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.

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.

This thesis examines the developing role of television channels in the delivery of public service broadcasting in Britain, 1996-2002. Starting from a hypothesis that channels are distinct television products in their own right and increasingly important in organising how broadcasters think about their audiences, it argues that channels have identities expressed through their schedules and determined by their relationship to genre and target audience. Based on research at the BBC (from 1998 - 2002), involving interviews with key staff and the analysis of BBC documents, this study examines the television broadcasting functions of commissioning, scheduling, marketing and audience research. It illustrates how these activities created specific identities for television channels and how these identities shaped the programming that reached television screens. It reveals how channels became increasingly important in the television landscape as buyers in a more demand-led commissioning economy and acted as a focus for the creation of media brands. It then discusses how the evolution of a channel portfolio enabled each channel to play a specific role in fulfilling public service obligations and looks at how different models of audience emerged in relation to the different public service television channels, charting the decline of the mass audience and the emergence of the visualisation of audiences in a more individualised way. The thesis concludes by addressing some implications of these developments. It looks at how the different models of audience in circulation affect debates about quality television, and how changing ideas about the construction of public service channels may impact on the regulation of broadcasting. Finally, it explores the effect of multiple channels, each targeted at specific audiences, on the concept of a unitary public sphere and speculates that channels have the potential to underpin the creation of multiple imagined communities.

The thesis uses close textual analysis to study and evaluate the television work of Alfred Hitchcock. The corpus consists of the twenty shows personally directed by Hitchcock, including his appearances before and after those shows. In response to most previous writing, which tends to compare the programmes with Hitchcock’s films (often unfairly) the thesis emphasises them as products of television. Programmes are evaluated on the basis of their perceived success as television- if they harness conditions related to television production and integrate them with narrative themes or to create meaning. Hitchcock is considered to be the major creative force in each programme. Chapter One provides a variety of important contexts including a brief history of US television of the 1950s, key literature on Hitchcock and analyses of contemporaneous programmes not directed by Hitchcock. The textual analysis chapters (2-8) consider aesthetic or thematic programme aspects. Chapter Two studies the various roles played by Hitchcock’s appearances as series host. Chapter Three considers the impact of censorship on programmes frequently dealing with murder, violence and insanity. Chapter Four analyses Hitchcock’s implementation of varieties of voice-over narration, a common device in short dramatic forms. Chapter Five studies Hitchcock’s use of point-of-view shots, particularly in relation to their role in the delivery of the narrative twist. Chapter Six considers the key Hitchcock theme of detachment from the world. Chapter Seven looks at moments from the programmes which demonstrate how aesthetic is influenced by television production conditions. Hitchcock created a number of television masterpieces. His achievements in television are in many ways comparable in quality and consistency to his theatrical films. Even when considered in the context of other 1950s US anthology dramas, the Hitchcock-directed programmes are superior on many levels. Elements of his film style were highly suited to television production. Many of his greatest achievements embrace and harness television production conditions in their presentation strategies to create an integration of style and meaning.

This thesis examines forms of Gothic fiction on television, and defines the ways in which television produces Gothic drama which is medium-specific (e.g. formally distinct from versions of the genre in other media). This work employs a textual analysis to explore Gothic television, and combines this with archival research and an examination of the changing climate of television production in a range of national and historical contexts. The thesis is organised into four case studies, each dealing with different national industries during different periods: British anthology drama of the 1960s and 70s (e.g. Mystery and Imagination (ABC/Thames, 1966-70), Ghost Story for Christmas (BBC1, 1971-78)); Danish art television in the mid-nineties (Riget (Danmarks Radio/Zentropa, 1994)); British adaptations of female Gothic literature, (e.g. Rebecca (BBC2, 1979), The Wyvern Mystery (BBC1/The Television Production Company, 2000); and big-budget, effects-laden series from North America in the 1990s (e.g. American Gothic, CBS/Renaissance, 1995-96), Millennium (20th Century Fox/10:13, 1996-1999). I argue that Gothic television plays on the genre's inherent fascination with the domestic/familial, to produce television drama with an overt consciousness of the contexts in which the programmes are being viewed, a consciousness which is locatable within the text itself; as such, the thesis defines the Gothic as a genre which is well suited to presentation on television. Furthermore, an examination is offered of the 'model' viewer as presented within the television text, enabling an understanding of the ways in which conceptions of television viewership are inscribed into television drama at the moment of production. I also interrogate the notion that television is an 'uncanny' medium by locating the precise sources of uncanniness with Gothic television, and delineate the ways in which innovations in television production have been showcased through the representation of the supernatural and the uncanny with Gothic Television.

To establish how women are portrayed in the press, the dissertation offers findings from a content analysis of 1,050 news accounts of women drawn from three Zambian newspapers in 1991, 1995 and 1999. These findings are supported by a textual reading of a smaller number of news accounts examining how media construct women in politics as they are representatives of other women in general. The dissertation concludes that news accounts of women in the Zambian press to some extent contribute to their continued marginalisation in society