|
TV
Londons
Exploring
Representations of London on Television
London, 28-29
July 2022
  
A
CREAM, University of Westminster conference, in collaboration with the
University of Brighton
TV LONDONS
– CONFERENCE PROGRAMME
About the
organisers
Dr Christopher Hogg is a Senior
Lecturer in Television Theory at the University of Westminster, UK.
Chris specialises in television drama and television acting, with a
particular interest in bringing together industry and academic
perspectives. He is the co-author (with Dr Tom Cantrell, the University
of York) of the book Acting in British Television (Palgrave Macmillan,
2017), and the co-editor (also with Cantrell) of the
collection Exploring Television Acting (Bloomsbury, 2018). Chris’s
recently published monograph, Adapting Television Drama: Theory &
Industry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), utilises interview insights from a
range of industry professionals to explore the creative and professional
approaches behind contemporary television adaptations. With a particular
focus on female and/or minority ethnic perspectives, the book also
considers important current industry adaptations in addressing equality,
diversity, and inclusion.
Dr Douglas
McNaughton
is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Art and Media at the University of
Brighton, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. His research
interests include the political economy of television production and
representations of space and place in British screen cultures. Recent
publications include articles and book chapters on camerawork as
performance, nostalgia in the film T2 Trainspotting, the
aesthetics of space and place in Cold War spy dramas, and Scottishness
in the BBC’s Doctor Who. Forthcoming work includes articles on
masculinity in 1960s spy-fi television (with Craig Haslop, University of
Liverpool), and folk horror in 1970s British children’s television.
Dr Andrew
O’Day
is an independent scholar. He is co-author (with Professor Jonathan
Bignell) of the book Terry Nation (2004) and editor of Doctor
Who: The Eleventh Hour (2014), Doctor Who: Twelfth Night
(2019) and co-editor (with Dr Brigid Cherry and Professor Matt Hills) of
Doctor Who: New Dawn (2021). Andrew has published widely on
television including the article ‘I Know You Killed Lucy: Soap and
Prediction for EastEnders 30th Anniversary’ for the
Television Heaven website as well as on Jack the Ripper and on LGBTQ
issues. He can be found on the Web at
www.hrvt.org/andrewoday
Day 1:
28 July 2022
9.30-9.50 – Registration and Refreshments
9.50 – Organisers’ Welcome
10.00-11.00 – Keynote 1
Imagining television: London and the early years of BBC
TV
Jonathan Bignell
This talk will analyse the tensions between the centripetal and
centrifugal forces at work in the early decades of television from
London. It was ambitious but parochial, international but local, and
still working out what the medium was for. From its beginnings in the
1920s until the erection of an aerial mast in the Midlands in 1949, the
British television service was London-centric, metropolitan in character
and projected to a small middle-class audience. London’s department
stores and exhibitions had offered venues for test transmissions and
demonstrations of television throughout the 1920s, and although the BBC
was the national broadcaster its television service, officially
inaugurated in 1936, was, in effect, regional rather than national. When
BBC TV began, signals radiated only a few dozen miles from London,
hardly anyone owned a television set, and technological and commercial
restrictions limited the scope of television programming. Newspapers,
cinema and live performance were each threatened by television and
competed with it for content and personnel. In its limited way, however,
television, like radio, helped to construct London, Britain and the
British Empire as ‘imagined communities’ (Benedict Anderson). Both radio
and television were close to quotidian reality because they were mainly
live rather than recorded media. For television, this immediacy meant
privileging live events such as outside broadcasts of national
ceremonies, as well as live performers in the London studios. The tiny
audiences for BBC television did not match ideas of national collective
identity that were promoted during wartime, and television stopped
between 1939 and 1946, but even on the day war broke out there was live
television from London’s Olympia exhibition hall when Australian and
West Indian visitors gave their impressions of Britain, and there were
live performances by amateurs who had brought along a ukulele and
violin. Before and after the Second World War, television programmes
were created and transmitted from a metropolitan, English base but one
that claimed to be the heart of a global Britain. To go beyond the
studio, the BBC used Outside Broadcast units, relaying plays from
London’s West End, cricket from the Oval and live coverage of the 1948
London Olympics. Looking both outward and back at itself, the London of
television’s formative years was a testing-ground for what broadcasting
and Britain might be.
Jonathan Bignell, PhD, is Professor of Television and Film at the
University of Reading. He is a member of the editorial advisory boards
of journals including the Journal of Popular Television, the Journal of
Science Fiction Film and Television and the New Review of Film and
Television Studies. He is a Corresponding Editor for Critical Studies in
Television and a General Editor of ‘The Television Series’ books from
Manchester University Press. His own books include three editions of An
Introduction to Television Studies, Terry Nation (with Andrew O’Day) and
Big Brother: Reality TV in the Twenty-first Century. As co-editor he has
published A European Television History, Popular Television Drama:
Critical Perspectives, two editions of British Television Drama: Past,
Present and Future, and most recently three volumes in MUP’s Moments in
Television series. His journal articles include contributions to
Critical Studies in Television, Adaptation, Screen, Media History and
the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television.
11.00-11.15 Break
11.15-12.35 – Panel 1 – Making TV Londons
The Geographies of Interwar Television
John Wyver
Television broadcasts from the Baird Company, the BBC and a small
number of other interests between 1928 and 1939 negotiated the spaces of
London in multiple ways. This paper offers a partial account of those
television spaces and the beginnings of an analysis of their
geographical significance.
Studio sites ranged across the capital, including Selfridge’s, Covent
Garden’s Long Acre, Broadcasting House, Crystal Palace and Alexandra
Palace. Each inflected the productions made in them. Locations for the
limited range transmissions created audiences concentrated in specific
areas, but at times these were linked to a range of remote sites, in
continental Europe, and even the east coast of the United States, as
well as a speeding express train and an aeroplane circling above the
metropolis. Linked too were more permanent viewing locations, including
department stores and radio dealerships, cinemas, Radiolympia, the
Science Museum and Waterloo Station.
The Baird Company extended television’s production geography to Epsom
for the Derby as early as 1931, and once the BBC’s high-definition
service was launched, the spaces of creation gradually expanded from the
studios and terrace at Alexandra Palace (AP), into the surrounding park,
and then across London for the 1937 Coronation procession at Hyde Park,
Wimbledon and West End theatres.
Other locations further enhanced the novel picturing of the capital, yet
each was dependent on physical access to limited GPO landlines to relay
images and audio back to AP. The map of the GPO’s landline network was
fundamental to the early development of television beyond the studio. At
the same time, the occasional use of a BBC mobile film unit was also
broadening the production space, as when the television service was
among the newsreel units at Heston aerodrome to record Neville
Chamberlain’s ‘Peace for our time’ remarks on his 30 September 1938
return from Munich.
In the months before the closure of the service at the start of
September 1939 (in part as the result of the geography-based fears that
the AP transmitter might help direct Hitler’s bombers) the extension of
the service to Birmingham was being actively considered, although the
war delayed this until 1949 when the Sutton Coldfield transmitter was
finally opened.
Drawing on materials from the BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham,
on other written materials, as well as the analysis of photographs and
film fragments, this paper explores the production, transmission and
reception geographies of interwar television, and seeks to understand
the ways in which the early service was shaped by them.
John Wyver is Professor of the Arts on Screen, University of
Westminster; Director, Screen Productions for the Royal Shakespeare
Company; and a writer and producer with Illuminations, the media company
he co-founded in 1982. His productions have been honoured with a BAFTA
Award, an International Emmy and a Peabody Award. Recent broadcasts
include Drama Out of a Crisis: A Celebration of Play for Today (2020)
and Coventry Cathedral: Building for a New Britain (2021) together with
the continuing RSC Live from Stratford-upon-Avon ‘event cinema’ series
of Shakespeare’s plays. He has published widely on the arts and
performance on screen, on the history of British broadcasting, and on
digital culture. His books include Vision On: Film, Television and the
Arts (2009) and Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company: A Critical
History (2019), and he is working on a cultural history of British
television in the interwar years.
