The thesis deals with contemporary Czech serial production in terms of script development. It focuses primarily on the development of screenplays for the series on Česká televize and on drama series with one-hour episodes. It compares the development in the Czech environment with British and American practice. It maps the current Czech serial environment, creates an overview of contemporary Czech serials in broadcasting and clarifies the basics of narrative serial structure. It contains a comparison of selected pilot parts in terms of their narrative structure. It focuses on both screenwriting practice and development practices from the point of view of the television of public service, in the case of the American production it focuses on the Hollywood system. It uses methods of qualitative analysis of scripts, in-depth semi-structured interviews with creative producers and comparison of script development in individual productions.

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This thesis offers an important reconsideration of the place of the Second World War within larger narratives of religious change in the twentieth century. While many scholars have subsumed these crucial war years within accounts of inter-war change, or dismissed them as a period of mellow or austere religion, the Second World War provides a significant opportunity for an analysis of religious change that relies on a confluence of vectors. International geopolitics, political consensus, myths of national cohesion, physical constraints, technological developments and currents in ecclesiastical thought each played a role in shaping the religious culture of wartime, one that the author describes as a “spiritual consensus” that prized unity and commonality over difference. This thesis also opens up an important new front for the history of modern Christianity in Britain. The relationship between mass media, religion and national culture has been under-examined by scholars, as has the particular ways that media shapes mental environments. The relationship between the Churches and the Ministry of Information seems to have sat in a penumbra between disciplines, leaving the rich trove of documents at the National Archives about the activities of the Religions Division of the MOI relatively unexamined. This thesis discusses in detail the global and domestic role afforded to an ecumenical Christianity in MOI propaganda. It also adds to existing scholarship that has emphasised the significant place afforded to Christianity in identity construction during the war, and its importance in the articulation of the narratives through which the urgency and necessity of the conflict was understood. / This is a study of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s religious broadcasting practices during the Second World War and its aftermath. Using documentary sources from the BBC Written Archives Centre and the National Archives, this thesis argues that the wartime context allowed the articulation and development of a particular kind of “BBC Religion,” one that celebrated commonality over difference, emphasized the importance of accessibility, and focused on individual rather than communal worship. BBC Religion was an important site of national propaganda and national identity construction, and was central to the celebration of key civil religious festivals, including the National Days of Prayer. BBC Religion provided listeners with daily prayers, devotionals, talks and entertainments to offer psychological and spiritual support during a time of crisis. Religion can be an effective tool of persuasion, particularly when propaganda builds on pre-­existing beliefs and loyalties. The Ministry of Information and BBC used a generic, practical Christianity as an “ecumenical weapon” to foster unity in Britain and between Allies. This thesis argues that the medium of radio and the technological and physical constraints of war shaped the particular articulation of BBC Religion. While the BBC helped foster a “spiritual consensus” during the war, this consensus quickly degraded in the in the aftermath of the conflict. Instead, the BBC articulated principles of tolerance and liberty in a more straightforward way, celebrating the return of regional and religious diversity in radio programming. In 1948, the BBC broke with its former “ban on controversy” to allow Bertrand Russell to openly question the existence of God on the air for the first time. This study offers a revision to “caesura” and “gradual-­declinist” narratives of religious change by suggesting that religious change in the mid-­twentieth century may be more episodic in nature, and that current historiography would benefit from an approach that considers the formation, development and adaptation of multiple discursive Christianities. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This is a study of the place of religion in British public life during the Second World War. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was tasked with creating popular, upbeat entertainment that could boost the morale of the nation while reminding listeners of the reasons to stay committed to the fight. They created a “BBC Religion” during the war, one that emphasised unity by stressing commonalities between all kinds of Christians, and offered psychological and spiritual comfort to listeners in a time of crisis. The Religious Broadcasting Department created engaging content that prized accessibility and simplicity above all, commissioning beloved programmes, including C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Man Born to be King, and Lift Up Your Hearts, a precursor to Radio 4’s Thought for the Day. When the urgency of the conflict passed and victory became assured, this BBC Religion ceased to serve a propagandistic function. Instead, the post-­war BBC celebrated diversity and respected differences in religious belief and interpretation instead of forcing conformity.

The present thesis investigates the music and career of Jeffrey Lewis (born 1942). The thesis is broadly divided into three sections. First is an account of the composer’s life, told mainly through an overview of his works, but also through a sketch of his early years in South Wales, his studies in Cardiff, Darmstadt, Kraków and Paris, his academic career in Leeds and Bangor, and his subsequent early retirement from academia. There follows a more detailed study of six works from the period 1978 – 1985, during which certain features of Lewis’s musical language came to the fore, perhaps most notably a very individual and instantly recognisable use of modal language. After an Epilogue, the thesis concludes with an Appendix in the form of a Catalogue in which all Lewis’s known compositions are listed, together with details of performances, broadcasts and recordings. Lewis’s music often plays with our temporal expectations; the close interrelationship between texture, structure, harmony and melody, and its effect upon our perception of the passage of time, are explored in the main analyses. These are conducted partly by means of comparison with other works by Lewis or his contemporaries. Memoria is examined in relation to a similarly tranquil score, Naaotwá Lalá, by Giles Swayne. The following chapter discusses the extra-musical inspiration for Epitaph for Abelard and Heloise, whose relationship to Tableau is then explored in the next. The difficulties of creating a large-scale structure that unifies the work’s various harmonic elements are also investigated. The analysis of Carmen Paschale considers it in relation to Lewis’s other choral music, whilst the final analytical chapter compares and contrasts two three-movement works, the Piano Trio and the Fantasy for solo piano. Lewis’s melodic writing in the Piano Trio is discussed in relation to that of James MacMillan, and the origins of the first movement of Fantasy in Oliver Knussen’s Sonya’s Lullaby are explored. In the Epilogue, the possible reasons for Lewis’s current neglect are explored, various influences on Lewis’s musical thinking are laid out, and his achievements are assessed.

The discursive and critical positions of the ‘classic’ nineteenth-century novel, particularly the woman’s novel, in the field of adaptation studies have been dominated by long-standing concerns about textual fidelity and the generic processes of the text-screen transfer. The sociocultural patterns of adaptation criticism have also been largely ensconced in representations of literary women on screen. Taking a decisive twist from tradition, this thesis traces the evolution of representations of masculinity in the malleable characters of Rochester and Heathcliff in film and television adaptations of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights between 1939 and 2009. Concepts of masculinity have been a neglected area of enquiry in studies of the ‘classic’ novel on screen. Adaptations of the Brontës’ novels, as well as the adapted novels of other ‘classic’ women authors such as Jane Austen, George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell, increasingly foreground male character in traditionally female-oriented narratives or narratives whose primary protagonist is female. This thesis brings together industrial histories, textual frames and sociocultural influences that form the wider contexts of the adaptations to demonstrate how male characterisation and different representations of masculinity are reformulated and foregrounded through three different adaptive histories of the narratives of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Through the contours of the film and television industries, the application of text and context analysis, and wider sociocultural considerations of each period an understanding of how Rochester and Heathcliff have been transmuted and centralised within the adaptive history of the Brontë novel.