STUDIES IN CULTURE AND COMMUNICATIONGeneral Editor: John Fiske

UNDERSTANDING TELEVISION

IN THE SAME SERIESIntroduction to Communication Studies John Fiske

Understanding News John Hartley

Advertising as Communication Gillian Dyer

Case Studies and Projects in Communication Neil McKeown

Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies TimO’Sullivan, John Hartley, Danny Saunders,Martin Montgomery and John Fiske

An Introduction to Language and Society Martin Montgomery

Popular Culture: The metropolitan experience Iain Chambers

Understanding Radio Andrew Crisell

Television Drama: Agency, audience and myth John Tulloch

On Video Roy Armes

Film as Social Practice Graeme Turner

A Primer For Daily Life Susan Willis

The Ideological Octopus: An exploration of television and itsaudience Justin Lewis

Textual Poachers: Televison fans and participatory culture HenryJenkins

Communications and the ‘Third World’ Geoffrey Reeves

UNDERSTANDINGTELEVISION

Edited by

Andrew Goodwinand

Garry Whannel

ROUTLEDGE • LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 1990by Routledge

11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.

“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis orRoutledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to

www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canadaby Routledge

29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

© 1990 Andrew Goodwin and Garry Whannel

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproducedor utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in

writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 0-203-97625-8 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-01672-X (Print Edition)

CONTENTS

List of contributors vii

General editor’s preface viii

Introduction 1

1 Public service broadcasting: the history of aconceptPaddy Scannell

11

2 A suitable schedule for the familyRichard Paterson

30

3 TV news: striking the right balance?Andrew Goodwin

42

4 Points of viewRosalind Brunt

60

5 F For Fake? Friction over factionPaul Kerr

75

6 Box pop: popular television and hegemonyMichael O’Shaughnessy

90

7 Winner takes all: competitionGarry Whannel

105

8 Gendered fictionsVerina Glaessner

118

9 Only when I laughMick Bowes

131

10 Television and black BritonsJohn Tulloch

144

11 Are you receiving me?Justin Lewis

157

Andrew Goodwin and Garry Whannel

12 Today’s television, tomorrow’s worldPatrick Hughes

170

Index 188

vi

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Mick Bowes is Vice Principal of Chelmsford Adult EducationInstitute and is actively involved in a number of communitymedia projects.Rosalind Brunt teaches Mass Communication and Women’sStudies at Sheffield City Polytechnic. She is also the Director ofthe Centre for Popular Culture, based at the Polytechnic, and ison the editorial board of Marxism Today.Verina Glaessner is a freelance journalist and critic.Andrew Goodwin is a lecturer in the Department of BroadcastCommunication Arts, San Francisco State University.Patrick Hughes teaches Communications and Journalism atWarrnambool Institute of Advanced Education in Australia.Paul Kerr is a producer on Channel Four’s weekly series TheMedia Show.Justin Lewis teaches at the Department of Communications atthe University of Massachussets.Michael O’Shaughnessy is a lecturer in Film and TV Studies atLeicester Polytechnic.Richard Paterson is the Head of the Television Unit at theBritish Film Institute. Paddy Scannell is a senior lecturer at the Polytechnic of CentralLondon and an editor of the journal Media, Culture and Society.John Tulloch is Principal Lecturer in Journalism in the Facultyof Communication, Polytechnic of Central London.Garry Whannel is a writer and researcher specializing intelevision and sport.

GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE

This series of books on different aspects of communication isdesigned to meet the needs of the growing number of studentscoming to study this subject for the first time. The authors areexperienced teachers or lecturers who are committed to bridgingthe gap between the huge body of research available to the moreadvanced student, and what the new student actually needs to gethim started on his studies.

Probably the most characteristic feature of communication is itsdiversity: it ranges from the mass media and popular culture,through language to individual and social behaviour. But itidentifies links and a coherence within this diversity. The serieswill reflect the structure of its subject. Some books will be general,basic works that seek to establish theories and methods of studyapplicable to a wide range of material; others will apply thesetheories and methods to the study of one particular topic. Buteven these topic-centred books will relate to each other, as well asto the more general ones. One particular topic, such asadvertising or news or language, can only be understood as anexample of communication when it is related to, and differentiatedfrom, all the other topics that go to make up this diverse subject.

