“If I Were Nick”: Men’s Responses to an Interactive Video Drama Series to Support Smoking Cessation

Background: Men continue to smoke in greater numbers than women; however, few interventions have been developed and tested to support men’s cessation. Men also tend to rely on quitting strategies associated with stereotypical manliness, such as willpower, stoicism and independence, but may lack the self‐efficacy skills required to sustain a quit. In this article we describe the development of and reception to an interactive video drama (IVD) series, composed of 7 brief scenarios, to support and strengthen men’s smoking cessation efforts. The value of IVD in health promotion is predicated on the evidence that viewers engage with the material when they are presented characters with whom they can personally identify. The video dramatizes the challenges unfolding in the life of the main character, Nick, on the first day of his quit and models the skills necessary to embark upon a sustainable quit. 
Objective: The objective was to describe men’s responses to the If I were Nick IVD series as part of a pilot study of QuitNow MenTM, an innovative smoking cessation website designed for men. Specific objectives were to explore the resonance of the main character of the IVD series with end‐users, and men’s perceptions of the effectiveness of the IVD series for supporting their quit self‐management. 
Methods: Seven brief IVD scenarios were developed, filmed with a professional actor and uploaded to a new online smoking cessation website, QuitNow MenTM.  A sample of 117 men who smoked were recruited into the study and provided baseline data prior to access to the QuitNow MenTM website for a 6 month period. During this time, 47 men chose to view the IVDs. Their responses to questions about the IVDs were collected in 3‐month and 6‐month online follow‐up surveys and analyzed using descriptive statistics. 
Findings: The majority of participants indicated they related to the main character, Nick. Participants who “strongly agreed” they could relate to Nick perceived significantly higher levels of support from the IVDs than the “neutral” and “disagree” groups (P <.001, d =2.0, P <.001 d =3.1). The “agree” and “neutral” groups were significantly higher on rated support from the videos than the “disagree” (P <.001 d =2.2, P =.01 d = 1.5). Participants’ perception of the main character was independent of participant age, education attainment or previous quit attempts. 
Conclusions: The findings suggest that IVD interventions may be an important addition to men’s smoking cessation programs. Given that the use of IVD scenarios in health promotion is in its infancy, the positive outcomes from this pilot study signal the potential for IVD and warrant ongoing evaluation in smoking cessation and, more generally, men’s health promotion.  

Romance and Reconciliation : The secret life of indigenous sexuality on Australian television drama

This article examines the representation of Indigenous sexuality on Australian television drama since the 1970s, suggesting the political importance of such representations. In 1976 Justine Saunders became the first regular Indigenous character on an Australian television drama series, as the hairdresser Rhonda Jackson in Number 96. She was presented as sexually attractive, but this was expressed through a rape scene after a party. Twenty five years later, Deborah Mailman starred in The Secret Life of Us, as Kelly, who is also presented as sexually attractive. But her character can be seen in many romantic relationships. The article explores changing representations that moved us from Number 96 to The Secret Life of Us, via The Flying Doctors and Heartland. It suggests that in representations of intimate and loving relationships on screen it has only recently become possible to see hopeful models for interaction between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

A kiss is just...

This paper proposes that a survey of representations of men not-kissing men in recent television drama series makes clear a particularly hysterical fascination. While the Australian program GP has managed to produce a banal representation of two men kissing, American equivalents have resorted to a series of strategies which make insistently clear that not only can men not kiss-but that the act of not-kissing must be repeatedly displayed. By refusing to have lovers kiss; by having lovers kiss but refusing to show the act; by having gay lovers, but having one played by a woman; by having men kiss but rendering the act ridiculous; in these ways, American television programs make clear the importance of this act by consistently pointing towards it and declaring its impossibility. This paper calls for the justice of equal access to public images of kissing.

From 'Neighbours' to 'Packed to the Rafters': accounting for longevity in the evolution of Aussie soaps

If there is one television programming staple for which Australian television drama is known internationally, it is the long-running television soap, with Neighbours (originally produced by Grundy in 1985) lauded as 'the most outstanding example of Australian series export' (Cunningham and Jacka, 1996). Twenty-five years on, this program still airs on domestic and international TV schedules five days a week, despite waning popularity with local Australian audiences. Considering past interest in the success and longevity of this soap, it is apposite to look again at the continuing progress of Neighbours foremost as a global brand. In comparison, Packed to the Rafters is treated here as a contemporary version of familiar Aussie themes related to everyday middle-class suburbia, populated with blue skies and feel-good characters expressing wholesome family values, but with a stylistic innovation defined here as domestic realism. As part of the production ecology of the late 2000s, Packed to the Rafters demonstrates the considerable role for local drama productions as loss leaders and flagship programming for commercial free-to-air networks up against an increasingly difficult domestic market.

On Chinese Modal Particle A (啊) : A Pragmatic and Semantic Study

Chinese modal particles feature prominently in Chinese people’s daily use of the language, but their pragmatic and semantic functions are elusive as commonly recognised by Chinese linguists and teachers of Chinese as a foreign language. This book originates from an extensive and intensive empirical study of the Chinese modal particle a (啊), one of the most frequently used modal particles in Mandarin Chinese. In order to capture all the uses and the underlying meanings of the particle, the author transcribed the first 20 episodes, about 20 hours in length, of the popular Chinese TV drama series Kewang ‘Expectations’, which yielded a corpus data of more than 142’000 Chinese characters with a total of 1829 instances of the particle all used in meaningful communicative situations. Within its context of use, every single occurrence of the particle was analysed in terms of its pragmatic and semantic contributions to the hosting utterance. Upon this basis the core meanings were identified which were seen as constituting the modal nature of the particle.