The life of the Good Life House: the spatial legacies
of ‘site’ in a suburban London situation comedy
Paul Newland
The BBC television sitcom The Good Life (BBC1, 1975-8) focusses on the
attempts of Tom and Barbara Good (Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal) to
escape the rat race by becoming totally self-sufficient in their
Surbiton home. Location filming took place in the Greater London suburb
of Northwood, where the exterior of the Edwardian detached house
situated at 55 Kewferry Road was chosen as the home of the Goods.
In this paper I will explore the representational qualities of 55
Kewferry Road as it appears in the series, paying particular attention
to the architectural specificities of the house. I will argue that this
house facilitates the depiction of a ‘classed’ London in the series, by
paying specific attention to the ways in which the building spatially
informs the class tensions that shape the comedy drama.
In addition to this, I will examine how far the representation of the
house in the television series has informed the history of this building
and its environs in subsequent years. Drawing on interviews with the
current owners of 55 Kewferry Road and research into media stories about
the sale of the property (paying particular attention to the ways in
which estate agents have employed the link to The Good Life as a
marketing tool when the property has been put up for sale), I will
analyse how far the narrative and key thematic aspects of The Good Life
have shaped not only the history of the house at 55 Kewferry Road – and
the lives of those who have lived in this building – but also the wider
spatial environment of suburban Norwood and suburban London over the
last 40 years
Dr Paul Newland is currently Director of Research and Knowledge Exchange
in the College of Arts, Humanities and Education at the University of
Worcester (UK). He has also worked at Bath Spa University, Aberystwyth
University, the University of Exeter, and the University of Plymouth.
Paul has published widely on representations of cities, landscapes and
architecture in literature and film. Books include The Cultural
Construction of London’s East End (2008) and British Films of the 1970s
(2013). Edited books include Don’t Look Now: British Cinema in the 1970s
(2010), British Rural Landscapes on Film (2016), and British Art Cinema
(with Brian Hoyle, 2019). He has published a number of articles and
chapters on representations of London, including ‘Global Markets and a
Market Place: Reading BBC Television’s Eastenders as the
Anti-Docklands’, in the Journal of British Cinema and Television, Vol. 5
No. 1 (May 2008), and ‘Shaun of the Dead and the Construction of Cult
Space in Post-Millennial London’, in Pam Hirsch and Chris O’Rourke (eds),
London on Film: The City and Social Change (Palgrave, 2018). Paul also
explores his interest in space and place through his creative research
as a filmmaker and critically-acclaimed musician.
Filming at Elstree and Beyond: EastEnders and Grange
Hill
Andrew O’Day
This talk will centre around a largely neglected area: the filming of
EastEnders and Grange Hill at BBC Elstree Studios and also on location
in London and beyond. Looking at EastEnders, the paper will position the
Elstree set of an area of London’s East End in the industrial context of
the BBC and in relation to audience surveys conducted during the
planning stages of the series (see Buckingham 1987); attention will be
paid to the practicalities of filming on a built set at Elstree, rather
than in a real area in London itself, connecting this with the fact that
EastEnders is an example of television form’s continuing serial; the
paper will explore the way that, while London and the East End cover a
large geographical space, EastEnders’ relatively small set fits in with
the soap opera genre and its focus on family relationships and
community; and the talk will discuss the fact that this location,
although expanded and updated, is part of EastEnders format, while, over
the programme’s 37 years on air, many characters have left and many new
characters have been introduced, often arriving and departing by a mode
of transport which takes them into and outside the parameters of the
programme. However, the issue will be raised that EastEnders is filmed
at other locations such as in Central London, in other areas of the
United Kingdom, and even abroad but that these excursions are still
linked to the small Walford community. Moving on and I will conclude by
examining the filming of Grange Hill at Elstree and various locations
such as at London schools and will situate the use of certain locations
in relation to Realism. Creator Phil Redmond’s programmes (Brookside,
Hollyoaks and Grange Hill) have been discussed as realistic but the use
of ‘Realistic’ locations has not.
Buckingham, David (1987), Public Secrets: EastEnders and its audience,
London, BFI.
12.35-1.35 – Lunch
1.35-2.55 – Panel 2 – Fantasy Londons
‘We made it! London, 1965!’ The representation of London in early Doctor
Who/1960s British telefantasy
Nicolò Villani [TEAMS]
This presentation was rescheduled and given at the beginning of the
London From Abroad panel on Friday July 29.
Since its first appearance on British broadcast television (BBC1) in
1963, Doctor Who has been one of the most audiovisual products in which
‘Britishness’ played – and still plays – a crucial role in constructing
a strong and recognizable identity. During the first two seasons of the
classic Doctor Who run, the representation of London was used as a
‘narrative anchor’ to create a bridge between the audience and the main
characters, especially Ian and Barbara, who travelled with the Doctor
mainly to return home after their first adventure. The TARDIS usually
avoided to bring back her crew to London, leading to adventures through
Time and Space and delaying Ian and Barbara’s farewell to the Doctor
(and to the audience as well). Despite this, during the first two
seasons of Doctor Who we have some interesting representations of
London, narratively used to remind us where Barbara and Ian are aiming
to return to and welding the series to its contemporary pop culture
environment. The paper will discuss the second season serial ‘The Dalek
Invasion of Earth’ (1964), in which the TARDIS crew reach London in 2164
(two centuries after the series broadcast) during a dystopian alien
invasion: in this serial we find some interesting and diversified
representations of the city, both in its deconstruction and in its
tourist exaltation. Secondly I’ll focus on the second season serial ‘The
Chase’ (1965), which shows two different images of London: during the
first episode of the serial we have a fast but significant image of the
Beatles playing Ticket to Ride on Top of the Pops in 1965 and later, in
the final episode of the serial, Ian and Barbara finally arrive in
contemporary London.
The paper will proceed to look at the development from the first serial
‘An Unearthly Child’ (1963) with its Victorian-like junkyard to ‘The War
Machines’ (1966), the first full-length return to contemporary London,
reflecting the Swinging Sixties where two men fight over a groovy chick.
I shall probe the connections between Doctor Who and Adam Adamant Lives!
(1966-67), the BBC’s answer to The Avengers (1961- 69), with Adam
Adamant created by Sydney Newman and produced by Verity Lambert after
their collaboration on Doctor Who, where Adam Adamant’s conservative
Victorian/Edwardian values clash with those of Swinging Sixties London
in which he finds himself. Mention will also be made of Anneke Wills’
roles in both Doctor Who and Strange Report (1969-70).
I will then move onto look further at the modernity of 1960s Doctor Who
(Gatwick Airport in ‘The Faceless Ones’ [1967] and ‘The Evil of the
Daleks’ [1967], with the airport having been discussed by Jonathan
Bignell in relation to The Avengers, the trendy café in ‘The Evil of the
Daleks’ clashing with the Victorian setting, and the skyscrapers of ‘The
Invasion’ [1968]).
The paper will conclude by looking at the studio recreations of London
in 1960s Doctor Who such as in ‘The Web of Fear’ [1968] where such was
the excellence of the set of the London Underground that London
Transport complained that filming had taken place in the Underground
without permission, and also the use of London locations such as the
Post Office Tower in ‘The War Machines' and St Paul's Cathedral in ‘The
Invasion'. All this will lead to the conclusion that while Doctor Who is
telefantasy, its representations of London are grounded in sound
cultural contexts.
Nicolò Villani graduated at the DAMS of Bologna with a thesis in Media
Semiotics and a master's degree from CITEM in the History of Seriality.
