Full text papers by Jonathan Bignell
Epic / Everyday: Moments in Television, 2023
The British science fiction television series Doctor Who (1963-89) interwove the epic with the ev... more The British science fiction television series Doctor Who (1963-89) interwove the epic with the everyday, and this was a key component of its popularity and continuing cultural significance. This chapter examines the Doctor Who serial ‘The Chase’ (1965), an epic journey in which the TARDIS time machine is chased by the evil Daleks to a desert planet, then to the Empire State Building, the sailing ship Mary Celeste, a Gothic haunted house and finally to a futuristic metal city. By 1965 Doctor Who was losing its initial appeal; it had become everyday and ‘The Chase’ is in some ways an attempt to raise the stakes by using ambitious special effects and exotic locations despite the restrictions of the programme’s rapid, low-budget production. At the same time as it proclaims Doctor Who’s epic ambitions, the serial’s journey begins from, and includes extended scenes in, the TARDIS, a time travel machine that is also the everyday home of the protagonists. Studio-bound drama, characterised by talk and not action, alternates with jumps between exotic, other-worldly settings. In ‘The Chase’, Doctor Who explores the alternatives for what television science fiction can be. The serial’s epic journey ends by bringing the Doctor’s human companions home to the London of 1965, to look askance at their and their viewers’ everyday present. The chapter argues that ‘The Chase’ interrogates the value of long-running television programmes to domesticate the epic’s seriousness and scale, and to explore its alignment with everyday human experience.
Beckett’s Afterlives: Adaptation, Remediation, Appropriation, 2023
The Beckett on Film project (2000) adapted all nineteen of Beckett’s theatre works, creating scre... more The Beckett on Film project (2000) adapted all nineteen of Beckett’s theatre works, creating screen versions that were shown at film festivals, as television broadcasts, sold as a DVD box set and distributed via online video streaming. This chapter argues that these evolutions of the project are more significant than simply repackaging the content produced in one medium for distribution in another. Rather, they work with and reflect on the borders between mediums, and the ways that creative works fit into new medial environments. Beckett on Film can be seen not as a fixed text (or collection of texts), but as a mobile and mutable work that changes in relation to medium and audience, with different spatial and temporal specificities across the history of these adaptation processes. The chapter traces the British and Irish stories of how the Blue Angel production company, the Irish broadcaster RTÉ (Raidió Teilifís Éireann) and the British Channel 4 television channel framed Beckett on Film in its various manifestations. The chapter addresses the project’s genesis, production, scheduling for cinema and its television screenings addressed to specialist, general and then educational audiences. It also considers how the project’s adaptation into the ‘new’ media of DVD and online video framed the series as a cultural asset and a prestige collectable, aligning it with discourses of taste and connoisseurship. The chapter makes the case for Beckett on Film’s resilience, and its fit with an emergent culture of media convergence in which medial boundaries are being renegotiated.
Moments in Television: Complexity/simplicity, 2022
In 1967, the first colour TV drama serial in the UK was broadcast: an adaptation of Thackeray’s V... more In 1967, the first colour TV drama serial in the UK was broadcast: an adaptation of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. This chapter evaluates the colour in Vanity Fair using analysis of the programme, archival documentation and public discourses at the time. The significance of colour in this serial relates to the aesthetic frameworks through which literary adaptations were conceptualised, and to what colour meant in the television culture of 1967. The achievement of Vanity Fair depends not only on how it looks today but also how it could have been viewed at the time it was made. As Britain’s first and oldest television institution it might seem simple and obvious that the BBC would take the next technical step in broadcasting. It might also seem simple and obvious that colour would offer greater realism and visual pleasure to viewers. These ways of understanding simplicity depend on an assumption of incremental development, adaptation and extension. But conversely, the engineering challenges of making colour pictures and the production challenges of staging a multi-episode serial in colour were immense. For cultural commentators and BBC executives, there were also concerns about the tastefulness of colour, which was tainted both by an association with Hollywood and the uneven technical quality of US colour television. Introducing colour was fraught with difficulty and risk, and meant finding a way through complexities of technology, institutional policy and cultural politics. It also demanded creative responses to new artistic challenges, making the most of colour while maintaining conformity with established aesthetic norms.