The right thing

For a few years in the mid 2000s, the ABC screened barely any new Australian drama. This record-breaking slump, which reached an all-time low of just three hours of programs in the year ending June 2005, spurred an industry-led campaign and a degree of public controversy that convinced the federal government to increase the corporation’s funding. An extra $70 million was provided for drama, with the majority earmarked for 2011–12. The new twenty-two-part courtroom drama series Crownies, made for the ABC by the independent production house Screentime, is the principal product.

Sex with the light on

television drama series written for Hat Trick Productions for BBC

Casualty - Garage Flowers

An episode of the popular BBC 1 returning drama series

Casualty - What a Wonderful Life

An episode of the popular BBC 1 returning drama series

Bloodlines

A three-part BBC television drama series

Television and the popular: viewing from the British perspective

The academic discipline of television studies has been constituted by the claim that television is worth studying because it is popular. Yet this claim has also entailed a need to defend the subject against the triviality that is associated with the television medium because of its very popularity. This article analyses the many attempts in the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries to constitute critical discourses about television as a popular medium. It focuses on how the theoretical currents of Television Studies emerged and changed in the UK, where a disciplinary identity for the subject was founded by borrowing from related disciplines, yet argued for the specificity of the medium as an object of criticism. Eschewing technological determinism, moral pathologization and sterile debates about television's supposed effects, UK writers such as Raymond Williams addressed television as an aspect of culture. Television theory in Britain has been part of, and also separate from, the disciplinary fields of media theory, literary theory and film theory. It has focused its attention on institutions, audio-visual texts, genres, authors and viewers according to the ways that research problems and theoretical inadequacies have emerged over time. But a consistent feature has been the problem of moving from a descriptive discourse to an analytical and evaluative one, and from studies of specific texts, moments and locations of television to larger theories. By discussing some historically significant critical work about television, the article considers how academic work has constructed relationships between the different kinds of objects of study. The article argues that a fundamental tension between descriptive and politically activist discourses has confused academic writing about ›the popular‹. Television study in Britain arose not to supply graduate professionals to the television industry, nor to perfect the instrumental techniques of allied sectors such as advertising and marketing, but to analyse and critique the medium's aesthetic forms and to evaluate its role in culture. Since television cannot be made by ›the people‹, the empowerment that discourses of television theory and analysis aimed for was focused on disseminating the tools for critique. Recent developments in factual entertainment television (in Britain and elsewhere) have greatly increased the visibility of ›the people‹ in programmes, notably in docusoaps, game shows and other participative formats. This has led to renewed debates about whether such ›popular‹ programmes appropriately represent ›the people‹ and how factual entertainment that is often despised relates to genres hitherto considered to be of high quality, such as scripted drama and socially-engaged documentary television. A further aspect of this problem of evaluation is how television globalisation has been addressed, and the example that the issue has crystallised around most is the reality TV contest Big Brother. Television theory has been largely based on studying the texts, institutions and audiences of television in the Anglophone world, and thus in specific geographical contexts. The transnational contexts of popular television have been addressed as spaces of contestation, for example between Americanisation and national or regional identities. Commentators have been ambivalent about whether the discipline's role is to celebrate or critique television, and whether to do so within a national, regional or global context. In the discourses of the television industry, ›popular television‹ is a quantitative and comparative measure, and because of the overlap between the programming with the largest audiences and the scheduling of established programme types at the times of day when the largest audiences are available, it has a strong relationship with genre. The measurement of audiences and the design of schedules are carried out in predominantly national contexts, but the article refers to programmes like Big Brother that have been broadcast transnationally, and programmes that have been extensively exported, to consider in what ways they too might be called popular. Strands of work in television studies have at different times attempted to diagnose what is at stake in the most popular programme types, such as reality TV, situation comedy and drama series. This has centred on questions of how aesthetic quality might be discriminated in television programmes, and how quality relates to popularity. The interaction of the designations ›popular‹ and ›quality‹ is exemplified in the ways that critical discourse has addressed US drama series that have been widely exported around the world, and the article shows how the two critical terms are both distinct and interrelated. In this context and in the article as a whole, the aim is not to arrive at a definitive meaning for ›the popular‹ inasmuch as it designates programmes or indeed the medium of television itself. Instead the aim is to show how, in historically and geographically contingent ways, these terms and ideas have been dynamically adopted and contested in order to address a multiple and changing object of analysis.

Materialien zur Kunde des alteren englischen Dramas.

Reprinted 1963.

Versailles

television drama series written for Canal+ in France - for worldwide distribution.

Narrativa transmedia y percepción cognitiva en El Ministerio del Tiempo (TVE)

Introducción: En el presente trabajo se analiza la serie de ficción de TVE El Ministerio del Tiempo con el objetivo de determinar si el mayor conocimiento de la serie de ficción, el uso de las redes sociales y los recursos multimedia modifican la percepción del espectador. Metodología: Se procedió a realizar un trabajo de campo compuesto por 124 observadores a los que se les ha aplicado la escala EDI (Escala de identificación con los personajes). Resultados: Se concluye que un mayor conocimiento de la serie y el uso de las propuestas transmedia produce una mayor identificación con los personajes de ficción, aunque solo en los ítems que definen una mayor carga emocional o sentimental. Discusión: Lo anterior evidencia sin embargo, que no es aplicable a la evaluación cognitiva de aquellos espectadores más fieles a la serie. Conclusiones: Con los resultados obtenidos es posible afirmar que los contenidos transmedia se suceden en la percepción de los observadores desde lo racional a lo emocional. El conocimiento previo de la serie y el uso de las propuestas transmedia alarga la relación con lo visionado más allá del disfrute ocasional.