This thesis examines the way in which media professionals negotiate the occupational challenges related to television and radio production. It has used the subject of religion and its treatment within the BBC as a microcosm to unpack some of the dilemmas of contemporary broadcasting. In recent years religious programmes have evolved in both form and content leading to what some observers claim is a “renaissance” in religious broadcasting. However, any claims of a renaissance have to be balanced against the complex institutional and commercial constraints that challenge its long-term viability. This research finds that despite the BBC’s public commitment to covering a religious brief, producers in this style of programming are subject to many of the same competitive forces as those in other areas of production. Furthermore those producers who work in-house within the BBC’s Department of Religion and Ethics believe that in practice they are being increasingly undermined through the internal culture of the Corporation and the strategic decisions it has adopted. This is not an intentional snub by the BBC but a product of the pressure the Corporation finds itself under in an increasingly competitive broadcasting ecology, hence the removal of the protection once afforded to both the department and the output. Those who informed this study have responded to these challenges in a number of different ways. Of these, the two most important are the adoption of a discourse of ‘professionalism’ designed to underscore their creativity, knowledge and value to the BBC and overcome the ghettoisation of religious broadcasting and second, in the opening up of religion to a range of new formats and conventions which are designed to make the programming more audience, and thus commissioner, friendly. However, despite both these responses the long-term future of religious broadcasting and its suppliers is still far from clear. Therefore, using historical analysis, interviews with media professionals and a period of observational research this thesis offers critical insights into the private world of religious broadcasting at the BBC.

Over five case studies, this thesis brings together six 'telefantasy' programmes, television dramas that have been understood as 'cult' texts because of their fan audiences and that are centrally concerned with representing the fantastic. By situating the Quatermass serials, The Prisoner, Star Trek, The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) within their contexts of production, this thesis challenges the characterisation of such programmes as 'unique' cultural phenomena. Through this analysis, this thesis argues that the fantastic suggests itself as a particularly rich area for re-examining the central assumptions about the aesthetics of television. Challenging the notion of television as an intimate medium of 'talk' that addresses a distracted viewer through a small screen in the living room, this thesis argues that the display of the image in these programmes functions as an aesthetic and economic strategy to address an attentive viewer with distinctive programmes. However, this tendency towards spectacle and distinctiveness is not opposed to the 'intimate' model of television, but is used to negotiate a position for these programmes in which they are both spectacular and intimate, distinctive and familiar, addressing an attentive and a distracted viewer. By analysing the different ways in which the representation of the fantastic is negotiated within each case study, this thesis reassesses the industrial and aesthetic history of 1950s/1960s television, and engages with the debates about the impact of the rise of satellite, cable and digital television services. Through an analysis of the different status of telefantasy on contemporary US network and JfK terrestrial television, this thesis explores the different ways in which these two industries have responded to the fragmentation of the industry over the 1980s and 1990s. By retheorising the aesthetics of television, this thesis argues that we need to have a clearer understanding of the complexity of television history if we are to assess fully the impact of the current changes on the future of the medium.

The rising popularity of Korean contents in Asia known as Hanryu ('Korean Wave'), which was partly supported by Korean cultural policy, has many implications with regard to cultural policy in periphery countries under globalisation and the open-door versus cultural diversity debate. This thesis assesses how recent cultural opening under globalisation in Korea has affected Korea's cultural industries both quantitatively in terms of economic performance and qualitatively in terms of cultural content, identity and diversity. These questions are examined in the context of the changing relationship between the cultural industries and cultural policy in Korea since the end of the 1990s. The research draws upon statistical data, historical material and interviews. By researching how the Korean experience has developed, this thesis attempts to look at Hanryu not just as a phenomenon in its own right, but also considers the secondary impact of this phenomenon on perceptions of culture and identity. In particular the thesis considers Hanryu in terms of the cultural influence on neighbouring countries manifest through tourism and a new interest in Korean language and culture. Such cultural effects are less easily measured than economic data but are important to an understanding of causes and effects of Hanryu. Finally this thesis places the Korean experience in the broader context of cultural policy in periphery countries responding to globalisation and the relationship between national cultural policy and the global cultural economy. It is still too early to reach conclusions on the future of Korean cultural industries based simply on the recent trends However, since the mid 1990s, the Korean cultural industries have been transformed dramatically. Cultural policy has contributed to this trend and strengthened the competitiveness of Korea's cultural industries. At the same time the thesis considers some of the limitations and criticisms of Hanryu, including potential loss of cultural diversity and an anti- Korean backlash in some other Asian countries. The Korean cultural industries have benefited from imitating the Hollywood system and developing a distinctive hybrid cultural content and business model. This has made possible an alternative approach to policy and management which lies between two extremes of protectionism and free market ideology. The thesis comments on some of the difficulties and limitations in sustaining such a balance and concludes by considering the sustainability of Hanryu both in Korea and in the broader Asian context.

