Since 2008, male Street dance crew performances on U.K. television have burgeoned in popularity due to their displays of athleticism and synchronicity. Despite growth in popular dance scholarship, however, this phenomenon has been overlooked, in accord with the dismissal of spectacle as decorative and superficial. This thesis addresses this absence by presenting a critical investigation into the construction and performance of spectacle by male Street dance crew performances on U.K. talent show competitions. It explores the key concepts that shape the notion of spectacle in relation to televised popular dance, and enquires into how crews manifest these in their performances. It also addresses the extent to which these performers have any agency to resist their status as spectacular. Drawing upon a screen dance analysis and utilising theoretical perspectives from late capitalism and visual theory, this thesis focuses on 58 performances from Britain’s Got Talent and Got to Dance. Analysis revealed that choreographic and cinematic strategies of virtuosity and excess results in the construction of ‘the surplus’, which in itself aligns with post-Fordist labour practices and spectacle as a condition of commodified society. Crews perform the surplus through their transgression of corporeal boundaries and by performing excess labour in order to register within the media spectacle of reality television. This is expressed through the structure and content of their cinematically edited choreography, their performance of cultural identity and the relationship between technology and the body. By performing the surplus, crews are reduced to consumable images through the erasure of their histories, labour systems, and the displacement of the human. Dancers challenge this representation, however, through emphasis on choreographic themes and televised rhetorics of physical effort, brotherhood, and human emotion. It is, therefore, the thematic material and the fleshy humanity of the dancer that both registers and resists these performances as spectacular.

This thesis examines the discourses around creativity and cultural value that underpin the language used to construct television comedy at Channel 4 within three sites: broadcasting policy documents, interviews with Channel 4 heads of department and commissioners, and creative practitioners that have produced comedies for Channel 4 broadcast. In doing so this thesis uses a post-structural discourse analysis perspective with which to approach how comedy is understood as a genre within television industry policy, how departmental categorisation creates meaning around social purpose through discourses of cultural value and how this is both recreated and manifest among the understanding of what it means to create television comedy under the public service remit with which Channel 4 is charged. Through this multi-platform analysis, this study brings new light to comedy’s position within British broadcasting’s traditions of public service, it highlights the distinction of cultural value enacted by positioning some forms of comedy under the Comedy Department and others elsewhere under Entertainment. I argue that this process of inclusion and exclusion is framed through the justification of value in a way that reconstructs binary cultural hierarchies dependent on the notion of art and creativity as oppositional to the commercial and the popular. As such this thesis concludes that such cultural hierarchies are problematic for access and diversity in the creative labour force of British television comedy at Channel 4, particularly within the context of Channel 4’s specific remit to host a diverse range of talent both on and off screen and in doing so to encourage diversity, as a reflection of a pluralised British audience and society, across all British terrestrial channels.

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This PhD examines the significance of the BBC Northern Ireland television coverage of politics during a key period of the region’s history -the transition from conflict to devolution. Specifically it examines the films I made for the weekly television programme "Hearts and Minds", between 2006 and 2012 when the programme finished. I examine what happens to political coverage when there are no agreed terms of reference and noconsensus. I also explore the role of public service broadcasting when it can no longer assume that it speaks to ‘the nation’. The coverage of news by the media in Northern Ireland was developed within this binary framework, and I argue that challenging that was what I was doing through the films I made for "Hearts and Minds".

This research explores an existing, yet under-researched overlap between ‘post-conflict’ storytelling and the emerging form of interactive documentary. A tension is highlighted between high levels of authorial control over narratives and low levels of agency among audiences in the interpretation of traditional, audiovisual storytelling. Interactive documentary, as a user-centric and multi-narrative media form, is introduced as a potential means to engage audiences with stories of conflict in new and creative ways. As a conceptual framework and, in an attempt to understand and bridge the gap between the fields of interactive documentary and post-conflict storytelling, Gaudenzi’s (2013) taxonomy of four modes of interactivity is applied to critically analyse existing case examples of interactive documentaries that negotiate narratives of conflict: Gaza/Sderot (2008), 18 Days in Egypt (2011), Streets of Belfast (2015), and Gone Gitmo (2007). Multiple methodological approaches are adopted to explore the field of interactive documentary, specifically in its potential application to negotiate stories of conflict. Primarily, I adopt a practice-led inquiry as central, which involves the experimentation and development of various interactive storytelling technologies that culminates in the creation of Maze3: An Interactive Documentary. Maze3 offers a virtually simulated, navigable version of the Maze and Long Kesh prison, a significant and contested symbol of the Northern Ireland conflict. Through reflection on the creative process of making Maze3, 1 outline some of the key decision points in my quest to create an artefact that embodies key interactive characteristics, such a multi-linearity, polyvocality, sense of presence and environmental contextualisation. A qualitative, phenomenographic research study of users’ experiences of interacting with Maze3 follows adopting screen-capture observation and ‘think-aloud’ techniques. This aspect of the inquiry elucidates the potential role that interactive documentary can play in post-conflict societies, by exploring real-world experiences and implications of engaging with an interactive documentary, such as Maze3. This research offers various contributions, but, principally, it contributes to deeper understandings of practice-led research and the potential role of interactive documentary practice to storytelling within post-conflict Northern Ireland.

