Television history: archives, excavation and the future. A discussion

This article considers possible futures for television (TV) studies, imagining how the discipline might evolve more productively over the next 10 years and what practical steps are necessary to move towards those outcomes. Conducted as a round-table discussion between leading figures in television history and archives, the debate focuses on the critical issue of archives, considering and responding to questions of access/inaccessibility, texts/contexts, commercial/symbolic value, impact and relevance. These questions reflect recurrent concerns when selecting case studies for historical TV research projects: how difficult is it to access the material (when it survives)? What obstacles might be faced (copyright, costs, etc.) when disseminating findings to a wider public? The relationship between the roles of ‘researcher’ and ‘archivist’ appears closer and more mutually supportive in TV studies than in other academic disciplines, with many people in practice straddling the traditional divide between the two roles, combining specialisms that serve to further scholarship and learning as well as the preservation of, and broad public engagements with, collections. The Research Excellence Framework’s imperative for academic researchers to achieve ‘impact’ in broader society encourages active and creative collaboration with those based in public organizations, such as the British Film Institute (BFI), who have a remit to reach a wider public. The discussion identifies various problems and successes experienced in collaboration between the academic, public and commercial sectors in the course of recent and ongoing research projects in TV studies.

Returning to an old question: What do television actors do when they act?

This article argues for acknowledging and exploring actors’ processes in critical considerations of television drama. Theatre studies boasts a tradition of research privileging the actor, including a century’s worth of actor-training manuals, academic works observing rehearsals and performances and actor accounts. However, such considerations within television studies are relatively nascent. Drawing upon continuing drama as a fertile case study for investigating the specificities of television acting, the article concludes that the only way to understand television acting is through the analysis of insights from actors themselves, in combination with the well-established practices of analysing the textual end products of television acting.

Red Time is Me-Time: Advertising, Ambivalence, and Women's Magazines

This study explores the concept of self for women in consumer culture, as it is played out in an experiential advertising campaign for a U.K. women's magazine called Red. The study qualitatively explores the tensions and ambivalences experienced by female participants in response to a campaign using the notion of self-indulgence and "me time" as they experience it in the context of their everyday lives. It shows how women attempt to reconcile the mixed emotions that the Red campaign evokes in them.

I Can't Believe It's Not Bakhtin!: Literary Theory, Postmodern Advertising and the Gender Agenda

Taking the literary theories of Mikhail Bakhtin as a starting point, the authors offer three gendered readings of a postmodern advertisement for Moët & Chandon champagne. They commence with a discussion of the influence of gender on textual interpretation; continue with an outline of Bakhtin's key concepts, with particular reference to gender; present three contrasting readings of Moët's postmodern advertisement; and conclude with a discussion of their interpretations together with some reflexive reflections on the gender agenda. Though not claiming to offer a comprehensive introduction to Bakhtin, they do try to exemplify, in a quasi-carnivalesque mode of exposition, something of the character of that supremely gifted thinker and to demonstrate the insights his concepts provide in relation to gendered readings of advertising texts.