This thesis explores the ways in which popular fiction television is produced in Nigeria in the 21st century and through it the investigation of social relations in the industry and the analysis of its products. In so doing the thesis also interrogates the assumptions of social theorists regarding the impact that the globalization of culture is supposed to have on local cultures. Drawing on empirical evidence from fieldwork carried out in Nigeria between February and June 2006 involving participant observation in the location production of a television drama series, semi-structured and unstructured interviews with 15 people in Nigeria’s television industry, the thesis argues that despite some production practices in the industry not yet being, according to the practitioners, up to scratch, Nollywood has also evolved social and institutional structures which are recognisable features of the structure of the television industry everywhere. The thesis also argues that despite its having an industry that is ranked third in the world in terms of output, the West, but Hollywood in particular, retains a strong grip on the imagination of Nigeria’s popular fiction television producers. For a more nuanced account of the impact of the globalization of culture on Nigeria’s popular fiction television industry, however, I propose that we need to go beyond how people speak about what they do, to how they do what they do. Analysis of popular conventions of a less powerful audio visual industry, like Nigeria’s Nollywood, alongside those of Hollywood will help unpack further the nature of the impact that dominant cultures are assumed to have on local cultures.

From the mid-1990s a wave of dramatic serials featuring the legendary figures of China’s bygone dynasties has emerged in dramatic programming on Chinese primetime television. The commercialization of mass media and the rise of media consumerism in China since the early 1990s have fostered the emergence of these historical dramas on television. Set during the dynasty era, these television historical dramas have been at the forefront in articulating political and legal principles based on the Confucian-influenced traditional Chinese culture. Although media scholars have interpreted the popularity of the television historical dramas as a revival of Confucianism, virtually no empirical research has been done to explore how Chinese audiences relate their viewing experiences to the revival of Confucianism according to their own social and cultural conditions. This thesis presents a qualitative audience study of how the historical dramas are understood and socially and culturally valued in contemporary China, taking into account personal, social, historical and cultural issues that relate to viewers’ engagement with this television genre. Between late September 2007 and early April 2008, the author carried out his fieldwork audience research in two urban settings in China, the city of Beijing and that of Changsha. 10 focus groups and 11 in-depth interviews were conducted involving more than 60 respondents from young adult and middle-aged audience groups. According to the author’s fieldwork data analysis, the ways that the Chinese audience engages with the historical drama are far more complex than generally thought; rather than insist on a literal interpretation of the drama text, the audience engages with the historical television drama in quite a divergent way due to his or her age, gender, life stage and socio-cultural status. Meanwhile, informed by the Grounded Theory, the author identified two text-based interpretive frameworks that are adopted by the respondents across all the focus groups and in-depth interviews in their understanding and evaluation of the historical drama text. These two interpretive frameworks include the framework of fact/fiction and that of ‘classic-ness’. To conclude, the author argues that the Chinese audience’s response to the historical drama goes beyond a literal, political sense of totalitarian nostalgia; it is characterised by an increasingly more liberal, diverse and indeed open-ended engagement with the historical drama text. Nevertheless, a critical re-evaluation of Maoist revolutionary classic literary works is manifested within that engagement process.

This thesis is one of the very few studies that have examined how Chinese Communist Party (or the Party) used its media to appropriate traditional Chinese cultural values for political purposes. It focuses on the TV dramas that have won the top Feitian Awards (China’s top official TV drama awards) from 2002 to 2011, a total of 35 TV dramas. Drawing on the insights offered by framing theory and Lévi-Strauss’s binary opposition theory in their study of media content/messages and based on framing theory, the thesis proposes and elaborates a theoretical framework—network framing—to explain the cultural appropriation in the selected TV dramas. It has proposed that traditional Chinese cultural values have been woven into network patterned TV dramas as the central organizing ideas to promote the Party-desired messages/agendas. The thesis adopts mainly a qualitative methodology, combining textual narrative analysis and contextual secondary data analysis with the former as the major research method. The results of the narrative analyses of five case-studied dramas largely confirm the relevance of the proposed network framing: all five dramas are network patterned and are organized /framed around traditional Chinese cultural values, most of which are Confucianism-based, to promote the Party-desired messages/agendas; the traditional Chinese cultural values used as the central organizing ideas and the messages/agendas promoted by the Party vary with different dramas depending on the issues/ problems covered. These network-patterned traditional-Chinese-culture-framed stories contrast sharply with the binary-oppositionally-structured class-based stories of the cultural works of the pre-reform Maoist era. Comparing the former with the latter and discussing the transition from the latter to the former, the thesis argues that the Party’s political communication since 2001 has undergone significant changes: once as the dominant concepts in the Party’s ideology in the Maoist era, class and class struggle have now been dropped out of the Party’s ideology while traditional Chinese cultural values particularly Confucianism-based ones, which for long have been rejected and condemned by the Party, have now become part of the Party’s ideology; the way the Party communicates its messages/agendas has changed from crudity and over- simplicity in pre-reform Maoist era towards refinement, subtlety and sophistication in the current post-reform era. The thesis also argues with the results of the secondary data analysis that the production of TV dramas in the current post-reform era involves various political actors such as the Party-state, its representatives such as the former SARFT, and the commercial market (or the Chinese audience) and that the textual subtlety and sophistication in communicating the Party’s messages/agendas result from the combined sophisticated influences from these different political actors. In conclusion, the Party’s cultural appropriation through TV dramas for political purposes demonstrates that the Party’s political communication has developed toward sophistication.