The audio-visual character of television was used as the conceptual focus of this examination of television news broadcasting. The research comprised both a macro and micro level analysis. On the macro level, a study was undertaken to examine the influences of the cultural context of broadcasting with special reference to the structure of television and its news organizations upon the formats and content of television news programmes. A comparative content analysis was carried out of the principle evening newscast during one fortnight of news broadcast by the public and the private broadcast networks, in Britain and Canada, and the NBC in the United States. A special "code" was developed for this purpose which would categorize not only content but also format, with a special emphasis on the relative role of the commentary and the visuals. Comparison between the countries revealed differences in both content and format, pointing to different cultural emphasis upon specific issues. Differences in the formats used in the news revealed a greater trend to entertainment values - particularly the use of the action visuals and the newsreader in the more commercialised cultural settings. Within Canada and Britain, those differences between the public and private sectors which did occur, had to do with the style of news presentation, not with its contents, pointing to the standardization of production within the news organization under the conditions of competition and inter-dependence inherent in the structure of broadcasting in these countries. The micro level study examined the effects of the visual and auditory components of the news story by means of an experimental study. A BBC type newscast about demonstrations was systematically varied in six experimental conditions to examine the relative effects and their interactions of modality, consistency or inconsistency between the modalities and of content bias on retention and opinion change. Specifically designed verb/visual techniques of measuring the impression and the visual retention of the event were used. The results showed that viewers shifted their opinions in the direction of the story bias. Visual information increased the impact of the commentary and had its effects principally on the affective component of the opinion. Where visual information and commentary were at variance, the visuals had greater impact on the affective component, with the commentary influencing the cognitive or belief component more. The research points to the need to extend the concept of bias beyond that traditionally used in communication research, not only beyond content to style of presentation, but also to an examination of the different cultural and organizational factors within the industry in which lead to variations in the emphasis upon the visual element within news programmes.

The purpose of this thesis is to study whether and how death-related media rituals construct and reconstruct a global cosmopolitan community. The performance of the media at the occurrence of mass death events, may cultivate expressions of grief aimed at reinforcing a certain understanding of the social order. These rituals facilitate a sense of unity and solidarity between members of an imagined community. What kind of community does the enactment of death-related media rituals construct? What is the sense of solidarity they foster? By focusing on the performance of transnational media organisations following mass death events, the thesis studies the ways in which these ritualistic performances function as a social mechanism that informs the audience of the boundaries of care and belonging to an imagined community. Drawing on theories from sociology, media anthropology and moral philosophy, the thesis develops the analytics of mediatised grievability as an analytical tool. It aims to capture the ways in which news about death construct grievable death, and articulate the relational ties between spectators and sufferers. The thesis puts the analytics of mediatised grievability in play and employs it in a comparative manner to study and analyse the coverage of three different case studies by two transnational news networks. This comparative research design captures the complexity of the mediatisation of death in terms of geopolitics, cultural proximity, legitimacy of violence and the morality of witnessing death. The analysis of the three case studies by the two transnational news networks enables to account for different propositions that two of the networks make for their audiences in comprehending remote mass death. These propositions contain different ethical solicitations, each articulating a different understanding of the relational ties between spectators and distant others – some promote a cosmopolitan outlook, and others maintain a communitarian outlook.