The series, then, has two main aims, both closely connected.The first is to introduce readers to the most important results ofcontemporary research into communication together with thetheories that seek to explain it. The second is to equip them withappropriate methods of study and investigation which they will beable to apply directly to their everyday experience ofcommunication.

If readers can write better essays, produce better projects andpass more exams as a result of reading these books I shall be verysatisfied; but if they gain a new insight into how communicationshapes and informs our social life, how it articulates and createsour experience of industrial society, then I shall be delighted.Communication is too often taken for granted when it should betaken to pieces.

John Fiske

ix

INTRODUCTIONAndrew Goodwin and Garry Whannel

The study of television in our society takes place at poles that arealmost comic in their extremes. In our daily lives, television isconstantly ‘studied’—in the popular press, on buses and trains, inour kitchens and living rooms, on the radio, and in every sphereof our lives where conversation occurs. This study of television isusually anecdotal, sometimes self-conscious, and nearly alwaysatheoretical. At the other extreme there has grown up over the lasttwo decades a body of academic theories and concepts that can beapplied to television. Dozens of books and journals now publishanalyses of television deriving from sociology, Marxism, semiotics,structuralism, feminism, linguistics, psychoanalysis, andpostmodern theory. In the yawning gap between these two kindsof study, TV criticism in newspapers and magazines is the onlyroutinely published analysis of television. Yet that work remainslittle more than gossip in five syllables, or, in the case of thetabloids, monosyllabic gossip. TV criticism offers little help inunderstanding television as long as it is primarily a forum forwriters to air personal opinions, unhindered by any need to grasptwentieth-century cultural theory.

Meanwhile, teachers and students pick up the threads of theseanalyses (from ‘did you hear what Sheila said to Rick last night?’to ‘is Brookside a realist text?’) and attempt to cope with the factthat there is so little published material about television that isaccessible to students who are relative strangers in the world oftheory and the practice of analysing popular culture. It is for thosestudents and teachers that this book is written. It arose from theexperience that all the contributors share, of teaching abouttelevision at introductory levels, in adult education and toundergraduates. Many of the authors taught on the Universityof London’s Certificate in Television Studies, started by theDepartment of Extra-Mural Studies in 1978. Those of us whotaught (and still teach) these classes were struck by the absence

of any single text that could be used to introduce new students tothe history, social context, and textual interpretation of television.

This book attempts to fulfil that role, by gathering togethershort, accessible essays that encapsulate the main issues at stakein contemporary British television. In doing this, the authors alldraw on a large body of theory and empirical work developed overthe last twenty years.

The study of television has its genesis in a number of disciplines(see Cook and Hillier 1976). As early as the 1940s sociologists hadbegun to ponder the effects of the new medium—this wasespecially so in the United States, where the analysis of newmedia was less hindered than in Europe by assumptions aboutthe aesthetic superiority of older cultural forms. Sociology hascontinued to study television, lodging a particular stake in theanalysis of its audience, through ‘effects’ studies, the ‘uses andgratifications’ school of research, and later attempts to refinethese approaches and perhaps even combine them with ideas fromother text-based kinds of work.

The other early input into television study was literary andcultural criticism. By the 1950s a diverse body of work had grownup that is often collected under the rubric ‘cultural pessimism’,due to the largely negative interpretations produced in most of itsstudies, which tended to see mass culture (including television) asa problem. In the USA this school united Marxists aligned with theFrankfurt School with neo-conservatives like Dwight MacDonaldand Daniel Bell. (It lives on in the work of contemporary critics oftelevision, such as Neil Postman and Jerry Mander.) In Britaincultural pessimism was mainly associated with the work ofliterary critic F.R.Leavis, and the Leavisites, who expended a lot ofenergy in the pursuit of ‘discrimination’—that is, the ability to sortthe wheat from chaff, to make cultural judgements informed bythe ‘correct’ aesthetic and moral criteria.