Moments in Television: Sound/image, 2022
This chapter analyses the unusual and expressive uses of both visual style and sound in an episod... more This chapter analyses the unusual and expressive uses of both visual style and sound in an episode of the science fiction TV series The Twilight Zone, ‘The Invaders’ (1961). The episode has no dialogue, though it has some framing narration spoken direct to camera, and it has little music. Nevertheless, this chapter makes the case that the consequent rebalancing of the usual expressive means available to television is both innovative and compelling. The absence of sound becomes an occasion to think more precisely about what sound does, and by removing some of the usual functions of sound the episode allows us to question the customary hierarchy in which sound is a support for the image. Shifts in the viewer’s knowledge of the fictional world depend on how image and sound manipulate our relationship with the female protagonist of ‘The Invaders’ in both conventional and unconventional ways. Sounds produced by her vocally, by her body movement and as a result of actions she initiates, as well as sounds coming from alien invaders and their technologies, carry an extraordinary weight because of the lack of other kinds of audio information. Lack of the speech which would usually convey information, emotion and tone encourages the viewer to attend to images more intensely than usual, reading details of setting, costume, posture and facial expression for example, to make sense of the action.
Moments in Television: Substance/style, 2022
This chapter argues that the US science fiction adventure series The Time Tunnel (1966-7) is abou... more This chapter argues that the US science fiction adventure series The Time Tunnel (1966-7) is about television: about the capabilities of the medium, the experience of watching it and the technological apparatus that television comprises. Visually, the series often adopts a grandiose, excessive visual style, especially in the opening episode focused on here. Key images are characterised by a sense of scale and visual spectacle, and the format seems calculated to advertise the attractions of colour television and the episodic adventure narratives that television offered in the USA in the mid-1960s. The opening episode introduces the viewer to a massive underground base hidden beneath an American desert, in which an extraordinarily costly government project is being secretly carried out. At the heart of this technological facility, a physical apparatus, the massive Time Tunnel itself, acts as a portal for the protagonists to move to any moment in the past or the future, though without control over their destination. This premise is a self-reflexive representation of what television can do, transporting its viewer to real or simulated places and times beyond his or her experience, and engaging the viewer in thrilling narratives of exploration and peril. The style of the series, I suggest, articulates the substance of what television might be.
Beckett and Media, 2022
This chapter analyses the aesthetics of Beckett’s dramas for TV, in relation to theorisations of ... more This chapter analyses the aesthetics of Beckett’s dramas for TV, in relation to theorisations of the significance of texture in television and film, and histories of television production and reception technologies. It compares Walter Asmus’s 1986 television version of Was Wo [What Where] with his 2013 reworking of the same drama for the screen. The earlier version was broadcast in 625-line video, limiting contrasts between light and dark, whereas the 2013 What Where is in HD digital format, enhancing image clarity but stretching the limits of TV technology for the representation of black. These technical and aesthetic comparisons are placed in the context of Beckett’s earlier screen dramas of the 1960s and 1970s, which also exploited and challenged the video and film technologies used to produce them. By focusing on black, the chapter explores the significance of unlit space and texture in Beckett’s screen work. It argues that Beckett’s TV work uses the apparent nullity of black to draw attention to the representational capabilities of the TV screen, and links visual style to the materiality of television technologies.
Screen Plays: Theatre Plays on British Television, 2022
As a living writer, Samuel Beckett’s personal connections with performers, directors and theatre... more As a living writer, Samuel Beckett’s personal connections with performers, directors and theatre venues could be harnessed by production staff keen to present his work on television. For Beckett’s collaborators, adapting his plays offered other opportunities: small casts, single settings and suitability for shooting in the controlled environment of the television studio. Public service imperatives to disseminate his work underpinned repeated adaptations of Beckett’s plays throughout the second half of the twentieth century and beyond, often drawing on broadcasters’ links with theatre venues, productions and personnel. But television adaptations of Beckett’s theatre work received poor ratings and audience feedback; they looked old-fashioned because they were recorded in a studio, and their long takes with few cuts could make the plays seem ‘theatrical’ rather than ‘televisual’. In Britain adaptations of Krapp’s Last Tape appeared in both the BBC’s Festival and Thirty Minute Theatre series, but it was mainly arts programmes like Arena on BBC2 that transmitted original and co-produced or imported productions of Beckett’s plays. This chapter discusses a range of different kinds of Beckett adaptation, and places three adaptations of Krapp’s Last Tape within that broader context. The three productions use different strategies to direct viewers’ attention to bravura performances in relatively fully-realised sets, and a comparison of the versions offers ways to address questions about what television adaptations of theatre aimed to achieve, and the opportunities and constraints with which they negotiated.