The work presented in this Thesis details the development and evaluation of a working production methodology for the creation of a prototype television programme for the emerging medium of interactive broadcasting. With few production methodologies available for the creation of interactive television programmes, the research work used exploratory methods to identify suitable provision in the field of interaction that could be adapted for interactive television distribution by present and of future broadcast systems. As well as implementing a form of interaction currently unavailable through interactive television in the UK, the methodology presented utilises existing television stock. Through the constraints imposed in using existing recordings the work identified the steps necessary in implementing a process for converting the 20 material into 3D so that advanced interaction in the form of user control of a virtual camera could be implemented. Through the identification of a unique set of existing software tools and the production of a dataflow.for the successful integration of those software tools, a prototype interactive television programme was created using existing television stock. 80th the methodology and the programme created were evaluated in terms of whether the working methodology was understandable by third parties and in the acceptance of a new form of television content by an audience.

Drawing on media sociology and cultural studies approaches, this thesis aims to conceptualise the production culture of religious television. The study of production culture emphasises ‘collective, daily cultural performance involving symbolic codes, [and] conventionalized power hierarchies’ within media organisation (Caldwell, 2008, p. 342). The study of production culture of Islam-based television is important as it stands to aid our understanding of how religious television programming – and in particular, Islamic television programming – comes to take the form it does. It might also enhance our understanding of how and under what conditions television production employees produce television programmes. By combining participant observation and interviews with textual analysis, this study analyses the complex ways in which television production workers adapt to the resource limitations and ideological constraints within the production culture of a television channel. It analyses both the production quality of a magazine talk show called Living the Life and the quality of working life amongst members of its production community. This thesis argues that the diminished quality of working life exhibited by television production workers contributes to the poor production quality of a magazine talk show. Empirical findings reveal the ways in which the socioreligious and political mission of the channel shapes creative decision-making processes during the production of Living the Life. By exploiting the religious idea of ‘work as a mission,’ the channel motivated its television production employees to work with limited resources and, subsequently, to become more vulnerable to self-exploit whilst striving for the ‘deferred reward’ promised by God in the afterlife. Additionally, ideological constraints foster a ‘culture of caution’ amongst workers, which lessens both their creative autonomy and emotional well-being. Whilst research into television production offers rich insights into the employee’s experience of creative-commercial tensions and emotional work, this particular thesis demonstrates how religion shapes the production culture of a religious television organisation, thereby affecting the ways in which television production employees perceive their positions and manage emotions in their everyday working lives.

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This thesis examines the kinds of stories about teenage sexual violence that are enabled (or not) by US and British teen television drama series between 1990 and 2008. This genre is centrally concerned with issues of sexuality and, in particular, sexual vulnerability as teenage characters negotiate the transition from childhood to adulthood. Sexual violence narratives are common within this context. This thesis argues that a fuller understanding of representations of sexual violence is enabled by contextualising these narratives in relation to overall series’ and generic contexts. I employ a structural methodology to map where these storylines occur within series’ and generic structures across fourteen texts, uncovering striking patterns that point to the value of analysing several programmes alongside one another. This then provides the starting point for a deeper textual analysis of how sexual violence functions narratively and ideologically. Through doing this, I am able to provide insights into a variety of different forces that shape how these narratives are framed. Contextualising my analysis of representations of sexual violence allows me to account for the specificities of episodic and serial narrative forms, the generic hybridity of individual programmes, the wider conventions of the teen drama series genre, the gender of the series’ protagonist and US and British contexts. Additionally, I identify the genre’s dominant sexual norms and explore how these norms intersect with representations of sexual violence.

Representations of gay, lesbian, queer and other non-heterosexualities on British terrestrial television have increased exponentially since the mid 1990s. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer characters now routinely populate mainstream series, while programmes like Queer as Folk (1999-2000), Tipping the Velvet (2002), Torchwood (2006-) and Bad Girls (1999-2006) have foregrounded specifically gay and lesbian themes. This increase correlates to a number of gay-friendly changes in UK social policy pertaining to sexual behaviour and identity, changes precipitated by the election of Tony Blair’s Labour government in 1997. Focusing primarily on the decade following Blair’s installation as Prime Minister, this project examines a variety of gay, lesbian and queer-themed British television programmes in the context of their political, cultural and industrial determinants, with the goal of bridging the gap between the cultural product and the institutional factors which precipitated its creation. Ultimately, it aims to establish how and why this increase in LGBT and queer programming occurred when it did by relating it to the broader, government-sanctioned integration of gays, lesbians and queers into the imagined cultural mainstream of the UK. Unlike previous studies of lesbian, gay and queer film and television, which have tended to draw conclusions about cultural trends purely through textual analysis, this project uses government and broadcasting industry policy documents as well as detailed examination of specific television programmes to substantiate links between the cultural product and the wider world. The main body of the thesis comprises five chapters, including three industrial case studies examining the four main terrestrial broadcasters- Channel 4, Channel 5, ITV and the BBC- and their gay, lesbian and queer output between 1997 and 2007. Again by analysing policy documents and the distinct public service obligations of each broadcaster, these case studies link the brand identities and imagined audiences of each with the range and volume of LGBT and queer programming they produced within the ten year period studied. In doing so, they also consider the effect of digitisation and the multi-channel environment on the specific types of queer and LGBT programming provided by each broadcaster, and the impact of niche-market broadcasting on the presentation of sexual difference within the contemporary UK context.