In Britain in the 1970s the study of television underwent somedramatic changes, and it is this shift that forms the conceptualunderpinning of this book. Drawing on a vast body of culturaltheory (much of it imported from the Continent), television studies(like film studies) began to engage with concepts which subsumedthe questions of personal taste discussed in TV criticism andwhich went beyond the cultivation of ‘discrimination’. The study ofthe social context of television institutions was developed morefully in some early sociological (Burns 1977), historical (Williams1974; Briggs 1979), and political economic (Murdock and Golding1977; Garnham 1978) work on the medium. This analysis wasframed by new, broader questions about ideology, economic

2 INTRODUCTION

power, and social legitimation. The study of the televisionaudience was wrenched from an obsession with ‘effects’ andbecame more concerned with the altogether more complexquestion of how audiences make meanings out of TV ‘texts’ (Fiskeand Hartley 1979; Hall 1980). The use of the word ‘text’, alongwith terms like ‘code’ and ‘mode of address’, derived from theintroduction of a new field of study— semiotics, the science ofsigns. If semiotics didn’t magically ‘solve’ the problem ofinterpretation by offering a complete science of meaning, itcertainly did bring with it tools for the analysis of culture thatwere considerably more refined and relevant than those of literarycriticism or sociology.

This development of media theory and cultural analysisproduced new interpretations of cinema, pop music, youthsubcultures, fashion, advertising, and sport. And it transformedthe study of television. Many of the new concepts in televisionstudies derived from or owed something to the theoretical workdone in film studies. And so it was no surprise to find that theBritish Film Institute played an important role in the developmentof the study of television, through conferences, publications, andinvolvement in teaching. The Society for Education in Film andTelevision (SEFT) was another focus for the cross-fertilization ofcinema and TV, and their journals Screen and Screen Educationpublished much of the important work that constituted the ‘new’analysis of TV.

A number of institutions of higher education also contributed tothis new approach. Birmingham University’s Centre forContemporary Cultural Studies (under the directorship of RichardHoggart, and then Stuart Hall) played a pioneering role inintroducing theoretical approaches from France, Italy, andGermany to British audiences. Its journal Working Papers inCultural Studies published some important contributions to TVtheory, including Umberto Eco’s seminal attempt to begin thesemiotic study of TV, ‘Towards a semiotic inquiry into thetelevision message’. Other institutions (such as the School ofCommunication at the Polytechnic of Central London andLeicester University’s Centre for Mass Communication Research)taught about television from these new critical perspectives.

Thereafter the study of television and the media developedlargely in higher education, and in many cases only atpostgraduate level. In this rarefied atmosphere the attempt to offerpopular or accessible analysis was usually of secondary concern.The difficult business of making this material more accessible wasoften left to hard-pressed teachers who boned up on the latest

UNDERSTANDING TELEVISION 3

theories in Screen, or on a BFI weekend school, and thenattempted to translate them back into language that could beunderstood by the uninitiated. Media theory was hard to tackle,both because its terms could often seem obfuscating, and becauseit was genuinely and necessarily complex. Its meaning could not beunderstood in relation to theories of ideology without engagingsome extremely complicated debates. Its texts could not beunpacked without the resort to some difficult new methodologies.New terms entered the lexicon of the scholar of television: genre,mode of address, metaphor, metonymy, realism, naturalism,ideology, hegemony, code, convention, polysemy…and so on. (Onetask of this book is to explain some of these terms to students newto this field.)

There is no doubt that the task of making this body of workaccessible is a difficult one. This has been a special problem forthose of us teaching in adult education. But if academics arecorrect to complain that most TV critics are less interested intelevision than they are in their own writing careers, it must alsobe said that the academy could do a little more to popularizeitself. Outside the United Kingdom it isn’t so unusual for theoriststo publish TV and cultural criticism in newspapers and popularpublications. In Britain, the gulf between the theoretical and theaccessible is especially wide. Apart from occasional contributionsto the pages of the Listener, New Socialist, Marxism Today, and theNew Statesman and Society (where a number of our contributorswrite from time to time), most TV studies analysis has gone on inrelatively obscure journals. Despite the efforts of the BFI andothers (the Comedia publishing house, for instance—see Root1986) to make accessible texts and new teaching materialsavailable, this book is one of the first introductory texts abouttelevision that offers a broad view of institutions, texts, andaudiences (see also Masterman 1985; Clarke 1987; Alvarado,Gutch, and Wollen 1987).

One problem that might explain the delay in ‘cashing in’ theadvances of the 1970s is that those developments remainextremely uneven. They range from relatively prosaic efforts toundertake sociological studies of television through to wordyengagements with the outer conceptual reaches of psychoanalytictheory. And many of these theoretical advances remain as yetunconsolidated. One perhaps necessary side-effect of theexplosion of cultural theory in the 1970s was a tendency for mediaanalysis to latch onto new ideas in an almost ephemeral fashionthat resembled television more closely than scholarship. Studentsof television grappled with the implications of, say, the

4 INTRODUCTION

structuralist analysis of Louis Althusser…only to discover that theacademy went ‘poststructuralist’ that very same week. Newtheories of ideology and culture often seemed to be uncovered,developed, critiqued, and abandoned within a matter of months.(One explanation for this lies in the poverty of British theory,which often latched onto developments abroad very late, only todiscover that they were already out of date.)