Transatlantic Television Drama: Industries, Programs, and Fans, 2019
The chapter focuses on the comedy drama Episodes (2011-18), made by the British production compan... more The chapter focuses on the comedy drama Episodes (2011-18), made by the British production company Hat Trick for the BBC and Showtime. A British husband and wife duo of screenwriters work on a US network adaptation of their hit UK comedy show, which is “Americanized,” and they fight for their creative authority and their marriage. Episodes has a hybrid identity in terms of form, format and genre, expressed in decisions including setting, casting, and performance style. Each of these can be read as a commentary on the similarities and differences between American and British television cultures, alongside the narrative’s thematization of cultural and national differences. Episodes talks about transatlantic television, and self-consciously performs it, asking whether a program or a person can be transatlantic by making a joke of it. The chapter argues that Episodes is a meta-commentary on deeply embedded myths about the TV of each nation.
The Moving Form of Film: Historicising the Medium through Other Media, 2023
Working on intermediality from a historical and comparative perspective, this chapter analyses co... more Working on intermediality from a historical and comparative perspective, this chapter analyses co-dependency and cross-fertilization between examples drawn from screen culture, the stage and broadcasting. It derives from an intermedial research project, “Pinter Histories and Legacies”, that documented Harold Pinter’s work on the stage, radio, television and in cinema, thus tracing historiographic connections between media, across chronologies, between Pinter’s life and his work, and between Pinter and numerous other creative figures and their output. The chapter uses Pinter as the common thread between Roman Polanski’s film "Cul de Sac", Pinter’s play "The Birthday Party" and the BBC TV sitcom "Steptoe and Son". This investigation leads to a methodological debate about the limits of intermedial methodologies, and the paper argues for historicization in intermedial studies.
CSTonline, 2023
The US science fiction adventure TV series "The Time Tunnel" (1966-7) is about television. It’s a... more The US science fiction adventure TV series "The Time Tunnel" (1966-7) is about television. It’s about the capabilities of the medium, its technologies and the experience of watching it. The Tunnel is a portal through which the protagonists can travel to any moment in the past or the future, and this short blog argues that the Tunnel is therefore a metaphor for television. It can transport us to real or imagined places and times, and engage us in thrilling narratives of exploration and peril such as the sinking of the Titanic. It even looks like a giant television tube and screen. This blog analyses "The Time Tunnel"'s visual style, its TV format and how it was produced, in the context of 1960s TV culture.
CSTonline, 2023
The "Beckett on Film" project comprised films of all 19 of Samuel Beckett's plays, adapted for th... more The "Beckett on Film" project comprised films of all 19 of Samuel Beckett's plays, adapted for the screen by renowned directors. This blog details their movement from being art films shown at international festivals, to a season of TV programmes in the evening schedule, then TV broadcasts for schools, a DVD box set and then finally videos uploaded to YouTube. This movement from one medium to another is shown to be a survival strategy that allows the plays to adapt to changing media technologies and environments.
CSTonline, 2022
This week is the 100th anniversary of the BBC. This blog is about some of my own relationships wi... more This week is the 100th anniversary of the BBC. This blog is about some of my own relationships with BBC programmes and people, from my childhood to my role as a lecturer about TV Studies.
Television Performance, 2019
This chapter addresses how critical analysis might describe and evaluate non-human “performances”... more This chapter addresses how critical analysis might describe and evaluate non-human “performances” in television fiction, and how they affect distinctions between actor and role, and between character and narrative function. Across the history and genres of television, there have been very many “objects” that narratives make expressive but that are not human, nor even, in some cases, alive at all. The chapter considers the balloon-like Rovers of "The Prisoner" TV series, the kangaroos in "Skippy The Bush Kangaroo", and the puppets and models in "Thunderbirds", arguing that if they are to play their part in the fictional world, each of these "things" needs to function as an expressive “performer”. It argues that the boundaries between self and other, human and non-human, are thus destabilised and reflect on the labour of creation in television. The chapter draws on theories of performance, political economy and mise-en-scene.
Viewfinder, 2022
Beckett's plays written or adapted for British television during the author's lifetime were rarel... more Beckett's plays written or adapted for British television during the author's lifetime were rarely screened in drama slots but instead in arts series on BBC2. It was under the auspices of Arena in 1982 that BBC's most significant Beckett season was broadcast, in December of that year. Arena had not commissioned any of the productions, drawing instead on recordings previously made for BBC, showing a film acquired from the USA and a Beckett drama made for German television. All but one of the programmes in the season was briefly introduced by the critic and BBC drama producer Martin Esslin, but these were not original arts documentaries of the kind normally made for Arena. The Beckett season offers interesting insights into how the remit of Arena could accommodate different kinds of curation and presentation within the genre of arts programming.