This PhD research investigates the role of television in representing the past and constructing an idealized society using a case study of a phenomenal Ramadan drama series, Bab el-Hara. The television drama, a Syrian production, was funded by the pan-Arab satellite conglomerate, the MBC group, and it is set in a fictitious Damascus of the 1930s under the French Mandate. The series, airing its seventh season in Ramadan, 2015, succeeded in achieving pan-Arab fame and gave a boost to the “Damascene Milieu” drama genre. The study approaches this television phenomenon ethnographically, looking at the fiction's implicatedness in the everyday life of viewers and makers in Damascus and in Beirut, through a multi-sited approach investigating content, context and agency, engaging in questions on space, morality and patriotism. The objective is to investigate audiences, text and makers as distinct yet connected sites of meaning. This context based analysis of Bab al-Hara takes place against the backdrop of 2010/2011; the liminal state of a Levant entering deeper into a complex local, regional and international power struggle. The everyday life of Bab al-Hara’s viewers was characterized by a general sense of loss and mistrust, and an unclear and threatened future. Contrastingly, Bab al-Hara provided the nostalgic promise of ontological security, grounded as it was in the courtyard houses of Old Damascus. The Damascene courtyard house constituted the spatial anchor for an idealized moral past, an ahistorical Damascusfocused Arab cultural history, and an imagination of the domestic as sovereign. It thus promoted a view of the neighbourly, the city and the country as a system based on kin, or the family, as the frame in which to understand the collectivity. Bab al-Hara's cultural, moral and spatial telos, a fusion of religious and nationalist worldviews, amongst others, is negotiated by Bab al-Hara’s viewers. The older generation, with situated experience of the social relations during the 1930s, and the younger generation that is appreciative of the virility of the “real” Bab al-Hara man that they no longer encounter in their everyday life. The multiple generational readings in regard to the absent idealized strength and authority, became a dominant reading in relation to chastity and unity as two idealized values that are necessary to conserve, but that are facing serious challenges in the everyday. Bab al-Hara idealizes a moral domestic society that is set in the past and it aims to advance a discourse on unity and patriotism. In so doing, however, it only exposes the weakness of the national project. The Syrian social upheaval in 2011 shows how unity and patriotism as the binaries to sectarianism and treason, have not succeeded in protecting the inner domain of the house from external invasions or internal divisions. In fact, accusations of treason, instead of forcing the outsider to the outside and building solidarity within, accentuates mistrust between the insiders and reveals the power and the limits of t h e Bab al-Hara imaginary of a kin based collectivity, and the omnipresence of imperialism.

The term ‘dark comedy’ is used by audiences, producers and academics with reference to an array of disparate texts, yet attempts to actually define it perpetuate a sense of confusion and contradiction. This suggests that although there is a kind of comedy that is common enough to be widely noted, and different enough from other types to require separation, how and why this difference can be perceived could be better understood. Accordingly, I investigate what is enabling the recognition and distinction in respect of British dark comedy programmes, and use this as a basis for considering how this type of comedy works. I argue that the programmes may be distinguished primarily by aesthetic features, placing their rise on British television in a broader context of aesthetic trends towards a display of visual detail, spectacle, and excess that puts the private and the taboo on greater show. Using the theories of Freud, Bakhtin, and Bergson about taboo, the uncanny, the grotesque, and the appearance of mechanical actions in humans, I examine in detail examples of British comedy television programmes that are typically referred to as ‘dark’, demonstrating their consistent depiction of subjects that are often repressed or avoided, particularly those around which taboo restrictions and prohibitions have evolved (such as violence and death, illness, and transgressive sexuality). These areas are strongly linked with the body and physicality, and are also ones which occasion negative feelings of unease and denial that are connected to concerns about mental and corporeal fragility and fallibility. I conclude therefore that dark comedies provide a space where viewers may confront and ultimately minimise fears surrounding the human condition, enabling a ‘safe’ exploration of them that can be enjoyed as humorous.