We exaggerate this 1970s trend in order to make a seriouspoint: that one effect of this emphasis on new theory was thepremature abandonment of many potentially fruitful concepts andparadigms. One only has to think of the way in which the ideas ofthe German Marxists of the Frankfurt School were firstrediscovered, then parodied and critiqued (as parody), and finallydiscarded. In the process, a number of important insights werelost, and any attempt to re-engage with them could quickly bedismissed as thoroughly passé in the fast-moving world of 1970smedia theory.

A great deal of 1970s analysis of television and the media hasyet to be fully worked through. There is the question not only ofthose paradigms that might usefully be re-evaluated, but also theproblem of inadequate theoretical projects which remainabandoned by the analytical roadside, like clapped-out old cars.Their breakdown has yet to be fully understood. The debate about‘realism’ is one such abandoned rust-bucket. In the 1970s thetheoretical air crackled with concepts that derived from Marxism,feminism, psychoanalysis, and cinematic and literary theory, andacademic journals like Screen and Framework publishednumerous articles analysing television in these terms. Eventuallythis work collapsed under the weight of its own theoreticism andthe debate about realism and modernism was simply abandonedin favour of a new (and apparently unrelated) discussion about‘postmodernism’, which takes place as though the early 1970spositions never existed.

One problem for 1970s work was an understandable infatuationwith theory at the expense of empirical analysts, and a relatedtendency (clearly determined by the politics of academia) tofetishize ‘originality’. An original theory was often more excitingand prestigious than an explanatory one. It is generally agreedthat one problem in evaluating competing theories developed inthe 1970s was the lack of concrete analysis involved in merelyapplying theories to texts and thus producing dozens of(sometimes contradictory) ‘readings’.

In the 1980s there was a tendency to move back towards theempirical; towards testing out critical debates through an

UNDERSTANDING TELEVISION 5

engagement with the site of production (Feuer, Kerr, andVahimagi 1984; Ellis 1982); towards a testing out of criticaltheories via closer readings of the text (see Newcomb 1987;Masterman 1985); and towards a testing out of textual readingsthrough a study of actual audiences (see Hobson 1982; Ang 1985;Lewis 1985; and Motley 1986). There has also been a relatedinterest and commitment to the popular. That is to say, wheretheory in the 1970s often looked at popular television to discoverwhether or not it measured up to certain pre-given theoretical andpolitical criteria, the 1980s have seen a shift towards taking thepopular on its own terms, and beginning with actual public tastecultures (in order to understand them better), rather thanabstract theories (Bennett et al. 1981; Dyer 1981 and 1985). Thisperiod has thus seen a shift from a focus on ‘serious’ television(drama, documentary, news, current affairs) to popularentertainment forms (soap opera, situation comedy, pop musicvideo, sport, game show and so on). This approach has itsadvantages (and does, after all, derive from a theory—a paradigmbuilt on the writings of Antonio Gramsci), but is also has itsdetractors (see Gardner and Shepherd 1984; Williamson, 1986).

A further and more difficult shift in 1980s approaches emergedout of a perceived change in television itself. This was the debateabout postmodernism. This term is notoriously difficult to pindown, but can be summarized in this context as a concern with anumber of ways in which contemporary television is seen to defythe old modes of analysis deriving from literary and cinematictheory. Critics point to programmes like Miami Vice, Late NightWith David Letterman, The Singing Detective, and Max Headroom,and to new forms and services like music video and MTV, asexamples of television that is qualitatively different from the textsof the 1970s (see Gitlin 1987; Grossberg 1987). While these criticscertainly can’t be said to agree among themselves, the commonthemes in such analyses are a concern for television’s recentincorporation of avant-gardel modernist devices, its ‘flatness’ andemphasis on surface style, its abandonment of traditionalnarrative; and its tendency to be self-reflexive and about itself(rather than a mediation between itself and an extrinsic ‘reality’).Many critics now argue that this postmodern aesthetic requiresnew ways of ‘reading’ and understanding television.