This research explores the ways in which Dennis Potter (1935-1994) is made inheritable to audiences through a rural Heritage Lottery Funded project. With the sale of the written Potter Archive to the Dean Heritage Centre, Gloucestershire, in 2010, this study explores in great detail the processes enacted to interpret the Potter Archive as cultural (television) heritage. Through a creative and innovative research design which utilises autoethnography, inventive qualitative methods and a level of quantitative analysis, this study examines the ways in which Potter is made intelligible to past television audiences, project members and collaborators, local people, and the casual tourist within the heritage environment. A unique and irreproducible study, this interdisciplinary research sits as a contribution to an emerging field that is located at the interface between Memory studies and Museum Studies and explores the way various forms of mediation are connected to these fields. Inherently at stake in this research is the valorisation of television as heritage, as Potter remains well within living memory. Through proximate and intimate connections to this multifaceted heritage project this work represents one of the first interventions to explore turning television into heritage at a local level drawing together the macro level of cultural policy with the micro level of enacting that policy. In asking how Dennis Potter’s legacy is managed in the Forest of Dean heritage environment, this thesis explores the ways Potter’s legacy is mediated, how television heritage is consumed and made meaningful (or struggles for meaning) in the museum space, how a writer’s legacy is interpreted by heritage professionals, volunteers, past television audiences and museum visitors, and how television as heritage is consumed online. This thesis makes visible the underlying mechanisms by which the Dennis Potter Archive is (or might yet become) articulated as television heritage, through examining the core managerial, interpretive and memorial processes involved in this high stakes, multi-partner project.

Informed by theory and debate associated with the field of media studies, this thesis presents a comparative analysis of two Independent Local Radio (ILR) stations in the West Midlands between 1972 and the mid 1980s: BRMB Radio in Birmingham and Beacon Radio, which served Wolverhampton and the Black Country. It locates the two stations in the context of the development of British broadcasting policy, which had been shaped from the start by the British model of public service broadcasting. ILR was a public radio service which was funded by the sale of advertising time. Similar to commercial radio elsewhere, the survival of BRMB and Beacon Radio depended on the income they could generate, but the commercial imperative was constrained by the legislative and regulatory framework of British public service broadcasting. The thesis argues that the fortunes of the two stations depended largely on the approaches taken by their respective management teams to these conflicting influences. The success or failure of an ILR station, in terms of profit or programming, was shaped by its management team. BRMB Radio was an example of a station with an appropriate balance of experience and expertise. From the beginning it was headed by a managing director with a commercial background and a programme controller who was experienced in regulated public service broadcasting. In contrast, Beacon Radio was a station with the wrong people in charge. Both the managing director and the programme controller were from a commercial broadcasting background, and their approach brought the station into conflict with the Independent Broadcasting Authority, ILR‟s regulator. Almost every aspect of the Beacon operation was designed to make money. The profit motive took precedence over the fulfilment of its public service obligations. Beacon‟s deficiencies in terms of local coverage and its aggressive sales tactics caused some parts of the local community to reject the station, with some calling on the IBA to remove the Beacon licence. Formulating the correct type of programmes and working with the regulator was a necessity. To generate revenue a station needed to sell an audience to advertisers. To build an audience it had to create programming to which listeners could relate. Music policy, the personality of presenters, and predictability of output were specifically relevant to BRMB and Beacon. Above all, each station had to have access to the airwaves, and with the IBA as gatekeeper to the airwaves it had to abide by its rules and regulations, especially those relating to programming and content. This was exemplified by the case of Beacon Radio: it was only after the IBA had refused to renew its licence that Beacon recognised the importance of having programmes which met the prescribed standard of quality and public service, and working with the regulator and not against it.

