decent book to be found anywhere, and nothing it seems after Garry Whannel’s Fields in vision : Television sport and cultural transformation of 2005, and Toby Miller, Geoffrey A. Lawrence, Jim McKay, and David Rowe’s Globalization and sport : Playing the world from 2000.
Sir Humphrey Burton, 90 in March and now publishing his long-awaited autobiography In My Own Time, is that rare beast: a television executive liked by programme-makers. Twice the Head of BBC TV’s Music &
On 2nd May 2021, on a Sunday night, the BBC serial Line of Duty (2012-) ended its 6th series in a finale which was watched by an average of 12.8 million viewers a record for the World Productions-produced BBC police corruption drama.
Oooohhh… BBC One’s Line of Duty (2012-2021 maybe sort of) was a bit good wasn’t it? Wasn’t that captivating television? And, even better, turn over to BBC Four at the end and you can enjoy its spiritual predecessor Between the Lines (1992-1994) and appreciate how far the humble long, thin, narrow mark has come on television across the last few decades. A schedule more crammed with lines than any other.
The Black Lives Matter Protest invigorated many of us to think about our respective curricula. I was probably not the only one aware of the limitations of what I offered to students in terms of including non-dominant voices. Most of my teaching has focused on British, American and sometimes European television and film.
The pandemic meant that for a year the usual summer exodus to foreign holiday destinations has been banned, and holidays in the UK were also unlawful until recently. It was all rather reminiscent of the Holiday at Home campaign of the 1940s, prompted by the need to reduce travel, save resources and close some seaside resorts because of fears of invasion.