CSTonline, 2022
This is a blog based on a chapter I have published about unusual and expressive uses of sound in ... more This is a blog based on a chapter I have published about unusual and expressive uses of sound in TV. It focuses on an episode of the science fiction series The Twilight Zone: 'The Invaders' (1961). The episode has no dialogue, though it has some narration spoken to camera and some music, and the absence of speech made me think about what sound in TV drama does, in relation to image, performance, genre, narrative and affect.
Popular television drama: critical perspectives, 2005
This chapter connects a study of the commissioning and production processes of the BBC science fi... more This chapter connects a study of the commissioning and production processes of the BBC science fiction drama series Doctor Who with the larger theoretical question of the understandings of 'quality' guiding its production and reception in the 1960s. The chapter is based on many primary source documents from the BBC Written Archives Centre.
From Page to Screen: Adaptations of the Classic Novel, 2000
This chapter gives brief definitions and explanations of the genre of the Gothic in literature, t... more This chapter gives brief definitions and explanations of the genre of the Gothic in literature, then focuses on Dracula and adaptations of Bram Stoker's novel in TV and especially film. This includes the history of adaptations of Dracula into theatre and the impact of Victorian melodrama on film and TV Draculas. The chapter also discusses theoretical and cultural reasons for Dracula’s popularity in the film and TV media, and the fascination with this character and story.
Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film, 2005
This chapter focuses on an overlapping series of journeys. It offers several interpretive journey... more This chapter focuses on an overlapping series of journeys. It offers several interpretive journeys from the detail of brief moments in Badlands to critical frameworks for discussing the meanings of the film as whole. These movements from detail to meaning also entail the linkage of aspects of the film to broader film-theoretical problematics such as genre, narration, gender and familial roles, and the placing of the film in a historical context within the American film culture of the 1970s. While the interpretive discussion of Badlands demonstrates the power of detailed film analysis to open up a vista of theoretical and cultural study, the purpose of the analysis is not only to explore the meanings of this film in particular (an enterprise necessarily restricted by constraints of space), but also to reflect on the discursive process of film criticism.
Time and Relative Dissertations in Space: Critical Perspectives on Doctor Who, 2007
This chapter draws on archival research, analysis of programmes and theoretical approaches to chi... more This chapter draws on archival research, analysis of programmes and theoretical approaches to childhood and children’s culture. It discusses three aspects of the mid-1960s Dalek serials in BBC's Doctor Who using these methodologies. First, it presents an analysis of the design of the programme format for children watching with their parents, and locates
the assumptions about children as addressees that this involved. This issue is connected to conceptions of Public Service Broadcasting, the capabilities and interests of children, and relationships with other programme forms. Second, the chapter shows how the figure of Susan Foreman in particular, but also other humanoid characters and the monstrous Daleks, offer patterns of identification and disidentification which construct the place of the child as a valued proto-adult, but also an alien creature. Finally, the chapter discusses the invocation of children as consumers of Doctor Who-related merchandise, especially products relating to Daleks, and how the domestic consumption of television and merchandise remodulates the two other parts of the argument.
Genre and performance: film and television, 2010
The hybrid television form of docudrama, blending documentary and drama conventions and modes of ... more The hybrid television form of docudrama, blending documentary and drama conventions and modes of address, poses interesting methodological problems for an analysis of performance. Its topics, mise-en-scène and performers invite a judgement in relation to the real events and situations, settings and personae represented, and also in relation to the ways the viewer has perceived them in other media representations such as news, current affairs interviews and documentary features. Docudrama’s performance of the real asks the viewer to evaluate it in relation to anterior knowledge. But because of their adoption of conventions from drama, docudramas also draw on performance modes from fictional television forms and invite audiences to invest their emotions and deploy their knowledge of codes used in fictional naturalism or melodrama. These hybrid frameworks for viewing militate against docudrama being able to cultivate the authenticity or sobriety
associated historically with documentary. However, on the other hand, the multiplicity of available interpretive frameworks and routes of access for the audience can also enrich and broaden the pleasures and social purchase of docudrama. This chapter ranges over examples of docudramas on the post-1990 period, mainly made wholly or partly in the UK, to discuss some of the distinctions between kinds of docudrama performance, the implications of their links with related television forms and how docudrama performance exploits the capacities of television as a medium.