Clearly a further important trend (and perhaps a related one) inthe 1980s concerns not the text-reader relation addressed bypostmodern critics, but the text-institution relation that isradically altered by the growing deregulation of television, on bothsides of the Atlantic. The 1986 Peacock Report on broadcasting

6 INTRODUCTION

offered a challenge to British assumptions about the organizationof television as a public service. In the context of British televisionthis has meant a radical questioning of the assumptions thatanalysts once took for granted. It has also meant an engagementwith the proliferation of sites of distribution, as television becomesavailable not as a text transmitted by a national duopoly, but as aproduct available through a multiplicity of marketplace sources—home video and cable and satellite TV now supplement the publicservice institutions of television.

In attempting to address these debates, this book is designed toprovide readers with a basis for working forward into the 1980sreformulations. That is to say, it doesn’t assume that thetheoretical work of the 1970s can be abandoned in favour of theempirical, the popular, or the postmodern. It assumes that thenew emphases can only be understood through an engagementwith concepts such as ideology, hegemony, and bias, and throughan understanding of how television mediates the social relationsof gender, race, and class.

Because this is primarily an introductory text, we have stressedaccessibility over complexity, in an effort to provide an overviewthat readers can build upon and develop at greater levels ofsophistication in their own study, reading, and analysis. Eachchapter thus surveys a debate or genre as widely and clearly aspossible, providing a suggested follow-up reading list of three orfour key texts, in addition to other references. There is of courseno attempt to unify the contributions into a seamless position—there are distinctly different approaches underlying some of thecontributions. Nor is there any attempt to suggest that theseintroductory essays constitute a theoretically integrated approachto television analysis. The essays here present very differenthistories—of institutions and policies, of audience research andprogramming. Paddy Scannell’s account of the development ofpublic service broadcasting is in marked contrast, for instance, toJohn Tulloch’s historical engagement with race and Britishbroadcasting. Patrick Hughes offers a different perspective againon the post-broadcasting technologies, as does Richard Patersonin his discussion of the TV schedule—although either of themmight easily be integrated with Scannell’s defence of publicservice. Andrew Goodwin’s account of TV news raises questions ofaudience consumption that are taken up more fully by JustinLewis in his account of the audience.

Similarly, the different approaches to texts present sometimescomplementary and sometimes widely divergent analyses.Goodwin’s essay on TV news raises questions about ideology and

UNDERSTANDING TELEVISION 7

television from within a paradigm that has generally beendominated by sociological content analysis. Rosalind Brunt’schapter, on the other hand, is intended to introduce othertechniques of text analysis developed over the last fifteen years orso. And these ideas are then taken up by a number of ourcontributors in a debate that is still framed (in our view) by thepolitical questions opened up in Michael O’Shaughnessy’s piece onthe concept of hegemony. Paul Kerr’s analysis of the drama-documentary debate, Verina Glaessner’s discussion of soap opera,Garry Whannel’s analysis of sports and quizzes, and Mick Bowes’essay on situation comedy each consider different aspects of thepolitics of popular television programming.

We haven’t made the common division between historical,institutional, and textual analysis in our ordering of the essays,since many of our contributors specifically refuse suchseparations. (Both Kerr and Whannel, for instance, have as muchto say about institutions as they do about programming.) Neitherhave we considered the notion of genre in the abstract—althoughthe attempt to understand the rules and conventions that governour understanding of the different parts of the TV schedule iscertainly written in to many of the essays. Perhaps mostinteresting of all the questions raised in that debate is the issue ofinformational versus entertainment programming, and how eachmakes its own very different truth claims. Reading through thepieces that follow, we hope that our readers will notice both theclashes and connections between television’s factual and fictionaldiscourses: in its efforts to mediate political conflict in news(Goodwin), drama-documentary (Kerr), and sitcom (Bowes), forinstances; or in the role of both factual and fictional ‘personalities’discussed by Brunt, O’Shaughnessy, and Whannel.

Making these connections involves an engagement with thepolitics of television that will, we hope, take you beyond the remitof this book. As this introduction has tried to indicate, the task ofunderstanding television in the 1990s is to tackle the awkwardrelationship between the new emphases of empirical, populist, andpostmodern studies in the 1980s and the discovery of theory thatoccurred in the preceding decade.

References

Alvarado, M., Gutch, R., and Wollen, T., Learning the Media, London:Macmillan, 1987.