Among his interests are structural semiotics, the contemporary media
landscape, the evolution of digital media and the possibility of
bringing the structural investigation – especially through the recent
evolutions of Ethnosemiotics – close to contemporary audiovisual
textuality. Fresh from his experience as a juror for Venice 75 Classics
section, he is editor-in-chief for Birdmen Magazine, and is a Ph.D
student at the e-Campus and a member of CUBE – Bologna University Center
of Ethnosemiotics
Unreal and real Londons: the use of locations in the
BBC’s Neverwhere (1996)
Tony Keen
As many have recognised, most recently Hadas Elber-Aviram in Fairy
Tales of London (2021), Neil Gaiman’s 1996 novel Neverwhere was a
game-changer in the depiction of fantastic Londons. Though most famous
as a novel, Neverwhere began life as a television series, commissioned
by the BBC. Though the original series is not generally well-respected,
largely because the final product did not reflect Gaiman’s vision, the
television format remains rooted in the DNA of the novel. This paper
looks at the ways in which the fantasy landscape of London Below was
formed by the use of actual locations for filming, and the interactions
in this manner between television series and novel. This will include
moments where the tv locations influenced how scenes eventually played
out in the novel (e.g. the description of Blackfriars Underground
station in the novel owes much more to the filming location of Aldwych
than it does to the actual Blackfriars), and others where limitations on
the original tv production were overcome by Gaiman in the subsequent
novel (e.g. the original planned location of the ‘Floating Market’ in
Harrod’s was denied permission by the owners, and it was relocated to
Battersea Power Station, with interiors filmed in the Truman Brewery on
Brick Lane; in the novel, Gaiman restored the location to Harrod’s). The
object is to re-establish the tv series as an important piece of
Neverwhere’s evolution, not to be forgotten.
Dr Tony Keen is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of
Notre Dame (USA in England). He has taught courses on London and the
fantastic for Middlesex University, Notre Dame, and the Manchester
Centre for Continuing Education. He has written on various aspects of
science fiction for Foundation, Vector, and Strange Horizons.
Abandoned Londons: the imagination of disaster in
television drama
Douglas McNaughton
Science fiction has long projected the end of the world. As
Christopher Daley explains, ‘British disaster fiction perpetually
exposed the anxieties haunting the overt civility of Victorian,
Edwardian, and interwar Britain’ (2014: 133) and Daley shows how these
anxieties intersected with Cold War fears. In her essay ‘The Imagination
of Disaster’ (1965), Susan Sontag writes ‘The trump card of the
end-of-the-world movies… is that great scene with New York or London or
Tokyo discovered empty, its entire population annihilated’ (45).
London is key to representations of the end of the world in the British
imaginary. While these fantasy images have a long history in screen
fictions, they became fact during the Covid-19 pandemic. During the
regular lockdowns, images of an apparently deserted London filled the
British media, images both familiar from their fictional representations
and strange because of their reality. This paper connects these
real-life images with previous imaginings of deserted London in
post-apocalyptic British television drama. Case studies include Doctor
Who (BBC 1963-present), Survivors (BBC 1975-77; 2008-2010) and The Day
of the Triffids (BBC 1981; 2009).
Daley, C. 2014. The Not So Cozy Catastrophe: Reimagining the British
Disaster Novel in J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) and Brian
Aldiss’ Barefoot in the Head (1969). In: Germanà, M. and Mousoutzanis,
A. eds. Apocalyptic Discourse in Contemporary Culture: Post-Millennial
Perspectives on the End of the World. London: Routledge.
Sontag. S. 1965. The Imagination of Disaster. Commentary 40 (4),
October, 42-48
2.55-3.10 – Break
3.10-4.30 – Panel 3 – Virtual Londons
Transmogrification: Experiencing London Without Ever
Leaving One's Couch.
Stacy Embry [TEAMS]
Just a week before Christmas, the angels soared as the tourists sat
covered by plastic on the top of a double-decker bus traversing Regent
Street. The experience of London is never enough but adding the holidays
to the mix only made the impact more visceral. The rain diminished
nothing as the children in the group struggled under dripping umbrellas
whilst getting a better look at the lights flowing above.
The passive documentary ‘The Lights Before Christmas: Luminous London’
gives the viewer no plot, no story, no characters and all of the
historic city to explore with no guide or chatty companion. Without
narrative, the outing becomes authentically individually mesmerizing
because it is personal: No two viewers would have the same experience.
The pilgrim sees London for themself whilst that very transmogrification
alters their life. Seeing and hearing ambient companions around, the
visitor feels right there alongside strangers who are intimate as
friends. The magic of London lays before the observer without a
point-of-view director deciding what the experience should be. It is a
raw London without a tour guide and this journey of a lifetime is taken
from one’s own couch.
As angels fly overhead and large projections thrust themselves
aggressively onto botanical buildings, the occasional non-invasive
history footnote again inserts itself giving context without conscious
awareness. Still, the experience feels organic and authentic. Starting
at the London Eye and ending with tired children leaving to go home and
dream of Saint Nick, experiencing the luminosity of London, in person or
on film, changes the tourist. This streaming service video gives access
to a real London whilst taking the viewer on a transformative escape
from their patently obvious life.
Stacy Embry is a professor of English at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical
University Worldwide. A native of Indiana in the United States, her
background includes master's degrees in English Literature and
Educational Psychology. A dedicated academic, her point of intersection
between culture and literature has always been television. Most recently
published in the Journal Implicit Religion on the series Doctor Who,
Stacy is a passionate Anglophile who has never been outside America.
Loving all things British, she felt a distance from the United Kingdom
until happenstance brought a point-of-view travel experience video that
changed her perspective. The “Lights Before Christmas: Luminous London”
documentary showed Stacy the streets and sights of her preferred city at
Christmastide. Her dearest dream came true as the experience felt real.
Feeling authentically invigorated, the lingering benefit helped her
escape total isolation during the Covid-19 pandemic. Almost two years
later, she can still close her eyes and be on a bus experiencing Regent
Street.
MTV Londons: Community, Identity and City Life in the
Modern Music Video
Drago Momcilovic [TEAMS]
Since the dawn of the MTV age in 1981, music videos of the
Anglophone world have incarnated multiple, politically progressive
portraits of the urban environment. Music video directors and artists
have collaborated to curate particular images of the city that showcase
not only the recording artists in question but also the various publics
and subcultures to which their work is so often addressed. In this
sense, I follow Andrew Goodwin’s argument in Dancing in the Distraction
Factory that the music video clip is to be seen as a showcase for the
modern pop singer’s “star-text” – that narrative of personality,
artistry, and public life that attaches to the music video artist and
informs their repertoire. However, I also want to extend Goodwin’s idea
of the “star-text” to the world these stars and their audiences share
and co-create: the modern metropolis, whose diverse populations,
thronging movements, and rationalized spaces shape the way communities,
and especially disempowered or subaltern communities, develop and forge
a sense of belonging in the urban environment and beyond.
In this paper, I argue that the history of the modern music video clip
and its relation to community formation and identity politics can be
seen best through the lens of its creative explorations of London, in
particular, which evolve along three distinct trajectories. The first,
popularized before the advent of MTV, consists of video clips by Bob
Dylan, The Who, and the Beatles, who innovate the archetypal structure
of the modern video by troping London as a traditional site of tourism.
Its visual landmarks, however, forge generational community between
artist and audience and re-center the youth cultures of the 1960s as the
primary consumers of an evolving sense of Britishness.
The second occurs during the MTV era, when artists like the Pet Shop
Boys, Bronski Beat, Prodigy, U.N.K.L.E., Chemical Brothers, Aphex Twin,
Everything But the Girl, and Madonna reveal London as a space of
technological and industrial modernity. In their videos, London’s
subterranean spaces and hidden nightclubs are placed on view, exposing
subaltern communities searching for greater visibility and creative
agency in a world that often ostracizes them based on race, class, and
sexuality.
The third arises in the contemporary era, as digital and virtual
technologies proliferate alongside a global pandemic, political
stalemate, and racial reckoning. Artists like Coldplay, Wolf Alice,
Will.i.Am, Kylie Minogue, and Elderbrook project images of a phantom
London – actually, of phantom Londons that foster and simultaneously
strain community bonds across virtual spaces and social distances.
