This thesis examines the impact of writers, producers and directors on programming and production in several periods of US television drama history. I address the role authorship plays in shaping US television drama aesthetics and how creativity functions within its production cultures. I also address the personalisation of programmes through media and textual visibility and the place of authorship within the commercial and industrial contexts of US network television. My methodology involves textual analysis of a large viewing sample of programmes and a combination of archival research into original production documentation and analysis of US TV coverage in newspapers, magazines and trade journals. The thesis is divided into four case studies, each looking at the spaces for authorship, creativity and personalisation in key historical moments of US TV drama production and programming: early 1950s anthology writers, producers and directors (e.g. Paddy Chayefsky, Fred Coe, Delbert Mann); anthology producer-hosts of the late 1950s (e.g. Rod Serling, Alfred Hitchcock); executive producers of the 1980s-2000s (e.g. Steven Bochco, Jerry Bruckheimer); and guest writers and secondary producers in the 1980s-2000s (e.g. David Mamet, David Chase). The thesis aims to debunk the critical notion that authorship is present only in boutique quality television or that authorship is purely an invention of branding strategies and suggests new formulations of US TV authorship specific to historical production contexts. The thesis extends the author paradigm to include multiple authorship and a range of production roles and also revises several historiographical assumptions about authorship, programming and production. The thesis offers a model of authorship studies in television studies which frees authorship from quality prescription. It addresses the issue of industrial collaboration and incorporates it into our understanding of TV authorship. I relocate authorship studies from cultural mythology to aesthetics and production analysis, and provide more medium and industrial specificity.

Comic mockumentaries have been a regular fixture on cinema and television screens since the early 1960s, and texts such as A Hard Day’s Night, This is Spinal Tap, The Thick of It and the work of Christopher Guest have all achieved mainstream popular success. However, current scholarship has side-lined virtually all discussion of these comic texts, which are both the most popular and the most common examples of the fake documentary form, in favour of those instances which exhibit an intense reflexive relationship with the straight documentary. This thesis proposes a critical and aesthetic re-evaluation of the comic mockumentary form, by using detailed textual analysis of a range of radio, television and film texts, to explore how they function critically and historically, and how the comedy within them works. I also argue for the consideration of the mockumentary as a genre rather than simply an aesthetic mode. My main contention is that the primary aspiration of the comic mockumentary is entertainment, rather than the construction of a reflexive critique of the straight documentary form. As a result, the mockumentary has begun to sever its direct links to documentary, and it is no longer useful to examine these texts solely in terms dictated by their relationship with documentary proper. By emphasising the role that comedy and tone play within the genre, I hope to open the form up to a wider range of critical approaches than current discussions have so far allowed. The thesis also highlights the centrality of performance, suggesting that the performative aspects of genuine musicians such as The Beatles and Bob Dylan, and the public personae of politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, are the focus of the mockumentary text. Examples such as This is Spinal Tap and The Thick of It can be seen to create an ironic critical distance, complicating the way that we understand the straight documentary through the comedic interplay of the real and the fictional.

This thesis analyses multi-episode British drama programmes in the spy and conspiracy genres over a period from 1979 to 2010, investigating televisual issues of form and genre and interrogating a model of how television is considered to 'work through' the concerns and anxieties of the nation. Chapter One provides a literature review of the conventions of the spy and conspiracy genres. Chapter Two looks at a cycle of ‘prestige’ adaptations of spy novels beginning with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (BBC2, 1979), considering the new developments they brought to form and genre, particularly in terms of complex serial narratives. Chapter Three analyses a cycle of 'authored' conspiracy serials emerging from traditions of 'radical' television drama across the 1980s, including Edge of Darkness (BBC2, 1985) and A Very British Coup (Channel 4, 1988). Positioning them in relation to the oppositional anxieties of the era, I argue that there emerges a greater tendency for such programming to engage with topical 'headline' issues, thereby playing a greater role in television's 'working through' than the more traditional spy series. Chapter Four takes a more longitudinal approach and examines how the spy series evolved over these decades, from The Professionals (ITV, 1977-83) to Spooks (BBC1, 2002-11), finding that these also display a greater tendency towards topical concerns but that the manner in which this is accomplished is substantially affected by the series form. Finally, Chapter Five analyses a revival of the conspiracy genre in the context of the 'war on terror', considering how programmes such as The State Within (BBC1, 2006) approach the same issues as Spooks but from an alternative perspective. Across the thesis, I explore how over time the formal and generic innovations introduced at the beginning of the period of study are absorbed into and managed by existing traditions and a growing generic self-consciousness, which comes to partially blunt the process of 'working through'.

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.

Acting for television has hitherto been a much-neglected field; by focusing solely on screen performance, usually via textual analysis, the small amount of work thus far conducted has largely ignored the various conditioning factors that combine to shape it. This thesis is designed to address that lack, drawing on a combination of archive research, original interviews and textual analysis to provide a multi-perspectival, historical overview of acting in British television drama, spanning the live era to the present day. The programmes selected as case studies herein derive from historically distinct production contexts: namely, the live drama of The Quatermass Experiment (BBC, 1953); the ‘as live’, pre-recorded videotape of Doctor Who (BBC, 1963-89); and the move to Outside Broadcast location work, utilising a ‘rehearse/record’ process, on the first series of Survivors (BBC, 1975-77). The fact that each programme has since been re-made in the 2000s allows for both a comparative study and a chronological development of television acting. The significance for acting of the shift from multi-camera studio to single camera location work is represented here by the models of studio realism and location realism. However, the physical site of performance is just one of several determinants that are examined throughout. Actor experience, technology, drama training and production process together comprise a complex set of variables that are in a constant state of flux. How these factors have intersected and combined to affect performance provides the key to this study of British television acting over the last six decades.

