tag:theconversation.com,2011:/id/topics/tv-drama-33471/articlesTV drama – The Conversation2024-01-19T10:14:39Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2212332024-01-19T10:14:39Z2024-01-19T10:14:39ZThe Sopranos at 25: mafia tale of murder, mayhem and family created a golden age of television<p>Twenty-five years after its debut on <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/nov/01/hbo-book-home-box-office-its-not-tv">HBO</a>, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/dec/19/sopranos-hit-social-media-generation-mafia-series-emotional-struggles">The Sopranos</a> consistently sits at the top of lists of the <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-lists/best-tv-shows-of-all-time-1234598313/">greatest TV shows of all time</a>. The pressures of being number one was not something that its creator, <a href="https://www.allmovie.com/artist/david-chase-vn15570136">David Chase</a>, had ever entertained.</p>
<p>A somewhat dour producer/writer (The Rockford Files, Northern Exposure), Chase had inadvertently ascended the ranks to become a sought-after TV talent who nevertheless aspired to a film career. Still, in pitching the concept of a mobster mired in internal conflict, he found an appetite for change amongst the networks he was working for.</p>
<p>With stagnant formats and generalised output, most executives were struggling to find a hit in this brash post-1980s world. But after punting his unconventional “bad guy as protagonist” idea and being repeatedly rejected, Chase found himself walking away from HBO in 1997 with a deal as both writer and director of the pilot.</p>
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<p>When the first series got the green light, he set about achieving his vision, without much hope that <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSQCQ2ZngG8">he would get beyond one season</a>. Adept at subverting the story conventions of the time, Chase had a product that fit the format but raised the game in terms of character development, depth, black humour and, for television, a visually enriching cinematic style. The Sopranos instantly stood out as something bold and innovative.</p>
<p>Reinventing a mafia character to add complexity beyond the achievements of James Cagney, Marlon Brando, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro would be a challenge that James Gandolfini would relish, but which would ultimately <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/james-gandolfini-struggles-sopranos-tony-tinderbox-book-hbo-executive-2021-12?r=US&IR=T#:%7E:text=%22In%20order%20to%20become%20Tony,%22exhausted%22%20by%20the%20role.">take its toll on the actor</a> as he wrestled with the darkness of his character. </p>
<h2>Gandolfini: an imperfect anti-hero</h2>
<p>Like the character he was to play, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/James-Gandolfini">James Gandolfini</a> also hailed from New Jersey. He was a character actor with depth, but HBO was initially worried about his leading-man qualities. Even Chase, who had his heart set on Bruce Springsteen’s musician pal <a href="https://www.littlesteven.com/bio">Steven van Zandt</a> (who went on to play sidekick Silvio), had to be persuaded.</p>
<p>But ultimately, the risk paid off and it was considered iconic casting – Gandolfini’s credibility playing both family man and brutish avenger were vital to the success of both series and character. This bear-like, aggressive tough guy had inner demons and this show was going to share them with you. And Gandolfini was going to make you care.</p>
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<p>Fully inhabiting Tony Soprano, Gandolfini brought heart and empathy to the role as did <a href="https://www.tvinsider.com/people/edie-falco/">Edie Falco</a> as his long-suffering spouse Carmela, who helped bolster the familial dynamics of discord further. As the seasons rolled on, her role became evermore devastating and enthralling as her character hardened.</p>
<p>Tony was at the forefront of a new wave of lead characters that permitted sympathy for the devil. Here was an audience that wanted fallible, relatable characters, not just straightforward heroes and tough guys.</p>
<p>Relatability is a crucial factor in the show’s iconic status and timeless appeal. It also tapped into a growing trend in the US of talking through psychological problems and mental health in therapy. Tony’s burgeoning awareness of his own mental health problems is the revelatory moment that kicks off the series: a fainting episode that cannot be medically explained sees him prescribed a session with psychiatrist Dr Melfi (Lorraine Bracco).</p>
<p>Creating an imperfect anti-hero at the heart of this mafia family was a stroke of genius. External conflict meets internal conflict, as an alpha male mobster manifests the psychological demons conjured up by a troubled relationship with his ruthless mother, the indomitable Livia. This key relationship was central to Tony’s dilemma and his fate.</p>
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<p>In the first episode, Chase established Tony’s character by having him carefully shepherd baby ducks out of his swimming pool. Here was a man who was kind to animals but deadly when betrayed. Audiences were frequently disconcerted watching him execute grisly murders, then head home for dinner with his family.</p>
<p>Episodically, the show pivoted from such violent and bloody action to small familial scenes, forgoing a traditional linear narrative structure for huge emotional arcs that would span whole seasons. With no “story of the day”, no episode could be deemed to have a happy ending – just as Chase wanted it.</p>
<h2>A golden age of drama</h2>