In this paper, I also differentiate the visual language of these music
video portraits of London, arguing that the mass media form’s unique
aesthetic character allows it to highlight three powerful visual tropes
of community formation and belonging that the modern metropolis offers:
the physically present and powerfully visual heritage site; the
cinematographic tropes of mobility and movement, as cameras follow
artists and actors through both accessible and inhospitable city spaces;
and the editing techniques that gesture toward the presence of seemingly
invisible hot spots and hot zones.
Drago Momcilovic earned his doctorate in English at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison and is currently Senior Lecturer in Comparative
Literature at UW-Milwaukee. His teaching and research interests include
gender, technology, monstrosity, animal studies, posthumanism,
environmental literature, and popular culture and identity politics in
European and Anglo-American literature, cinema and television. He is the
editor of the collection of essays Resounding Pasts: Essays in
Literature, Music and Cultural Memory and the author of the recent
articles “‘It’s Too Bad We’re Not Horses’: The Animal as Witness in Bird
Box” and “Music Video Gothic: Fragmentary Form at the Dawn of MTV.”
‘London. My city. It was a monstrous place.’ Mapping and materialising
Georgian London in City of Vice (Channel 4, 2008)
Professor Claire Monk, De Montfort University
For five weeks in January to February 2008, up to 2.7million Channel
4 viewers each week (an 11% audience share for the 9pm peak
post-watershed slot) were hooked by the historical drama series City of
Vice set in 18th-century London – and particularly by its opening
sequence, in which a birds-eye-view camera travelled along the Thames
from east to west, passing the Tower of London, before sweeping inland
at St Pauls and continuing along Fleet Street to zoom down onto Covent
Garden market and nearby Bow Street. This opening sequence was
accompanied by a sombre cello, and the equally sombre narratorial voice
of actor Ian McDiarmid, cast as Henry Fielding, the celebrated
18th-century novelist and dramatist, but also (less widely known)
appointed in around 1748 as Magistrate of Westminster and Middlesex:
London’s chief magistrate. However, City of Vice – set, with precision,
in 1753 – established the Georgian capital for its viewers not by
manipulating aerial filmed footage of the real city, nor via use of
exterior location shots – but by filming John Rocque’s 1746 Map of
London (itself a cartographic feat which had taken 10 years to
complete), then using CGI techniques to bring Rocque’s map to
three-dimensional life. Both this opening sequence and the wider
dramatic and materialisation strategies used in each episode propelled
viewers through the drawn map(ped) streets, swooping aerially across the
virtual Georgian city to land at precise real locations where the 3D map
burns and fuses into the filmed live-action sequences of each week’s
narrative.
Produced by Touchpaper Television (a subsidiary of RDF Media) and Justin
Hardy’s company Hardy & Sons for Channel 4, directed by Hardy and Dan
Reed, and written by Clive Bradley and Peter Harness, with the social
and women’s historian Hallie Rubenhold as its historical advisor, City
of Vice’s subject was the struggle – spearheaded personally by Fielding
with his younger brother John Fielding (Iain Glen) (also a magistrate:
‘the blind beak of Bow Street’, blind since youth) – to give London its
tiny first police force, the Bow Street Runners. The Fieldings hoped,
idealistically, to bring peace and order to the brutal, chaotic,
crime-ridden capital: a place of grotesque inequality and constant
danger, made ‘monstrous’ by ‘commerce and trade’, where ‘everything was
available, at a price’ (Fielding in City of Vice, Episode 1). Moreover,
City of Vice’s storylines, as well as its overall conceit and historical
London topography, drew closely on primary historical sources and
documents: the Proceedings of the Old Bailey (at a date when the Old
Bailey Online project’s digitisation of these records for public access
was still a work in progress), the Newgate Calendar and Henry Fielding’s
own diaries/memoirs. In a further innovation, Channel 4 Education
commissioned an historically accurate interactive game counterpart to
the series, Bow Street Runner.
City of Vice ran for only one season, but it nonetheless remains a
significant, even unique, series meriting further attention: as a hybrid
experiment in fusing historical drama/crime drama, primary-sourced
factual London and criminal history, historical and digital mapping, and
CGI interactivity; and for its closely related solutions to the
particular problems of how to visualise, dramatise, materialise and
‘accurately’ represent historical Londons in television. Above all, City
of Vice sought ways to bring viewers ‘inside’ its virtual Georgian
London experientially, alongside its flawed and human narrator and the
beleagured Runners, as observers, witnesses – and, in the Bow Street
Runner game, fellow detectives – but never as tourists.
Claire Monk is Professor of Film & Film Culture at De Montfort
University, a founding member of DMU’s Cinema and Television History
Institute (CATHI) and Centre for Adaptations, and an (at least)
eighth-generation Londoner. Her field is the cultural, socio-political
and contextual understanding of British cinema and film culture since
the 1970s across contemporary and period representations, extending to
historical/history genres on TV. She is known particularly for her
contribution to the debates around ‘heritage’ and ‘post-heritage’
cinema, in work which re-directed attention onto questions of gender,
sexuality, class and pleasure. Her monograph Heritage Film Audiences (EUP,
2011) and follow-on publications brought the perspectives of audiences
and fans into these debates. Her wider work on British cinema spans the
politics – cultural, socio-economic, sexual and representational – of
the Thatcher and Blair eras; masculinities from the 1990s ‘underclass
film’ to the queer spectrum; the UK work of transnational directors (Pawlikowki,
Kaurismäki); socio-economic, historical, urban and regional geographies
and questions of place; and discourses of regeneration and decline. She
has published on TV and cinematic London in ‘London and contemporary
Britain in Monkey Dust’ (2007) and ‘“Where I come from, we eat places
like this for breakfast”’, on Kaurismäki’s I Hired a Contract Killer
(2009), both for the Journal of British Cinema and Television. Recent
publications include ‘EMI and the “pre-heritage” period film’, Journal
of British Cinema and Television (2021); ‘Maurice without ending: from
Forster’s palimpsest to fan-text’ in Sutton & Tsai (Eds)
Twenty-First-Century Readings of E. M. Forster’s ‘Maurice’ (Liverpool
UP, 2020, in paperback 2023); and ‘Pageantry and populism,
democratization and dissent: the forgotten 1970s’ in Upstairs and
Downstairs: British Costume Drama Television from The Forsyte Saga to
Downton Abbey, Leggott & Taddeo eds (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). The
BFI’s 2019 UK Blu-ray release of the 30th-anniversary restoration of
James Ivory’s classic LGBTQ film Maurice (1987) features Claire’s audio
commentary, acclaimed by The Arts Desk as ‘revelatory’. Her chapter on
‘the long shadow’ and long queer-cinematic provenance of 2018
Oscar-winner Ivory is in press (for 2023) in Williams & Lamberti (Eds)
Call Me by Your Name: Perspectives on the Film (Intellect).
4.30-4.50 – Break and Refreshments
4.50-5.50 – Keynote 2
Mapping Invisible Londons in the ABC decade
Charlotte Brunsdon
This paper will explore the way in which different types of
invisible London have been brought to greater visibility, or become
visible, in the recent period. Developing my previous work on London as
a television city, I will pursue the argument that the dominant,
internationally recognised image of London prior to the ABC decade
(Austerity-Brexit-Covid) has been in crisis since about 2010, and will
consider some of the new television Londons and the issues at stake
therein. While I will address some general questions about television
cities and television London in a streaming age, my main discussion will
be of two contrasted BBC series, McMafia (2017) and Uprising (2021),
which I will argue offer some contrasted possibilities for London’s
future.
Charlotte Brunsdon is author of London in Cinema (2007) and Television
Cities: Paris, London, Baltimore (2019) and has recently edited Stuart
Hall’s Writings on Media (2021). She taught for many years at the
University of Warwick and is a Fellow of the British Academy.
6:00-9:00 – Walking Tour
Day 2: 29 July 2022
9.30-10.00 – Registration and Refreshments
10.00-11.20 – Panel 1– Other Londons: Representation, Power and
Inequality
A Home in East London: mediating spatial inequality and
gentrification in contemporary television drama at the intersection of
local and global.
