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I return for this blog to the topic of neglected historical British television comedy. In my last post, my focus was on the significance of female performers to the genre, with a retrospective of the comedy career of actress Penelope Keith. This time I
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Forgive me for returning to Broadchurch so soon after John Ellis’s excellent account, written just as it finished. But I thought it was worth commenting on some of its other (largely textual) features before it slips away from view until the second series
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It was with some horror that I realized I had put myself down to write a blog this week.
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Last Monday, Britain invented television… all over again. A load of people watched the same programme at the same time, at the moment of first broadcast. At one point, 9.27 million people, 34.64% of the TV audience, was watching the final denouement of th
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I had high hopes for Guy Hibbert's recent Channel 4 one-off drama Complicit, which follows MI5 agent Edward Ekubo (David Oyelowo) in hot pursuit of a suspected terrorist, Waleed Achmed (Arsher Ali), from Britain to Egypt in order to foil a suspected ricin
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In 1986, in a now infamous Saturday Night Live sketch, William Shatner told fans at a Star Trek convention to ‘Get a Life!’. Drawing upon every cliché of the Trekkie, the sketch playfully mocks the obsessive and socially dysfunctional behaviour that was
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I’m not a great sports fan. I enjoy the Olympics, tennis and darts when they happen to be on the telly, but I’ve never suffered the agonies and ecstasies of loyally supporting a particular team or following a specific sport. That is until I discovered For
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I was surprised to hear from the editor of CST Online that no one had yet covered the topic of this week’s blog, the HBO comedy drama series Girls (2012-), created by and starring Lena Dunham. Surprised because the series, following the lives of a group
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Today’s factual TV is all about formats: repeatable, exportable templates that can generate multiple episodes in a multitude of markets. Thanks to excellent collections of case studies like Tasha Oren and Sharon Sharaf’s Global Television Formats, we can
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Two motifs have become familiar when male television writers, producers and executives talk about the future of television. Firstly, the future of television viewing can be found in the habits of 13 year-old boys. I can’t count the number of times I have
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