Career paths in the field of cultural and creative production and the attainment of recognition have been associated with networking and point at the relevance of maintaining social relationships. Social capital has been discussed as one key element, given the fact that forming social relations with significant others potentially aids individuals striving for symbolic capital – the precursor to recognition. The emergence of online social networking platforms as a means to amplify opportunities to build social relationships raises questions in regards to its impact on building social capital. The key question that arises is: To what extent can digitally mediated social relationships support creative professionals in attaining recognition for their work by capitalising on digitally mediated social ties? To answer this, it was necessary to uncover the nature of digitally mediated social relatedness in order to understand how and why these relations may be eligible to produce social capital. Tracing this process through drawings of personal networks elicited a wealth of narratives around the influence of digitally mediated social interaction on symbolic capital. This thesis identified that accessing social capital resources via digitally mediated social interaction operates within the context of two prime factors: risk and trust. As such, digitally mediated social ties are useful for building social capital. However, this holds primarily in contexts where risk is relatively low and therefore the required level of trust is marginal. The relevance of digitally mediated social ties in building social capital is thus largely context driven, whereby the individual circumstances of creative professionals are crucial. My findings highlight the ambivalent nature of digitally mediated social ties in terms of their conceptualisation as a form of social relationship. Interestingly, while being highly volatile and fluctuating in nature, these liquid ties, as I have labelled them in my thesis, do afford access to resources such as trust that have hitherto been primarily associated with strong social ties. Essentially, this challenges the prime conceptualisation of social capital as an affordance of strong, established social relationships in the formation of symbolic capital. Therefore, I make a case for a more nuanced approach to (mediated) social capital, which conceptualises the relevance of the social tie in light of its affordance, rather than its formal quality.

My thesis interrogates the changing nature of the espionage genre on Western television since the middle of the Cold War. It uses close textual analysis to read the progressions and regressions in the portrayal of the female spy, analyzing where her representation aligns with the achievements of the feminist movement, where it aligns with popular political culture of the time, and what happens when the two factors diverge. I ask what the female spy represents across the decades and why her image is integral to understanding the portrayal of gender on television. I explore four pairs of television shows from various eras to demonstrate the importance of the female spy to the cultural landscape. These shows represent the female spy's birth in the era of the sexual revolution, her rise as a feminist career woman, and the post-9/11 restrictions on who is allowed to serve the country. I argue that the conflation of nation and family that occurs in each show serves to elevate the primacy of the heterosexual reproductive unit, challenging the outwardly-progressive representation of the apparently feminist spy figure. Analyzed in concert, these shows reveal the conservative bent of the espionage genre despite the higher visibility of its female protagonists.

This thesis examines the production of UK children’s public service broadcasting in the 21st century through extended case study of one significant production facility: BBC Scotland Children’s Department. Starting from the hypothesis that the Department offers a unique inflection of its public service remit through being an alternative producer to the main BBC Children’s production facility in London, it argues that the various contexts and settings of the Department impact on its texts, practices and discourses to articulate a distinctive approach to children’s public service broadcasting befitting the Department’s status as a BBC ‘centre of excellence’. Based on production research at BBC Scotland from 2007 to 2011, the study explores a number of problematic concepts associated with contemporary UK public service broadcasting for children, including the perceived value of UK-originated content; the occupational values of producers as specialists; the construction and representation of the children’s audience; and the specificity of television form in achieving public service for children. These issues are given additional scrutiny with respect to how BBC Scotland Children’s Department negotiates the demands of producing content that is simultaneously national and network, and in light of the difficulties in UK children’s broadcasting as a whole, suggested by the 2007 Ofcom Report on The Future of Children’s Television Programming. Occurring at a critical juncture in the history both of the BBC and of public service broadcasting more generally, the study reveals how the theorised gap between audience and producer, so critical in children’s media, is managed by the Department, and how notions of ‘public service’ to children are articulated in institutional ethos and practice as well as in texts and artefacts. Through analysis of different aspects of the children’s television production process at BBC Scotland, the thesis concludes that the Department embodies and manifests a strong ethos of public service in all its work.