Anna Viola Sborgi
In this paper, I explore the crucial role of contemporary televisual
depictions of the home and housing in mediating the politics and
aesthetics of gentrification in East London. While the cinematic and
televisual East End has certainly a long history, as scholars like
Brunsdon (2007 and 2018) and Newland (2008) have demonstrated, and
contemporary depictions of the area are imbricated with its past
cultural representations, I want to focus in particular on three shows
that are explicitly concerned with the urban transformation of East
London as it has been unfolding in recent years: Channel 4 and Netflix’s
Top Boy (2011-2013 and 2019-present), Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum
(Channel 4, 2015-2017) and Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney’s Catastrophe
(2015-2019). In particular, I demonstrate how the process of urban
change accelerated by the 2012 Olympics and the increasing socioeconomic
inequality arising from it are played out specifically within the space
of home and housing in the mediated borough. Depicting different types
of housing – the council block, the townhouse, the apartment – the shows
I consider engage with often different ideas of property and home in a
rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood. These, in turn, intersect with issues
of inequality across gender, race and class lines and inform the
representation of East London as a strongly contested urban terrain,
where different categories of people fight for the right to housing and
to the city in a wider sense. While the competing ideas of home
refracted in the shows need to be situated within a specifically local
socioeconomic context – London’s real estate boom and the post-1980s
privatization of the British public housing stock – they also
participate in the transnational dynamics of the housing crisis, which
is local and global at the same time. This interplay between local and
global is reflected in the aesthetics of the shows but also further
demonstrated by their production and distribution histories. Streaming
on Netflix and Amazon Prime, representations of a gentrifying East
London reach multiple screens worldwide and assume new meanings for
their international audiences. While they clearly still engage with the
local at various levels – representation, location shooting, promotion,
development of local talent – these representations of the neighbourhood
on global screens necessarily lose some local specificity, in a process
of mainstreaming and commodification that, in many ways, is a facet of
gentrification itself. Moreover, I argue that, despite engaging at some
level with the borough’s earlier depiction as the poverty-stricken and
crime-ridden, working-class “other” to the West End, these shows
increasingly mediate the Eastern part of the city as a highly
transitional space, a site of convergence and global connectivity,
while, at the same, local struggles for home, belonging and
socioeconomic equality are reframed within a transnational geographical
and media landscape.
Dr Anna Viola Sborgi is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the
Department of Film and Screen Media, University College Cork Ireland.
Her current Horizon-2020-funded project, MEDIAHOMES: Housing Precarity
on Screen in Ireland, Portugal and the UK from the 2008 crisis to
COVID-19, investigates transnational mediations of housing inequality in
Europe, their production and circulation. She holds a PhD in Film
Studies (King’s College London) and a PhD in Comparative Literature
(University of Genoa). Her Film Studies PhD, ‘London’s Moving East’ –
Film, Television, and Gentrification, 1980 to the present, which she is
currently working on to develop into a monograph, investigated East
London’s spatial politics and the different ways in which the film and
media industries represent but also participate in the gentrification of
the area. She was previously Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the
University of Genoa, Italy, where she worked on a project on post-2000
representations of high-rise and tower-block living within the London
skyline. Recent publications include “Grenfell on Screen” in After
Grenfell: Violence, Resistance and Response (Pluto Press, 2019) and
“Housing Problems: Britain’s Housing Crisis and Documentary” in Cinema
of Crisis: Film and Contemporary Europe (EUP, July 2020). She is an
editorial board member at Mediapolis: a Journal of Cities and Culture
and co-chairs the Urbanism/Geography/Architecture Scholarly Interest
Group at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies.
The ‘other London’: Black Britain’s silently salient march from New
Cross to central London as represented in Blood Ah Go Run.
María Piqueras Pérez
When thinking of London, landmarks such as Big Ben, Tower Bridge, The
Tower of London, Hyde Park or even double-decker red buses come to mind.
However, there is much more beyond these places in London given that it
is a city with many faces, especially those hidden London places or
stories that do not come so quickly to the imagination when one thinks
of London but that are, at the same time, intrinsically linked to the
city and are part of its history. In 1981 after the New Cross fire took
place, the historically neglected Black British community reacted to the
years of forgetting on the part of mainstream Britain. After the fire,
on the 2nd of March 1981, the Black People’s Day of Action march took
place. It was an 8-hour long march starting in New Cross and finishing
in Hyde Park via Fleet Street – a metonym for the British National
Press. This peaceful march led by Black Britain disrupted with their
chants the silent London or mainstream London with many of the city’s
landmarks as a background.
Therefore, this paper aims at exploring ‘the other’ London, the London
that is not so easily accessible or overt and that is not the one which
mainstream cinema or TV would deal with. In other words, this paper will
deal with how the Black British community, living in ‘hidden London’ as
‘the other’ gained voice following the march of the Black People’s Day
of Action by referring to what this day signifies for the community with
London as a background. This objective will be achieved by using Menelik
Shabazz’s documentary Blood Ah Go Run (1982) as a tool of analysis where
images and video footage from the day of the march are present. The
first section of this paper will provide a context for the Black
People’s Day of Action concerning the importance of this happening for
the memory and struggle of black Britain showing London as linked to a
community or identity, Black Britishness. Then, in the following
section, the streets of London where the march happened will be
described and analysed as an example of ‘the trauma of the streets’ with
the aim of, as Guha states, “chart a certain imaginary of the city in
relation to another kind of figure, the Caribbean migrant or settler,
arriving in Britain at the end of the Empire” (2009). In the final
section, it will be argued how this march opened up a space for a hidden
part of a London community in the city taking into account the events
that followed the march such as the 1981 uprisings and the institutional
response to it given that after the uprisings numerous Workshops made up
of Afro-British filmmakers such as Ceddo, Sankofa or BAFC were
established and managed to set the record straight and challenge the
traditional representation of their communities, showing and recording
in this way London from the point of view of ‘the other’.
María Piqueras Pérez is a PhD candidate from the University of Murcia
(Spain). She is a recipient of a SENECA Foundation doctoral grant, given
by the regional office of Murcia for the promotion of science –
including the human sciences – and technology. In 2018 she graduated in
English Studies at the University of Murcia with an extraordinary
end-of-degree award. In 2019 she earned a Master’s degree on teaching
English as a foreign language at the same University together with an
award from the Rotary Club of Murcia given to talented Master’s degree
students. María’s current line of research is focused on the
Afro-British audiovisual culture from the Thatcher era to the end of the
century as explored through memory, identity, time and the avant-garde.
She’s specifically focusing on the production of independent black
filmmakers belonging to groups such as The Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC),
Sankofa and Ceddo. Some of her research interests range from cultural
studies, diaspora studies, memory, identity and post-colonialism to film
studies, space studies and (experimental) art. She has been a speaker at
several international conferences. She has also been a visiting
researcher at the University of Westminster (London) from September 2021
to January 2022. She is part of the research project Queer Temporalities
in Contemporary Anglophone Cultures (Literature, Cinema, and Video
Games) funded by the Spanish National Research Agency at the University
of Murcia.
Constructing London on Screen: Pinter, Places and Power
James A. Jarrett
Harold Pinter was one of the most celebrated playwrights of the
twentieth century, iconic and lionised for his many great, visionary
dramas, including The Birthday Party, The Homecoming, and No Man’s Land.
As a dramatist he was famous for his idiosyncratic ‘Absurdist’ style, so
called because his works seemed to contradict the playwriting
conventions of their day. Unlike the ‘angry young men’ of The Royal
Court, Pinter’s plays did not express his political views or the de-
rigueur polemics of the fashionable left-wing zeitgeist: he purported
that he wrote for no purpose other than to explore and articulate his
own peculiar, and frighteningly bleak, vision of the world. Moreover:
Pinter’s obsessive preoccupation with the corruption of language, as
well as the misuse of authority and brute power ‘uncover[ed] the
precipice under everyday prattle and force[d] entry into oppression’s
closed rooms’ (2005: Nobel Prize in Literature).
