Filming and Performing Renaissance History

Over the last one hundred years, many of the events and personalities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have been brought before home, cinema, exhibition, festival and theatrical audiences via a variety of visual media. This collection, for the first time, examines these representations, looking at recent television series, documentaries, feature films, pageantry, theatre and popular culture in a range of cultural and linguistic guises. Filming and Performing Renaissance History opens up wider avenues of interpretive opportunity and substitutes a more generous, nuanced acknowledgement of the ways in which the 'Renaissance' is made to signify across disciplines and in relation to a whole series of events and personalities. Accessing the Renaissance in this fashion generates a genuine sense of the modalities of historical representation, of what the Renaissance 'means' and of how its meanings have been negotiated in modernity.

'Strange Visitor From Another Planet': Genre, Corporate Identity and the Arrival of American Telefantasy on British Television

While the BBC had been broadcasting television Science Fiction productions from as early as 1938, and Horror since the start of television in 1936, American Telefantasy had no place on British television until ITV’s broadcast of Adventures of Superman (1952-1958) in 1956. It would be easy to assign this absence to the avoidance of popular American programming, but this would ignore the presence of Western and adventure serials imported from the US and Canada for monopoly British television. Similarly, it would be inaccurate to suggest that these imports were purely purchased as thrilling fare to appease a child audience, as it was the commercial ITV that was first to broadcast the more adult-orientated Science Fiction Theatre (1955-7) and Inner Sanctum (1954). This article builds on the work of Paul Rixon and Rob Leggott to argue that these imports were used primarily to supply relatively cheap broadcast material for the new channel, but that they also served to appeal to the notion of spectacular entertainment attached to the new channel through its own productions, such as The Invisible Man (1958-1959) and swashbucklers such as The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955-60). However, the appeal was not just to the exciting, but also to the transatlantic, with ITV embracing this conception of America as a modern place of adventure through its imports and its creation of productions for export, incorporating an American lead into The Invisible Man and drawing upon an (inexpensive) American talent pool of blacklisted screenwriters to provide a transatlantic style and relevance to its own adventure series. Where the BBC used its imported serials as filler directed at children, ITV embraced this transatlantic entertainment as part of its identity and differentiation from the BBC.

Parent Issues: How Life on Mars Negotiates a Television Generation Gap

In defining what he termed 'Television's Second Golden Age', Robert J.Thompson refers to characteristics such as being 'not regular TV', internal continuity, mixed genres but an aspiration towards 'realism', complex writing, self-consciousness and intertextuality. Such characteristics are displayed by the BBC series Life on Mars (2006-2007) which intermingles the Seventies tough cop show with psychological fantasy. This chapter examines the way that the series can be understood as a dramatisation of the negotiation that the creators undertook with their Seventies source material to update it for the values and qualities of contemporary television drama. It will emphasise the importance of television in the generation of the imagined 1973 and its characters, but also as an ongoing connection between the real and the imagined within the programme, including forming a breach of the boundaries between the two. Sam's actions within his Seventies world to remake it to include his own ideas of justice and due process while retaining the passion and freedom of action that the milieu provides will also be be examined in relation to the series' creators' needs to remake the Seventies tough-cop show in the light of modern social and media mores. The paper will also consider how Sam has to come to terms with his father's crimes, as the series' creators had to come to terms with the 'crimes' of taste, morality and approach of their 'parent' programmes from the Seventies' Golden Age.

Ghosts and Television

This chapter explores the ghost story on television, and particularly the tensions between the medium and the genre. Television has long been seen as a nearly-supernatural medium, an association that the very term 'medium' enhances. In particular, the very intimacy of television, and its domestic presence, have led to it being considered to be a suitable and effective venue for the ghost story, while at the same time concerns have risen over it being too effective at conveying horror into the home. The ghost story is thus one of the genres where the tensions between the medium's aesthetic possibilities and desire for censorship can be most clearly seen. As such, there is a recurring use of the ghost story in relation to different techniques of special effects and narrative on television, some more effective than others, and the presence of the ghost story on television waxes and wanes as different styles become more or less popular, and different narrative forms, such as single play or serial or series, become more or less dominant. Drawing on examples primarily from a British and US context, this chapter outlines the history of the ghost story on television and demonstrates how the tensions in presentation, narrative and considerations of the viewer have influenced the many changes that have taken place within the genre.

Error sensitive historical GIS: Identifying areal interpolation errors in time series data

Historical GIS has the potential to re-invigorate our use of statistics from historical censuses and related sources. In particular, areal interpolation can be used to create long-run time-series of spatially detailed data that will enable us to enhance significantly our understanding of geographical change over periods of a century or more. The difficulty with areal interpolation, however, is that the data that it generates are estimates which will inevitably contain some error. This paper describes a technique that allows the automated identification of possible errors at the level of the individual data values.