'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.

'Grooming' and the Sexual Abuse of Children:Institutional, Internet and Familial Dimensions

‘Grooming’ and the Sexual Abuse of Children: Institutional, Internet and Familial Dimensions critically examines the official and popular discourses on grooming, predominantly framed within the context of on-line sexual exploitation and abuse committed by strangers, and institutional child abuse committed by those in positions of trust.

Set against the broader theoretical framework of risk, security and governance, this book argues that due to the difficulties of drawing clear boundaries between innocuous and harmful motivations towards children, pre-emptive risk-based criminal law and policy are inherently limited in preventing, targeting and criminalising ‘grooming’ behaviour prior to the manifestation of actual harm. Through examination of grooming against the complexities of the onset of sexual offending against children and its actual role in this process, the author broadens existing discourses by providing a fuller, more nuanced conceptualisation of grooming, including its role in intra-familial and extra-familial contexts. There is also timely discussion of new and emerging forms of grooming, such as ‘street’ or ‘localised’ grooming, as typified by recent cases in Rochdale and Oldham, and ‘peer-to-peer’ grooming.

The first inter-disciplinary, thematic, and empirical investigation of grooming in a multi-jurisdictional context, ‘Grooming’ and the Sexual Abuse of Children draws on extensive empirical research in the form of over fifty interviews with professionals, working in the fields of sex offender risk assessment, management or treatment, as well as child protection or victim support in the four jurisdictions of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Impeccably presented and meticulously considered, this book will be of interest to criminologists and those working and studying in the field of policing and criminal justice studies, as well as policy makers and practitioners in the areas of child protection and sex offender management.

Before the Volcano:Reverberations of Identity on Montserrat

How is identity claimed, contested and sustained?

This book looks at retentions, reconstructions and reverberations of identity in a colonial Caribbean setting. It is an ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘impressionistic’ ethnography of life on the island of Montserrat leading up to and including the present day volcanic eruptions. It explores Montserrat’s existing colonial identity and emerging postcolonial identity drawing upon examples from local poets, calypsonians and historians; controversial development and trade union struggles; and the impact of tourism and colonialism on the island – Black Irish identity claims and the celebration and/or commemoration of St. Patrick’s Day in particular.

This book will appeal to Anthropologists, Sociologists, and Cultural Studies and Caribbean Studies scholars, as well as those involved in and concerned for the reconstruction of Montserrat the place and Mons’rat the people.

Claiming and displaying national identity: Irish Travellers' and students' strategic use of 'banal' and 'hot' national identity in talk

Two complementary explanations have been offered by social psychologists to account for the universal hold of national identity, first that national identity is ideologically assumed, as it forms the ‘banal’ background of everyday life, and second that national identity is ‘hotly’ constructed and contested in political and everyday settings to great effect. However, ‘banal’ and ‘hot’ aspects of national identity have been found to be distributed unevenly across national and subnational groups and banality itself can be strategically used to distinguish between different groups. The present paper develops these ideas by examining possible reasons for these different modes and strategies of identity expression. Drawing upon intergroup theories of minority and majority relations, we examine how a group who see themselves unequivocally as a minority, Irish Travellers, talk about their national identity in comparison to an age and gender-matched sample of Irish students. We find that Travellers proactively display and claim ‘hot’ national identity in order to establish their Irishness. Irish students ‘do banality’, police the boundaries and reputation of Irishness, and actively reject and disparage proactive displays of Irishness. The implications for discursive understandings of identity, the study of intra-national group relations and policies of minority inclusion are discussed.

Socio-political context and accounts of national identity in adolescence

Psychological research into national identity has considered both the banal quality of nationalism alongside the active, strategic construction of national categories and boundaries. Less attention has been paid to the conflict between these processes for those whose claims to national identity may be problematic. In the present study, focus groups were conducted with 36 Roman Catholic adolescents living in border regions of Ireland, in which participants were asked to talk about their own and others’ Irish national identity. Discursive analysis of the data revealed that those in the Republic of Ireland strategically displayed their national identity as obvious and ‘banal’, while those in Northern Ireland proactively claimed their Irishness. Moreover, those in Northern Ireland displayed an assumption that their fellow Irish in the Republic shared their imperative to assert national identity, while those in the Republic actively distanced themselves from this version of Irishness. These results suggest that for dominant ethnic groups, ‘banality’ may itself provide a marker of national identity while paradoxically the proactive display of national identity undermines minority groups claims to national identity.