Pinter was born in London, and he lived in the city all his life, apart
from a brief period residing in the seaside town of Worthing. As Peter
Raby has pointed out, ‘Pinter is, among other things, the dramatist of
the city, and specifically, of London’ (Raby, 61), and many of his most
celebrated works were set in the capital. Even in his dramas situated in
other places or locales, the charismatic pull of the capital is present.
Those who are not in London have often escaped from the city and are in
exile; those who are in London often betray deeply disturbed and
ambivalent feelings about living in such a human jungle. This paper at
the TV Londons conference will examine how the many faces of London are
represented, imagined, and re-imagined in the screen productions of
Pinter plays, exploring how directors convey and express Pinter’s
changing vision of the city and its power dynamics through the subtle
interplay language, frame, performance, music, and sound.
Raby, P. (ed). 2001. The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dr James A. Jarrett was educated at De Montfort University, Cardiff
University and at the University of Essex, where he was awarded a
master’s degree and a PhD for a thesis in contemporary theatre and
psychoanalysis under the supervision of the playwright Jonathan
Lichtenstein. Dr Jarrett worked as a performer, before returning to
education to lecture in theatre and the performing arts. He has taught
at the University of Essex and at University Centre Colchester, where he
was the first programme director of the innovative Bachelor of Arts
honours degree programme in acting.
Dr Jarrett is an expert on Harold Pinter, and has presented papers on
theatre, performance, acting, film, and culture to conferences at
University College London, and at Essex, Bristol, Middlesex, and Leeds
Universities. His latest publications include essays in George Orwell
Studies, The Pinter Review and Performing Ethos. He is currently
preparing articles for publication in Contemporary Theatre Review as
well as a range of research as practice projects.
11.20-11.35 Break
11.35-12.55 Panel 2 – London from Abroad
Diaspora representations of London in the Polish TV
series “Londoners”
Alicja Kisielewska
The object of reflection in my paper will be London as a place where
the young Polish immigrants started to settle in the first decade of the
twenty-first century. I will take a closer look at the representations
of London on the Polish television, based on a very popular drama series
Londyńczycy (Londoners) aired on public television (TVP1, 2008-2009, 2
series). The drama was also broadcast on public television in Sweden and
Latvia. I will discuss the “London discourse” of the series, that is the
sets of drama locations selected by the creators of the TV series to
reflect the immigrant mapping of London. The story about London as a
significant place in the lives of TV series characters is made up of
narratives focused around such spaces as Soho, Ealing, City, Canary
Wharf and the West End. I will try to demonstrate how the choice of
locations and architectural sites presented in the drama series is used
to represent London, which has been a sort of “promised land” for the
Polish immigrants. This will allow me to consider how London as a space
and place has an effect on creating the cultural identity of characters,
and at the same time the cultural identity of the Polish diaspora in
London. Moreover, the presented conclusions will be a contribution to a
broader analysis of the modes of representing London in television
content produced outside Britain.
Alicja Kisielewska, PhD is an associate professor at the University of
Białystok (Poland), director of the University’s Institute of Cultural
Studies, and an expert in media and culture. Her work involves media
anthropology and semiotics. She is the author of the following
monographs: Film w twórczości Andrzeja Struga [Film in Andrzej Strug’s
Works] (Białystok 1998), Polskie tele-sagi – mitologie rodzinności
[Polish Tele-Sagas—Mythologies of Family] (Kraków 2009), and
Antropologia telewizji. Telewizja w życiu codziennym w Polsce [The
Anthropology of Television: The Television in Polish Daily Life] (Białystok
2021).
"Now I'm Ready to Conquer the World!" Intercultural Dialogism, Contested
Epistemologies and Multiple Londons in the Israeli sitcom Pini
Gilad Padva, Tel Aviv University
London has been depicted extensively on Israeli television, cinema,
literature, journalism and pop music, in part due to its centrality in
Israeli travelling prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, the popularity of the
English language in globalized Israel and its impact on modern Hebrew,
the mythicized English manners and politeness, the alluring British
Royalty, and nostalgic memorization of the 1917-1947 British Mandate in
Palestine. This research initially analyzes the Israeli sitcom Pini
(2010) that centers on a young bearish Israeli cook who clumsily paves
his way in London's culinary scene, maintaining a hilariously failed
intercultural friendship with his refined Welsh male flatmate, and
gauchely developing a romantic relationship with the roommate's
beautiful French cousin. This series hyper-stereotypically formulates
the Israeli protagonist as an uneducated, unsophisticated, unreverent
and vulgarly straightforward young man. In contrast, the Londoners are
depicted on this screen as mostly refined, civilized, polite and
organized yet uncreative, conventional and boring persons. Pini's London
is screened primarily as a ludicrously naïve playground that the Israeli
protagonist forces himself upon it with his vulgar machismo and,
particularly, his awkward literal translation of Hebrew slang
expressions to English. Concomitantly, Pini’s London is iconized,
beautified, parodied, ironized and mocked through Pini's and the
presumed Israeli audience’s stereotyping eyes. The comic intercultural
dialogism between the Israeli protagonist and his British roommate is
located in their typical middle-class apartment in a red-brick building
by the canal as well as in London's spacious parks, Russell Square, bars
and galleries. The series’ episodes are interspersed with shots of
Camden market, Leicester Square, Piccadilly Circus and other sites that
address London's iconic status in the Israeli viewers' mind. Thus, Pini
presents a dynamic dialog between London's iconicity and mundanity,
symbolism and everydayness, domesticity and urbanity, subtleties and
bluntness, structuredness and exuberance, multiculturalism and
interethnic tensions. This televisual description of London as a
Babylonian cultural arena is based on comically failed dialogism and
grotesque interrelations between contested cultures, masculinities,
epistemologies, aesthetics and ethics. The comic interactions between
the London residents in Pini echo Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of dialogism
based on the primacy of the social, and Bakhtin's assumption that all
meaning is achieved by interpersonal and intercultural struggles. Yet
Pini's dialogism is ultimately an epistemology founded on loopholes that
endlessly yield grotesque failures with surprising consequences.
Concomitantly, Pini’s dialogism is an epistemological framework for
multiplied, heterogenous sociocultural Londons with their own semiotics,
cognitions, communications, discourses, and consciousness. Notably, Pini
embodies multiplied heterotopias. Whereas the main cultural divide in
Pini is between the lowlife Israeli cook and the civilized London
locals, the city is also shown through the eyes of black Britons as well
as the white French cousin of Pini's roommate. Every one of them lives
in her/his own London, in a way, which is characterized by different
emotional landscapes, imageries, peculiarities, style and aesthetics.
This sitcom features contested Londons which are constructed according
to each character's ethnic, racial, social and cultural background and
represents a different kind of a London state of mind.
Dr Gilad Padva is a scholar and lecturer in cultural studies, film and
television studies, men's studies and queer theory. He has published the
books Straight Skin, Gay Masks and Pretending to Be Gay on Screen (2020)
and Queer Nostalgia in Cinema and Pop Culture (2014), and he co-edited
international volumes: Sensational Pleasures in Cinema, Literature and
Visual Culture: The Phallic Eye (2014), Intimate Relationships in
Cinema, Literature and Visual Culture (2017), and Leisure and Cultural
Change in Israeli Society (2020). He published numerous essays in
peer-reviewed journals, e.g. Cinema Journal, Social Semiotics, Feminist
Media Studies, Sexualities and Film Criticism. He also wrote chapters
for edited volumes, e.g. Israeli Television: Global Contexts, Local
Visions, Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion, Corporeal Inscriptions:
Representations of the Body in Cultural and Literary Texts and
Practices, and Cinematic Queerness: Gay and Lesbian Hypervisibility in
Contemporary Francophone Feature Films. He wrote about Youth and
Educators in Films for Youth, Education, and Sexualities: An
International Encyclopedia (2005); he wrote entries about Gregg Araki,
Simcha Sandi Dubowski, Harey Forbes Fierstein, Eytan Fox, Amos Guttman,
Keith Haring, queer filmmaking in Israel, Pierre et Gilles, sissy, and
Rose Troche for the Routledge International Encyclopedia of Queer
Culture: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transsexual Contemporary Cultures
(2005); he wrote about Dress, Fashion and Clothing in Routledge
International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities (2007); and he wrote
about Cinema for The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Love, Courtship, and
Sexuality through History (2008). Dr. Gilad Padva currently works for
the Women and Gender Studies Programme at Tel Aviv University, Israel,
where he teaches a course about men and masculinities in popular media.