Using data from the 2008 Formula One motor racing World Championship, this thesis theorises live, televised sports events as discursively constructed "spectacles". The two key aims of the study are; (1) to contribute to our understanding of the organising principles and broadcast values in televisual representations of sports; and (2) to demonstrate how "spectacle‟ is created as a textual accomplishment. Data includes verbal commentaries, interviews, video footage, and onscreen graphics. The analysis is primarily informed by the notion of the „activity types‟ concept (Levinson, 1979), "recontextualisation‟ (Linell, 1998), and follows broadly the principles of grounded theory (Strauss and Corbin, 1998) and multimodal discourse analysis (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006; Machin, 2007). The broadcasts are shown to be constructed as a sports-magazine that consists of a variety of mediatised activities and the study examines the mediatised event in relation to the organising principles of these activities. The study also explores three intrinsic elements found in live televised broadcasts, namely "liveness‟, "domain‟ and "bimodality‟. These refer to the interplay between the „live‟ and "non-live‟ segments of the coverage; shifts across the "physical‟ and "mediatised‟ domains; and the relationship between the "visual‟ and "verbal‟ tracks respectively. Overall the thesis demonstrates how the sports-magazine format allows the programmes to introduce thematic diversity, while retaining coherence. Furthermore, the centrality of liveness is found to be problematic in the broadcasts due to live motor sport‟s potential to turn into tragedy, should a life-threatening or fatal crash occur. However, the analysis reveals that the broadcasters manage moments of great tension by foregrounding the notion of "safe-danger‟ throughout the programmes, and when an accident does take place; they use a number of reporting strategies to compensate for the lack of information during the live event.

This thesis contributes to existing debates concerning television, nostalgia and genre. Drawing upon social constructionist approaches, the thesis theorises nostalgia as a discourse that is constructed through specific social, historical, cultural and, relating to television, institutional contexts. The thesis extends Paul Grainge’s (2000a, 2002) work on nostalgic modes and combines it with Catherine Johnson’s (2005) analysis of television series’ textual strategies to propose an analytical framework examining individual case studies that locate constructions of nostalgia within specific production context(s). This involves considering how such factors as individual channel remits (e.g. public service or commercial), imagined target audiences and scheduling concerns impact upon nostalgic discourses articulated through a programme’s narrative and generic strategies. These ideas are examined through employing textual analysis and extending Richard Nowell’s (2011) industrially-focused conceptualisation of genre cycles’ historical development to television, focusing upon post-2005 British time travel dramas and providing in-depth case studies of Doctor Who, Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes, Lost in Austen. Through adopting a textualist focus, this thesis re-engages debates concerning structured polysemy (Morley 1992, 1996) and, by demonstrating the multiple preferred reading positions that post-2005 British time travel dramas construct, proposes the concept of layered polysemy. Layered polysemy suggests that constructions of nostalgia are readable through multiple imagined audience discourses as a result of their articulation in ‘coalition’ programmes designed to simultaneously attract multiple distinct and divergent audience niches arising from their position on mainstream broadcast channels in UK (BBC1 and ITV1). Layered polysemy constitutes a midpoint between textual determinism and arguments demonstrating myriad audience readings, sitting alongside arguments concerning television series’ ‘aesthetics of multiplicity’ (Ross 2008, Johnson 2012) but rejects the latter’s focus upon material and/or cultural sites external to the programmes themselves. Layered polysemy therefore complements wider arguments arising from this thesis regarding the retention of broadcast culture discourses within contemporary Television Studies.

The dissertation develops a theory-based, state-centered revisionist explanation of the development of Canadian broadcasting policy during the years 1955 to 1968. The hypothesis contends that state officials seek their own preferred policy outcomes rather than reflecting the preferences of societal actors. The concept of decision points is used to explore the origins of the 1958 Broadcasting Act and the 1968 Broadcasting Act. The evidence suggests the content of these measures was largely determined by bureaucratic actors. Two aspects of the 1968 legislation (the power to approve broadcasting licenses and extension of broadcasting regulatory jurisdiction to cable television) are examined in detail. In both cases, the evidence points to the decisive role of state rather than societal actors in the policy process. Confirmation of the central hypothesis raises questions about society-centered theories of the democratic state.

This research is concerned with how journalists discursively construct their world of work and identity. In studies of news production journalists are frequently utilised as a source of information and explanation about processes and news values, as a means of describing the ‘real’ world of news. However, conversations with journalists have been largely treated by scholars as the transparent neutral information about production practices rather than a discursive practice in itself. In this piece of research the talk itself is moved centre stage and becomes the focus of analysis. Discourse analysis has been extensively applied to the output of television news yet this methodological approach has been underdeveloped in the area of production studies. This research project aims to address this gap by drawing on the work of discursive psychology (Potter & Wetherell 1987, Potter 1996, Billig 1996) to examine the rhetorical discourse of television journalists. I will argue that a more discursive approach to news production studies yields a more nuanced understanding of the culture and practice.

No description available.