<p>Subsequently, HBO found itself at the forefront of a new golden age of “cinematic television”. The Sopranos paved the way for new worlds and a wild west of platforms, full of promise and hope. Soon, new voices such as Shonda Rhimes (Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal), Amy Sherman-Palladino (Gilmore Girls, Marvellous Mrs Maisel) and Lena Dunham (Girls) would break through the din of white, male writers to create a broader perspective and elevate sidelined female stories that existed outside the familiar, patriarchal world that Tony inhabited.</p>
<p>Genre-busting series such as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/sep/26/transparent-review-the-best-thing-on-tv-at-the-moment">Transparent</a> had no need to tiptoe around challenging storylines with ever-evolving, selfish, judgmental, entirely flawed but endearing characters. Similarly, <a href="https://simonc.me.uk/tv-review-orange-is-the-new-black-season-1-db6457187df9">Orange is the New Black</a>, gave us empathetic, engaging backstories to the female prisoners. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/jan/20/breaking-bad-10-years-on-tv-is-still-in-walter-whites-shadow">Breaking Bad’s</a> Walter White trajectory, from quiet good guy to drug kingpin, would begin its arc a short six months after The Sopranos took its final bow in July 2007. And <a href="https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20211015-why-the-wire-is-the-greatest-tv-series-of-the-21st-century">The Wire</a> continued the evolutionary story from March 2008 with a show that would go on to explore institutional failure, drugs, deprivation and the challenges of urban society.</p>
<p>It’s ultimately impossible to conceive of White, drug-addicted <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2011/sep/06/have-you-been-watching-nurse-jackie">Nurse Jackie</a>, serial killer <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/nov/08/dexter-new-blood-review-leaner-hungrier-serial-killer">Dexter</a> or <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/oct/29/mad-men-box-set-review">Mad Men</a> lothario Don Draper without the flawed Tony Soprano. And unfathomable that a TV show could have the same impact in today’s streaming panorama, where flawed characters are the norm. </p>
<p>But in a blistering attack recently, David Chase <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sopranos-creator-david-chase-the-streaming-giants-are-killing-off-tv-f0bhf68zj">decried the current state of affairs</a>, claiming that thanks to multi-tasking viewers with short attention spans, the 25-year golden age of groundbreaking, taboo-busting TV is well and truly over, and executives are once again risk averse.</p>
<p>Grateful for the quality TV dramas that came after, for many this is what makes The Sopranos the perennial number one.</p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jane Steventon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The deeply flawed but intriguing Tony Soprano opened up a whole new world of complicated relatable characters that drew audiences in their millions.Jane Steventon, Course Leader, BA (Hons) Screenwriting; Deputy Course Leader & Senior Lecturer, BA (Hons) Film Production, University of PortsmouthLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2149352023-11-09T15:48:20Z2023-11-09T15:48:20ZFor All Mankind: space drama’s alternate history constructs a better vision of Nasa<p>Great art is often difficult to quantify. Apple TV’s series <a href="https://tinyurl.com/yb3zw6dp">For All Mankind</a> is a case in point, running the risk of being too sci-fi for drama fans (rockets, moon bases, Mars) and having too much naturalistic drama for sci-fi aficionados (jealousy, divorce, institutional politics). </p>
<p>Nonetheless, the show consistently rewards both sets of viewers by brilliantly blurring the line between reality and alternate history. It tells a compelling story wherein the Soviet Union beat the US to land on the Moon and, consequently, <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/space-race">the space race</a> never ended. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Trailer for season one of For All Mankind.</span></figcaption>
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<p>For All Mankind begins in an Apollo era transformed by the inclusion of women, characters of colour and LGBTQ+ protagonists. The show moves through the creation of long-term lunar habitation in the 1980s and, eventually, crewed landings on Mars in the mid-1990s – with all the downstream technological benefits that implies (electric cars in the 1980s, anyone?). </p>
<p>The upcoming fourth season promises to explore the implication of humanity’s first steps on the red planet, adding a focus on extractive industries and energy politics to the show’s longstanding interrogation of <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/19th-century/manifest-destiny">American Manifest Destiny</a> – the idea that God intended the US to spread democracy and capitalism across the world. Jamestown, the US lunar base, deliberately echoes the first permanent Anglo colony in the Americas, for example. </p>
<p>Yet, For All Mankind’s defining trait is scrutinising how the foibles of individuals can make or break a whole civilisation’s journey to the stars. Its powerful message is that the most mission-critical systems of all are human beings and their interpersonal relationships, <a href="https://www.lunapresspublishing.com/product-page/spec-fic-for-newbies">which is an excellent lesson for storytellers</a>.</p>
<h2>Astronaut fiction</h2>
<p>For All Mankind mines a rich vein of astronaut screen fiction, starting with the now-forgotten black-and-white TV show <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052493/episodes/?season=1">Men Into Space</a> (1959). That series anticipated many of the elements which For All Mankind would later double down on, such as women astronauts, realistic technical challenges and the search for water on the Moon.</p>