Ang, I., Watching Dallas, London: Methuen, 1985.

8 INTRODUCTION

Bennett, T. et al. (eds), Popular Television and Film, London: British FilmInstitute, 1981.

Briggs, A., The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, vol. 4:Sound and Vision, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Burns, T., The BBC: Public Institution and Private World, London:Macmillan, 1977.

Clarke, M., Teaching Popular Television, London: Heinemann, 1987.Cook, J. and Hillier, J., The Growth of film and Television Studies, 1960–

75, London: British Film Institute, 1976.Dyer, R. (ed.), Coronation Street, London: British Film Institute, 1981.Dyer, R., ‘Taking popular television seriously’, in D.Lusted and

P.Drummond (eds), TV and Schooling, London: British Film Institute,1985.

Eco, U., ‘Towards a semiotic inquiry into the television message’, WorkingPapers in Cultural Studies, no. 3, Birmingham: Centre forContemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, 1972.

Ellis, J., Visible Fictions, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.Feuer, J., Kerr, P., and Vahimagi, T., MTM: ‘Quality Television’, London:

British Film Institute, 1984.Fiske, J. and Hartley, J., Reading Television, London: Methuen, 1979.Gardner, C. and Shepherd, J., ‘Transforming television—part one, the

limits of Left policy’, Screen, vol. 25, no. 2 (1984).Garnham, N., Structures of Television, London: British Film Institute,

1978.Gitlin, T., ‘Car commercials and Miami Vice: we build excitement’, in

Gitlin (ed.), Watching Television, New York: Pantheon, 1987.Grossberg, L., ‘The in-difference of television’, Screen, vol. 28, no. 2

(1987).Hall, S., ‘Encoding and decoding in television discourse’, in S.Hall,

D.Hobson, A.Lowe and P.Willis (eds), Culture, Media, Language,London: Hutchinson, 1980.

Hobson, D., Crossroads: Drama of a Soap Opera, London: Methuen,1982.

Lewis, J., ‘Decoding TV news’, in P.Drummond and R.Paterson (eds),Television in Transition, London: British Film Institute, 1985.

Masterman, L. (ed.), Television Mythologies: Stars, Shows and Signs,London: Comedia, 1985.

Morley, D., Family Television: Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure,London: Comedia, 1986.

Murdock, G. and Golding, P., ‘Capitalism, communications and classrelations’, in J.Curran, M.Gurevitch, and J.Woollacott (eds), MassCommunication and Society, London: Edward Arnold, 1977.

Newcomb, H. (ed.), Television: The Critical View, Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1987.

Root, J., Open The Box: About Television, London: Comedia, 1986.Williams, R., Television: Technology and Cultural Form, London: Fontana,

1974.

UNDERSTANDING TELEVISION 9

Williamson, J., ‘The problems with being popular’ in New Socialist, no. 41(September 1986).

For a guide to further reading see the Television StudiesBibliography, compiled by Andrew Goodwin, available from BFIEducation, 21 Stephen Street, London W1P 1PL.

