At the end of the year BBC4 will be screening the third and final series of Detectorists (BBC/Channel X 2013 -), the sitcom written, directed by and starring Mackenzie Crook about a group of metal detector enthusiasts (‘detectorists’) in East Anglia.

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster (Nietzsche) For docudrama lovers like me, a new Peter Kosminsky production is always eagerly anticipated and the unfolding of The State over four consecutive evenings on Channel 4 last week made for a particularly intense viewing experience.

Thinking about the effects of neoliberalism on television, I’ve recently had reason to re-visit some of the programmes I looked at  when I was working on a book about the 1980s. In particular I remembered a fascinating series transmitted across May and June in 1990 called The Television Village . In it residents of a village in Lancashire were given a glimpse of the television future: the future we now inhabit.

ITV recently broadcast Goodbye Granadaland , a 90 minute valedictory celebration of the output of Granada’s studios in central Manchester ahead of its forthcoming relocation to the nearby Salford Media City complex.

English-language television comedy is circulating transnationally more than ever before, as Americans watch the Irish comedy Moone Boy on Hulu and British comedy panel shows like Have I Got News For You on YouTube; Netflix brings the BBC’s Miranda and RTE imports CBS’s 2 Broke Girls to Irish shores; the most popular sitcom on British television, Mrs. Brown’s Boys , is created by an Irish performer;

Reruns of television series have long been an integral part of the television market. Even though reruns have taken on different forms over the past decades – from television re-broadcasts to DVD box sets to online platforms such as Netflix – the underlying principle of rewatching familiar television content has remained the same.

The Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board, or BARB, tells us the who what, when, where, and how of watching British TV and computer screens. Jointly owned by ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, Sky, the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, and the BBC, it has been going in its current form for many years, shifting as required to keep track of changes caused by deregulation and the proliferation of consumer technologies.

A long time ago, in a galaxy not so far away, Friday nights were (all too briefly) enlivened by a pair of young scamps with a penchant for critiquing popular culture, whether mounting toy-based parodies of contemporary film and television, utilising Star Wars figurines to skewer trash TV formats, or dispensing Vinyl Justice to the mad, bad and (occasionally) dangerous of rock ‘n’ pop.

Booking is now open for the season of ‘Forgotten TV Dramas’ at BFI Southbank, London in February 2017.

22 February 2017, NFT3, BFI Southbank, London, 11-6pm. An event co-hosted by the BFI, Learning on Screen/BUFVC and the Centre for the History of Television Culture and Production, Royal Holloway (in association with the AHRC-funded ‘Forgotten Television Drama’ research project) Rationale ·