No description available.

In recent years television has seen a notable increase in evocative images of the human body subject to exploration and manipulation.Taking the increasing viscerality of television’s body images as a starting point, the work presented in this thesis asserts the importance of considering television viewing as an embodied experience. Through a focus on displays of the body across a range of television formats this thesis demonstrates the significance and complexity of viewers’ affective and embodied engagements with the medium and offers an alternative to accounts of television which are focussed only on the visual, narrative or semiotic aspects of television aesthetics. This work challenges approaches to television which understand the pleasures of looking at the body as simply an exercise in power by considering the role of the body in fostering the sharing of affect, specifically through feelings of intimacy, shame and erotic pleasure. Additionally, the research presented here accounts for and situates the tendency toward bodily display that I have described in terms of traditional television aesthetics and in relation to conditions within the television industry in the United States and the United Kingdom. Rather than considering the trend toward exposing the body as a divergence from traditional television, this thesis argues that body-oriented television is a distinctly televisual phenomenon, one that implicates the bodies onscreen and the bodies of viewers located in domestic space in its attempts to breach the limitations of the screen, making viewers feel both intimately and viscerally connected to the people, characters and onscreen worlds that television constructs for us. The methodological approach taken in this thesis is based on close textual analysis informed by a focus on affect and embodiment. This thesis relies on the author’s own embodied engagement with televisual texts as well as detailed formal analyses of the programmes themselves. In order to understand the place of explicit body images on television this thesis engages with a broad range of contemporary debates in the field of television studies and with the cannon of television studies. This thesis is also deeply informed by writing about affect developed in film studies and studies of reality television. This thesis is structured around a set of case studies which each explore different dimensions of the trend toward bodily excess across a broad range of genres including reality television, science programming and the drama series. The chapters in this thesis are organised around four tendencies or modes related to traditional television aesthetics: Intimacy, community, public education and melodrama. Each of these case studies examines how the affective body capitalises upon and extends the traditional pleasures of television through an affective appeal to the body.

This thesis assesses attitudes towards, and expectations of, British television between 1925 and 1936. This covers the period from the first public demonstration of an early form of the technology until the official launch of a full high-definition BBC service. The assessment is achieved via an analysis of four key factors. Chapter One covers the first of these, the private individuals working on television, with an emphasis on the publicity-hungry efforts of John Logie Baird. The second chapter investigates the public institutions, most particularly the BBC and the Post Office, which would eventually be of great importance to television’s ongoing development. Chapter Three covers the reporting of the developments in television by the popular press, allowing us to gain an insight into broader attitudes towards television. The final chapter considers the content of the first official broadcasts, which demonstrate how television was ultimately implemented. The study argues that television’s development was not pre-determined, and that its placement under the control of the BBC as a part of its public service broadcasts was not inevitable. This forms part of the wider question of what was expected from television, and how people’s attitudes toward it changed. This is answered through use of new empirical research, based on original documentation and an extensive survey of press reports. The findings of this research question many presumptions about early television’s development and the subsequent pre-war service. This study’s conclusions demonstrate how fluid the medium was in its early years, and that pre-war programming requires close analysis so as to more clearly demonstrate that television as seen in this period was distinct from later eras that have been more heavily researched and assessed.