He also works for the Department of Behavioral Sciences at Ruppin
Academic Centre where he teaches a course about sexual and gender
identities in popular culture and a course about media and communication
studies.
‘At this Wembley. The One that Freddie Mercury Never
Stepped Foot In’ – Ted Lasso’s London
Sabrina Mittermeier
Unfortunately, Dr. Mittermeier is no longer able to attend the
conference.
The Apple+ dramedy Ted Lasso (2020-) centers on the fictional
Premier League football club A.F.C. Richmond and its American coach, the
titular Ted Lasso. It thus zooms in on an integral part of British
culture, showing us football stadiums, locker rooms, fans watching in
pubs, pundits on TV. A consciousness of class and race intersects it
all, moving from the working-class background of fans, but also star
players, to the upper-class lives they lead now, particularly focusing
on masculinities and father-son dynamics as they play out in a
contemporary UK. The show anchors it all in a London that often blurs
real-life and fiction: the British-American writers’ room and crew
constantly cite other texts of popular culture, not just in dialogue,
but also in cinematography and the show’s soundtrack. Richard Curtis’s
work looms particularly large, such as in the second season’s Love
Actually (2003)-inspired Christmas episode, but also in an overall
consciousness of rom-com tradition(s) that borrow from film cultures on
both sides of the Atlantic.
Ted Lasso films on set in the local West London Film Studios and on
location in Richmond, tapping into a more authentic Britain, but also
using more stereotypically London signifiers to translate to the
American, and international, audience: the red phone booth in Richmond,
Tower Bridge in the show’s pilot, Wembley Stadium in a key episode. Ted
as a titular character often serves as the lens to introduce the
audience to London and the English, a fish out of water in a country
more foreign to him than expected.
As the show has become a pandemic success story, it also has turned
Richmond into a site of fan tourism, adding another layer to the
relevance of London as a location. My paper wants to explore the ways
Ted Lasso uses London strategically to portray British culture(s) to a
variety of audiences, using the tools of television and fan (tourism)
studies.
Dr Sabrina Mittermeier is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in
British and North American History at the University of Kassel, Germany.
She is the author of A Cultural History of the Disneyland Theme Parks –
Middle-Class Kingdoms (Intellect/U Chicago P 2021), the (co-)editor of
Fighting for the Future – Essays on Star Trek: Discovery (Liverpool UP
2020), The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek (2022), and Fan Phenomena:
Disney (2022). Her research on theme parks, fan tourism, film and
television has also been published in several volumes and journals, such
as the Journal of Popular Culture, Queer Studies in Media and Popular
Culture, and Science Fiction Film and Television. She’s currently
working on a second book on “Unmade Queer Television” and plans on
hosting a podcast on the television series Ted Lasso in 2022.
12.55-2.00 – Lunch
2.00-3.20 Panel 3 – Heritage Londons
Ripp[er]ed from the Headlines? Ripper Street’s
Multicultural London
Melissa Beattie [TEAMS]
‘The world comes to London and London becomes the world’ (4.6). So
says occasional antagonist Inspector Constantine of the Special Branch,
in a most unhappy tone. Series protagonists Reid, Drake and expatriate
of postcolonial-America Jackson, however, often express tolerance and
inclusiveness with regard to the denizens of their multicultural
Whitechapel. Though there has been some work on the series such as
Weissmann (2014) on the series’ transnational aesthetics, Williams
(2016) on the series as Gothic crime drama the primary foci have been on
class (Babilas 2017) and gender representation (Meldrum 2015) the
series’ portrayal of a complicated, postcolonial and multicultural
London that is both corrupter and corrupt during the late nineteenth
century has not been an explicit focus. In this paper, I shall analyse
how this portrayal intersects with contemporary British discourses
surrounding its colonial history, immigration and multiculturalism.
Ireland, then part of the British Empire, and the London Irish are main
foci of the series (which was shot in Ireland), as are Jewish and Romany
refugees; Hong Kong and the British Raj and their positions within the
Empire are also addressed in episodes with specific allegories to
contemporary events (e.g., escalating anti-immigrant and Islamophobic
sentiment in the time of and subsequent to Brexit, e.g., Nowicka 2018,
Creighton and Jamal 2020).
Though the series’ pro-multiculturalism stance is clear – and can be
tied to the BBC as a public service broadcaster (PSB) – this does not
mean that the portrayals are not problematic. In particular, the
connection of Chinese immigrants with opium and the complexities
surrounding (Northern) Irish arms dealer and anti-imperialist Theodore
Swift shall be analysed. Also to be discussed (and building to some
degree on Weissmann 2014) is the position of the US as represented by
Captain Jackson (as well as occasional guest characters). Though one can
argue that his presence is both an industrial (cf Weissmann 2012, 2014
and Hilmes 2014, inter multa alia on international co-productions) and
textual necessity – i.e., an early mislead, as two Americans, one a
doctor, were suspected of being Jack the Ripper (Begg 2013) – the
character being continually referred to by nationality rather than by
name and often as a possession of Inspectors Reid and/or Drake can be
read as reinforcing not just a ‘special relationship’ but also the US’s
complicated status as an early postcolonial state.
Babilas, D. (2017). ‘Edmund Reid and the Representation of the Middle
Class in Ripper Street,’ in L. Krawczyk-Żywko (ed.), Victorian
Detectives in Contemporary Culture: Beyond Sherlock Holmes. Houndmills:
Palgrave. 43-56.
Begg, P. (2013). Jack the Ripper: The Definitive History. London:
Routledge.
Creighton, M.J. & Jamal, A.A. (2020). ‘An Overstated Welcome: Brexit and
Intentionally Masked Anti-Immigrant Sentiment in the UK,’ Journal of
Ethnic and Migration Studies, 1-22.
Hilmes, M. (2014). 'Transnational TV: What Do We Mean by
“Co-Production,” Anymore?' Media Industries Journal. Vol 2.
Meldrum, C. (2015). ‘Yesterday's Women: The Female Presence in
NeoVictorian Television Detective Programs,’ Journal of Popular Film and
Television, 43:4, 201-211.
Nowicka, M. (2018) ‘Cultural Precarity: Migrants’ Positionalities in the
Light of Current Anti-immigrant Populism in Europe,’ Journal of
Intercultural Studies, 39:5, 527-542.
Weissmann, E. (2012). Transnational Television Drama: Special Relations
and Mutual Influence Between the US and UK. Houndmills: Palgrave
MacMillan.
Weissmann, E. (2014). ‘Exploring the Wild, Wild East,’ in S. Eichner
(ed.), Fernsehen: Europaeische Perspektiven. Festschrift Prof. Dr.
Lothar Mikos, Konstanz und Muenchen: UVK, 107-120.
Williams, R. (2016). ‘Walking Whitechapel: Ripper Street, Whitechapel,
and Place in the Gothic Crime Drama,’ in R. McElroy (ed), Contemporary
British Television Crime Drama. London: Routledge.