10 INTRODUCTION

Introduction Alvarado, M. , Gutch, R. , and Wollen, T. , Learning the Media, London: Macmillan, 1987. Ang, I. , Watching Dallas, London: Methuen, 1985. Bennett, T. et al. (eds), Popular Television and Film, London: British Film Institute, 1981. Briggs, A. , The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, vol. 4: Sound and Vision,Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Burns, T. , The BBC: Public Institution and Private World, London: Macmillan, 1977. Clarke, M. , Teaching Popular Television, London: Heinemann, 1987. Cook, J. and Hillier, J. , The Growth of film and Television Studies, 1960–75, London: BritishFilm Institute, 1976. Dyer, R. (ed.), Coronation Street, London: British Film Institute, 1981. Dyer, R. , ‘Taking popular television seriously’, in D. Lusted and P. Drummond (eds), TV andSchooling, London: British Film Institute, 1985. Eco, U. , ‘Towards a semiotic inquiry into the television message’, Working Papers in CulturalStudies, no. 3, Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University ofBirmingham, 1972. Ellis, J. , Visible Fictions, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. Feuer, J. , Kerr, P. , and Vahimagi, T. , MTM: ‘Quality Television’, London: British FilmInstitute, 1984. Fiske, J. and Hartley, J. , Reading Television, London: Methuen, 1979. Gardner, C. and Shepherd, J. , ‘Transforming television—part one, the limits of Left policy’,Screen, vol. 25, no. 2 (1984). Garnham, N. , Structures of Television, London: British Film Institute, 1978. Gitlin, T. , ‘Car commercials and Miami Vice: we build excitement’, in Gitlin (ed.), WatchingTelevision, New York: Pantheon, 1987. Grossberg, L. , ‘The in-difference of television’, Screen, vol. 28, no. 2 (1987). Hall, S. , ‘Encoding and decoding in television discourse’, in S. Hall , D. Hobson , A. Loweand P. Willis (eds), Culture, Media, Language, London: Hutchinson, 1980. Hobson, D. , Crossroads: Drama of a Soap Opera, London: Methuen, 1982. Lewis, J. , ‘Decoding TV news’, in P. Drummond and R. Paterson (eds), Television inTransition, London: British Film Institute, 1985. Masterman, L. (ed.), Television Mythologies: Stars, Shows and Signs, London: Comedia,1985. Morley, D. , Family Television: Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure, London: Comedia,1986. Murdock, G. and Golding, P. , ‘Capitalism, communications and class relations’, in J. Curran ,M. Gurevitch , and J. Woollacott (eds), Mass Communication and Society, London: EdwardArnold, 1977. Newcomb, H. (ed.), Television: The Critical View, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Root, J. , Open The Box: About Television, London: Comedia, 1986. Williams, R. , Television: Technology and Cultural Form, London: Fontana, 1974. Williamson, J. , ‘The problems with being popular’ in New Socialist, no. 41 (September 1986).

Public Service Broadcasting Annan Committee , Report of the Committee on the Future of Broadcasting (Annan Report),Cmnd. 6753, London: HMSO, 1977. Beveridge Committee , Report of the Broadcasting Committee (Beveridge Report), Cmnd.8116, London: HMSO, 1951. Crawford Committee , Report of the Broadcasting Committee (Crawford Report), Cmnd.2599, London: HMSO, 1925. Garnham, N. , ‘The media and the public sphere’, in P. Golding , G. Murdock , and P.Schlesinger (eds), Communicating Politics, Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1986.

Peacock Committee , Report of the Committee on Financing the BBC (Peacock Report),Cmnd. 9284, London. HMSO, 1986. Pilkington Committee , Report of the Broadcasting Committee (Pilkington Report), Cmnd.1753, London: HMSO, 1960. Reith, J. , Memorandum of Information on the Scope and Conduct of the BroadcastingService, Caversham, Reading: BBC Written Archive, 1925. Sykes Committee , Broadcasting Committee Report (Sykes Report), Cmnd. 1951, London:HMSO, 1923. Williams, R. , Culture and Society, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961. Home Office , Broadcasting in the ’90s: Competition, Choice and Quality. London: HMSO,1988. MacCabe, Colin and Stewart, Olivia (eds), The BBC and Public Service Broadcasting,Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986. Peacock Committee , The Report of the Broadcasting Committee, Cmnd. 8116, London:HMSO, 1986, especially chapter 12. Scannell, Paddy and Cardiff, David , Serving the Nation: Public Service Broadcasting Beforethe War, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1982. For a fuller discussion of the wider implications of this chapter, see Paddy Scannell , ‘Publicservice broadcasting and modern public life’, Media, Culture and Society, vol. 11, no. 2 (April1989).

A Suitable Schedule for the Family Goodhardt, G.J. , Ehrenberg, A.S.C. , and Collins, M.A. , The Television Audience: Patternsof Viewing, Farnborough: Saxon House, 1975, 2nd edn 1987. Gray, A. , ‘Behind closed doors: video recorders in the home’, in Helen Baehr and GillianDyer (eds), Boxed In: Women and Television, London: Pandora, 1987. Lull, J. , World Families Watch Television; London: Sage, 1988. Paterson, R. , ‘Planning the family; the “art” of scheduling’, Screen Education, no. 35(Summer 1980). Pilsworth, M. ‘An imperfect art—TV scheduling in Britain’, Sight and Sound, vol. 49, no. 4(Autumn 1980).

TV News Connell, Ian , ‘Blaming the media’, in Len Masterman (ed.), TV Mythologies, London:Comedia, 1985. Glasgow University Media Group , Really Bad News, London: Writers and Readers Co-operative, 1982. Harrison, Martin , TV News: Whose Bias?, London: Policy Journals, 1985. Schlesinger, Philip , Putting Reality Together: BBC News, London: Constable, 1978.