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Full text papers by Jonathan Bignell
the assumptions about children as addressees that this involved. This issue is connected to conceptions of Public Service Broadcasting, the capabilities and interests of children, and relationships with other programme forms. Second, the chapter shows how the figure of Susan Foreman in particular, but also other humanoid characters and the monstrous Daleks, offer patterns of identification and disidentification which construct the place of the child as a valued proto-adult, but also an alien creature. Finally, the chapter discusses the invocation of children as consumers of Doctor Who-related merchandise, especially products relating to Daleks, and how the domestic consumption of television and merchandise remodulates the two other parts of the argument.
associated historically with documentary. However, on the other hand, the multiplicity of available interpretive frameworks and routes of access for the audience can also enrich and broaden the pleasures and social purchase of docudrama. This chapter ranges over examples of docudramas on the post-1990 period, mainly made wholly or partly in the UK, to discuss some of the distinctions between kinds of docudrama performance, the implications of their links with related television forms and how docudrama performance exploits the capacities of television as a medium.
the assumptions about children as addressees that this involved. This issue is connected to conceptions of Public Service Broadcasting, the capabilities and interests of children, and relationships with other programme forms. Second, the chapter shows how the figure of Susan Foreman in particular, but also other humanoid characters and the monstrous Daleks, offer patterns of identification and disidentification which construct the place of the child as a valued proto-adult, but also an alien creature. Finally, the chapter discusses the invocation of children as consumers of Doctor Who-related merchandise, especially products relating to Daleks, and how the domestic consumption of television and merchandise remodulates the two other parts of the argument.
associated historically with documentary. However, on the other hand, the multiplicity of available interpretive frameworks and routes of access for the audience can also enrich and broaden the pleasures and social purchase of docudrama. This chapter ranges over examples of docudramas on the post-1990 period, mainly made wholly or partly in the UK, to discuss some of the distinctions between kinds of docudrama performance, the implications of their links with related television forms and how docudrama performance exploits the capacities of television as a medium.
Programmes studied comprise The Americans, Call the Midwife, Les Revenants, The Good Wife, Friends, The Simpsons, John From Cincinnati, Police Squad!, and The Time Tunnel. Substance and style are evaluated across these examples from a wide range of television forms, formats and genres, which include series and serial dramas, sitcoms, science-fiction, animation, horror, thrillers and period dramas.
Programmes studied comprise The Twilight Zone, Inspector Morse, Children of the Stones, Dancing on the Edge, Road, Twin Peaks: The Return, Bodyguard, The Walking Dead and Mad Men. Sound and image are evaluated across these examples from a wide range of television forms, formats and genres, which includes series, serial and one-off dramas, children’s programmes, science fiction, thrillers and detective shows.
The contributors to this collection come from diverse areas of TV studies, bringing with them myriad interests, expertise and perspectives. All chapters undertake close analysis of selected moments in television, considering a wide range of stylistic elements including mise-en-scène, spatial organisation and composition, scripting, costuming, characterisation, performance, lighting and sound design, colour and patterning. The range of television works addressed is similarly broad, covering UK and US drama, comedy-drama, sitcom, animation, science fiction, adaptation and advertisement. Programmes comprise The Handmaid’s Tale, House of Cards, Father Ted, Rick and Morty, Killing Eve, The Wire, Veep, Doctor Who, Vanity Fair and The Long Wait.
The contributors to this collection come from diverse areas of TV studies, bringing with them myriad interests, expertise and perspectives. All chapters undertake close analysis of selected moments in television, considering a wide range of stylistic elements including mise-en-scène, spatial organisation and composition, scripting, costuming, characterisation, performance, lighting and sound design, colour and patterning. The range of television works addressed is similarly broad, covering UK and US drama, comedy-drama, sitcom, science fiction and detective shows. Programmes comprise The Incredible Hulk, Game of Thrones, Detectorists, Community, Doctor Who, The Second Coming, Years and Years, The Americans, Columbo and Lost.
Epic /everyday is essential reading for those interested in how closer attention to the presence of the epic and the everyday might enhance our critical appreciation and enjoyment of television.
Taking a comparative approach to the topic, the volume is organized around a set of common questions, themes, and methodological reflections. It deals with European television in the context of television historiography and transnational traditions. Case study chapters written by scholars from different European countries to reflect their specific areas of expertise
The success of cringe comics like Sacha Baron Cohen, Larry David, and Julia Davis coincides with a cultural paradigm shift that has been linked to a resurgence of shaming/humiliation rituals and to what Adam Kotsko and Melissa Dahl identify as the “age of awkwardness”. Cringe articulates a deeply-felt discomfort and a degree of uncertainty when it comes to adopting to political correctness and changing attitudes in the cultural climate.
This special issue of "Humanities" discusses the inclusivity of cringe humour, whether it affirms or violates norms and values, and addresses a variety of cringe comics and shows, including Larry David, 'BoJack Horseman', 'Flowers', and 'Veep'.