Dr Melissa Beattie was awarded a PhD in Theatre, Film and TV Studies
from Aberystwyth University where she studied Torchwood and national
identity through fan/audience research as well as textual analysis. She
has published and presented several papers relating to transnational
television, audience research and/or national identity. She has worked
at universities in the US, Korea, Pakistan and Armenia. She can be
contacted at tritogeneia@aol.com
Invisible Design: Invention & Emotion in The Crown
Jane Barnwell
The Crown tells the story of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign, showing the
personal and political dramas behind the scenes. The show stitches
together a portfolio of locations and set builds to create the illusion
of a coherent world. In reality Buckingham Palace is quite fragmented
whereas the design for the show creates a continuity of space that helps
generate a coherent grammar so that the world becomes one. The
production designer Martin Childs says,
‘My sets look as much like the real thing as Claire Foy looks like the
Queen. I always want my work not to be visible but to be inevitable so
that the audience looks at it and accepts it without question. Part of
that is keeping tied together several different locations.’
(Author interview, 2019)
Childs says the concepts evolve with each block as there are four
different directors every season who have a different vision while
respecting what has already been established. Using biography, history,
film and a bit of emotional research Childs attempts to ‘get to the
truth that is other than the facts’. For example, the Royal couple’s
Buckingham Palace bedroom constructs a central motif for the show in the
deliberate choice of architecture, that utilises an enfilade design
rather than that of more regular corridors. A subtle sense of distance
is achieved while also connecting the two adjoining rooms through
doorways. The absence of Philip when he is on tour becomes a presence in
the bedrooms, the doors are open and we can see his empty bed. The
personal moments that take place in private spaces elegantly convey the
narrative through settings that appear to live and breathe.
Childs takes real life and gently adjusts it according to the character
and narrative development required for the show. Usually, a character’s
domestic setting reveals personality, however in this instance there is
a disconnect between the Queen and her home. The design works to
indicate the lack of self-expression available to the Queen as she
becomes part of the establishment. She inherits her father, the King’s
bedroom for example (in season 1) which is architecturally unchanged but
painted pink rather than blue as a nod to feminising a room that used to
smell of cigar and cigarette smoke according to Childs. Thus, although
superficial surface decoration is altered to accommodate the newcomer
the fundamental structure remains intact echoing the immutability of the
establishment.
Dr Jane Barnwell is Reader in Moving Image at the University of
Westminster. Graduating from Leeds University and The Northern Film
School she began her career at the BBC, before working freelance in
production. She has worked on the ideation and production of film and
cultural events in a range of venues including, the V&A, the Museum of
London, BAFTA, Regent Street Cinema, Truman Brewery, the Women’s
Library, ICA, Rich Mix and the Unicorn Theatre.
Jane has published articles for journals and periodicals including, The
Guardian, The Scenographer, International Journal of Production &
Costume Design, Journal of British Cinema and Television, The
Conversation, Widescreen and The Production Designers Collective. She
has authored books including Production Design for Screen; Visual
Storytelling in Film and TV (2017, Bloomsbury), Production Design:
Architects of the screen (2004, Columbia University Press) and The
Fundamentals of Film Making (2008, AVA publishing). Jane’s latest
publication explores the significance of the design of the home on
screen, Production Design & the Cinematic Home, Palgrave Macmillan,
2022.
The Architecture of Misfits, Top Boys & Bodyguards:
Exploring the Significance of London’s Brutalist Architecture in
Twenty-First Century British Television
Jonny Smith
This paper will examine representations of Brutalism, a post-war
architecture defined by exposed rough concrete and bold, confrontational
forms, in relation to London-set twenty-first century British
television. Despite falling out of favour during the 1980s with the
advent of neoliberal Thatcherite politics and a shift to Postmodernist
architectural styles, Brutalism has enjoyed a renaissance in Britain
over the past twenty years as a source of cultural fascination. During
this period Brutalism has become a significant presence in British
screen culture, particularly on television through such programmes as
Misfits (2009-2013), Top Boy (2011-), The Bodyguard (2018), Save Me
(2018-2020), The Informer (2018), Angela Black (2021) and The Tower
(2021). Crucially all these productions are situated within London which
highlights the symbiotic relationship Brutalism has with the Capital in
simultaneously constructing both as on-screen entities.
This paper will then examine the contours of this relationship between
Brutalism and London in British television, building on Charlotte
Brunsdon’s research into the ‘construction of place-that-is-London’
on-screen (2007: 8) as well as the ‘hegemonic discourse of location’
that is London (23). This paper will argue there are three consistent
trends that have come to define this relationship. Firstly, that
Brutalism’s recent television appearances, predominantly in the form of
housing estates, are reflective of wider cultural trends whereby the
architectural style functions as a ‘environmentally deterministic’ (Nwonka,
2017) reassurance to neoliberal politics – often reinforcing notions of
inherent criminality within a racial and working-class homogeneity.
Secondly, that Brutalism has grown to become a shorthand space for
visually identifying London on-screen – a new ‘landmark London’ – which
brings its own voyeuristic pleasure as a space of ‘the other’ and as a
sought-after private commodity. Finally, the paper will examine how
fantasy-comedy Misfits and drama-thriller Save Me challenge Brutalism’s
negative, deterministic conception under neoliberal politics by
entertaining fantastical, communal and collective possibilities within
the architectural space. This paper then finds Brutalism as not just
crucial architectural space in visualising London on-screen, but central
to narrative explorations of race, social exclusion, class and housing
policy in British television.
Brunsdon, C. (2007), London in Cinema: The Cinematic City Since 1945,
London, BFI.
Jonny Smith is currently a researcher and teaching assistant at the
University of Manchester, where in April he completed his AHRC funded
PhD in Film Studies. His thesis, titled ‘Nasty, Brutish & Tall: The
Utilisation & Representation of Brutalist Architecture in British Cinema
Post 1970’, builds on a broader interest in British Cinema,
representations of place and architecture, as well as their intersection
with issues of class, power and national identity
3.20-3.40 – Break and Refreshments
3.40-4.40 – Industry Panel
Nathaniel J Hall
Nathaniel Hall is an award-winning actor, writer and HIV activist,
known for his HIV stigma-smashing solo-show First Time about his
experience of growing up HIV+ after diagnosis at 16. First Time has
enjoyed audience and critical success alike and Nathaniel’s story has
reached millions through broadcast, media and print. Nathaniel appeared
as Donald Bassett in It’s A Sin, the hit C4 drama about HIV/AIDS in
1980s Britain. His community-led creative activism has been covered
extensively by the UK’s media including Good Morning Britain, Lorraine,
Channel 4 News, BBC News and BBC Breakfast. He is Co-Artistic Director
of Dibby Theatre, an award-winning LGBTQ-led theatre company from
Manchester. Nathaniel's next show is called Toxic and will premiere in
Manchester in 2023 before touring the UK.
June Hudson
June Hudson is a designer, artist, teacher and actress who has
worked extensively as a costume designer for film and television. June
started her career as a costume designer at ATV Studios, moving to the
BBC in the mid-1960s. At the BBC, she was responsible for programmes as
diverse as Are You Being Served (1972-1985), Blake’s 7 (1978-1981) and
many costume dramas including Dickens and Shakespeare adaptations. June
was principal costume designer during the development of EastEnders
(1985-present) and had the task of setting up an entire new wardrobe
department at BBC Elstree and establishing the look of the show’s
extensive cast of characters. More recently June has moved into
teaching, as Lossett Visiting Scholar at the University of Redlands in
California.
Lindsay Siviter
Lindsay is an historical researcher, consultant and London tour
guide who has worked extensively in museums and archives in London
including for several years in The Crime Museum, New Scotland Yard. As a
freelance historical researcher and consultant she has assisted on many
projects, having written and contributed to books and articles on a
variety of subjects from Egyptology to Espionage. As an historical
adviser and consultant to many companies including the Museum of London
and the BBC, she has also appeared in over twenty television
documentaries globally on Jack the Ripper and continues to be invited to
work on true crime projects. She is also the owner of the Siviter True
Crime Library and Archive, which contains around 5000 true crime books,
journals, documents, research papers, audio visual material and relics
connected to true crime cases.
4.40-5.00 – Closing Remarks
5.00-7.00 – Joint Book Launch
Chris Hogg, Adapting Television Drama: Theory & Industry (Palgrave,
2021)
Jane Barnwell, Production Design & the Cinematic Home (Palgrave, 2022)
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