Points of View Eco, Umberto , ‘Towards a semiotic inquiry into the television message’, Working Papers inCultural Studies, no. 3, Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University ofBirmingham, 1972. Hall, Stuart , ‘Culture, media and “the ideological effect”’, in James Curran et al. (eds), MassCommunication and Society, London: Edward Arnold, 1977.

Masterman, Len (ed.), TV Mythologies, London: Comedia, 1985.

F for Fake? Friction Over Faction Caughie, John , ‘Progressive television and documentary drama’, Screen, vol. 21, no. 3(1980). Goodwin, A. , Kerr, P. , and Macdonald, I. (eds), Drama-Documentary, BFI Dossier no. 19,London: British Film Institute, 1983. Kerr, P. , ‘A response to Caughie’, Screen, vol. 22, no. 1 (1981).

Box Pop Bennett, Tony , et al. (eds), Popular Television and Film, London: British Film Institute, 1981. Gurevitch, Michael , et al., Culture, Society and the Media, London: Methuen, 1982. Masterman, Len , Television Mythologies, London: Comedia, 1984.

Winner Takes All Clarke, Alan , and Clarke, John , ‘Highlights and action replays’, in Jennifer Hargreaves (ed.),Sport, Culture and Ideology, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. Tulloch, John , ‘Gradgrind’s heirs: the quiz and presentation of “knowledge” by Britishtelevision’, in Geoff Whitty and Michael F.D. Young (eds), Explorations in the Politics ofSchool Knowledge, Driffield: Studies in Education, 1977. Whannel, Garry , ‘Fields in vision: sport and representation’, Screen, vol. 25, no. 3 (1984).

Gendered Fictions Ang, Ien , Watching Dallas, London: Methuen, 1986. Dyer, Richard , et al., Coronation Street, London: BFI TV Monograph, 1981. Hobson, Dorothy , Crossroads: The Drama of a Soap Opera, London: Methuen, 1982. Modleski, Tania , Loving With a Vengeance: Mass Produced Fantasies for Women, London:Shoe String Press, 1982.

Only When I Laugh Cook, Jim (ed.), Television Situation Comedy, BFI Dossier no. 17, London: British FilmInstitute, 1982. Cook, Jim and North, Nicky (eds), Teaching TV Sitcom, BFI Education, London: British FilmInstitute, 1985. Eaton, Mick , ‘Television situation comedy’, Screen, vol. 19, no. 4 (Winter 1978–9). Nathan, David , The Laughtermakers, London: Peter Owen, 1971.

Television and Black Britons Braham, Peter , ‘How the media report race’, in Michael Gurevitch et al. (eds), Culture,Society and the Media, London: Methuen, 1982. Cohen, Phil (ed.), It Ain’t Half Racist, Mum, London: Comedia, 1982. Gilroy, Paul , There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, London: Hutchinson, 1987. Husband, Charles , White Media and Black Britain, London: Hutchinson, 1975.

Are You Receiving Me? Ang, Ien , Watching Dallas, London: Methuen, 1985. Lewis, Justin , ‘Decoding TV news’, in Philip Drummond and Richard Paterson (eds),Television in Transition, London: British Film Institute, 1985. Morley, David , The ‘Nationwide’ Audience, London: British Film Institute, 1980. Morley, David , Family Television: Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure, London: Comedia,1986.

Today's Television, Tomorrow's World Particular changes in the structures, operations, and products of the companies in the cultureand communications industries are reported as they happen in the general business andfinancial media such as The Financial Times, The Economist, Fortune, and Business Week.There are also the magazines and journals specializing in reporting and commenting onthese industries, including Broadcast and New Media Markets in the UK, the US magazineChannels of Communication, and Electronics Today International in Australia. For adiscussion of the prospects of satellite television, see Richard Collins, ‘The prognosis forsatellite television in the UK’, Space Policy, February 1989. More substantial background reading would include the following: Forester, T. (ed.), The Information Technology Revolution, Oxford: Blackwell, 1985. Mattelart, A. , Delcourt, X. , and Mattelart, M. , International Image Markets, London:Comedia, 1984. Murphy, B. , The World Wired Up: Unscrambling the New Communications Puzzle, London:Comedia, 1983. Turney, J. , (ed.), Sci-Tech Report, London: Pluto, 1984.