Since the liberalisation of the audiovisual sector and the upsurge of private commercial televisions in Cameroon, there has been a frequent broadcast of foreign soap operas, known locally as “series”. Qualitative methods were employed to investigate the meanings some market women in Bamenda obtain from their consumption of foreign soap operas and to understand the reason behind the broadcast of foreign soap operas in Cameroon. The participants of the study reveal reading their favourite transnational texts in various ways, both as individuals and as a collective whole. In some instances, market women are seen to copy foreign practices, yet, the emulation of some foreign practices contribute to empowering these women both economically and emotionally. In other moments, some market women resist some of the meanings within imported foreign soap operas. The sharing and discussion of meanings obtained from foreign soap operas arguably work to neutralise the lingual, tribal, religious, educational, and marriage differences that exist among market women. This thesis combines political economy, and cultural studies approaches to capture these contradictory realities of cultural exchange.

This thesis has set out to explore the "symbolic world" of images of psychological problems and distress in soap operas in terms of their "cultural" definition in the soap opera community, their models causation, and their semiotic and narratives uses in the storylines. A sample of ten soap operas was recorded for a period of nine months in 1990 and it was analysed with a multi-facet methodology which comprised: a content analysis, a thematic analysis, a narrative analysis, and an interpretative analysis. The most common psychological problems in soap operas were: depressive symptoms (32%) dependence on substances and alcohol (15.2%), masked antisocial behaviour (15.3%), psychosis (11.5%), acute depression (10.7%) and suicidal thoughts (6.1%). The quantitative content analysis has not revealed any important "distortions" of social reality apart from the cases of psychosis and "masked" antisocial reactions. For the majority of cases of distress, their causes were sought into the personal and familial environment while the role of socio-economic factors was played down. The thematic analysis examined the cultural discourses that were not to articulate images of psychological problems in soap operas. A binary methodology of oppositional structures was utilised in order to model the dramatic tensions and decision dilemmas of soap opera characters. The most common cultural discourses which framed discussions about human distress were: women's vision of family life, teenage rebellion, adult deviance, morality, destiny, and neighbourliness. Portrayals of acute depression, for instance, highlighted the role of the community in providing support during personal crises while depressive symptoms pointed out the functional role of women's skills in detecting distress and seeking support. On the other hand, images of psychosis and antisocial reaction were articulated within the discourses of deviance and rule-braking behaviour. Narrative uses of distress, such as presenting false impressions of suicide, using distress as a cliff-hanger device, and giving rise to side-effects and follow-up stories, exemplified the complicated ways in which soap operas treated psychological problems.

No description available.

No description available.

The following research is concerned with an exploration of the discourses constructed about lesbian culture both within and surrounding the production and lifecycle of The L Word. The originality of the approach to and development of this thesis is anchored in a consideration of the show as a symbolic good (Garnham, 1999) which encapsulates not only the meanings inherent in the television text, as often focused upon in traditional Television Studies perspectives, but also producer focused branding and creative justification through promotional materials, and audiences sense making. This means that the thesis is the result of the intersection of a number of theoretical approaches to the study of television production as industrial practice, television as meaningful text, and also to audiences as readers. This thesis outlines that The L Word’s textual elements, promotional branding, and the audience response to this wide consideration of the television text altered significantly over six seasons. During this time the priorities of the producer altered from a focus on political representation and a communal sense of lesbian identity, to maintaining narratives and that would ensure appeal to a mainstream audience. This change in focus led to the fragmenting of lesbian subjectivities and formed an ideologically hegemonic lesbian culture within the text. This was further asserted through the othering of lesbian characters considered overtly sexualised, alongside identities of gender and sexuality that blurred the queer boundaries. The developing decoding and reactions of the lesbian audience further support the development of these hierarchies of discourse. Within this thesis it is also argued that the pleasures of the lesbian audience became problematic and their readings had to become increasingly negotiated for them to find enjoyment in the narratives and outcomes of The L Word.