<p>In their 1960s and 1970s heyday, of course, astronauts were everywhere. Science and fiction blurred in countless pulp tales, B-movies, magazine features, novels and comics. Even <a href="https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/doll-barbie-miss-astronaut/nasm_A20070121000">a space-suited Barbie</a> debuted four years before a man would walk on the Moon. David Bowie sang about a “space oddity” in 1969 (later covered by astronaut Chris Hadfield, who filmed <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo">the first music video in space</a>), while in 1977, Star Trek actress Nichelle Nichols was tasked by Nasa with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lca9_EDMcX0">recruiting a more diverse field of astronaut candidates</a>. </p>
<p>More recent forerunners of For All Mankind include <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112384/">Apollo 13</a> (1995) and its magnificent companion TV series, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120570/">From the Earth to the Moon</a> (1998). Then there are the blockbusters like Ridley Scott’s <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3659388/">The Martian</a> (2015) and the visually stunning <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1454468/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Gravity</a> (2013). <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4846340/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Hidden Figures</a> (2016) dramatised the real-life history of Nasa’s African-American women mathematicians, who overcame discrimination to contribute greatly to America’s earliest space missions.</p>
<h2>Nixon’s women</h2>
<p>While building upon all of these, For All Mankind stands out – like Hidden Figures – for its willingness to deconstruct the myth of the straight white male flyboy. That character is here personified by the temperamental Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) and the upward-failing father and son astronauts Gordo and Danny Stevens (Michael Dorman and Casey W. Johnson). </p>
<p>The stereotypical all-American hero, the show says, is likely prone to anger-management issues, substance abuse and infidelity. In their place, the series uses an alternate history to reconstruct a better, more inclusive and even more diverse vision of Nasa.</p>
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<p>In the third episode of season one, set in the 1970s, Nasa seeks to counter Russia’s landing of a woman on the moon by recruiting women pilots of its own. These characters are known as “Nixon’s women”. Among them is the deceptively quiet Ellen Waverly (Jodi Balfour), former Nasa “computer” Danielle Poole (Krys Marshall), and the barnstorming Molly Cobb (Sonya Walger). They quickly become central protagonists in humanity’s interplanetary expansion.</p>
<p>While the show usurps Sally Ride’s distinction as <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/20700213">the first American woman in space</a>, it compensates by making its fictionalised Ride (Ellen Wroe) a moral heavyweight during a Cuban Missile Crisis-style lunar standoff. </p>
<p>Yet, even in this timeline, some things remain the same. In the third season, a gay astronaut comes out in a broadcast from the surface of Mars, only to find that historical prejudice has followed him to another planet. His openness inadvertently inspires the creation of the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Dont-Ask-Dont-Tell">Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell</a> military policy. But the difference here is that For All Mankind’s US president is themself a closeted character, who must reach a difficult personal and political reckoning with this policy. </p>
<p>Their resulting ethical quandary is played with the acute introspection of literary drama, but their story – a cognitive estrangement asking us to look anew at our own history – is enabled by the narrative apparatus of science fiction. It encapsulates what makes For All Mankind potentially the greatest show on television right now: meaningful human tales told against an interplanetary backdrop.</p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Val Nolan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>For All Mankind is set in an Apollo era transformed by the inclusion of women, characters of colour and LGBTQ+ protagonists.Val Nolan, Lecturer in English and Creative Writing, Aberystwyth UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2133872023-10-04T09:14:43Z2023-10-04T09:14:43ZEverything Now: eating disorder recovery is treated with sensitivity and nuance in Netflix comedy drama<p>Netflix couldn’t have chosen a more resonant title than <a href="https://www.netflix.com/title/81437049">Everything Now</a> for their new comedy drama series. When I came out of a residential clinic in 2009 for treatment of anorexia, I did a parachute jump, started volunteering and decided to have a baby on my own. Some of these were impulsive – yet heartfelt – attempts to “catch up” on a life that had been passing me by. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Trailer for Everything Now.</span></figcaption>
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<p>This sense of things moving on while you have been trapped in the depths of an eating disorder is probably even more potent in the <a href="https://theconversation.com/eating-disorders-among-teens-have-more-than-doubled-during-the-covid-19-pandemic-heres-what-to-watch-for-201067">intensified temporal rhythms of teenage years</a>. </p>
<p>As Mia Polanco (Sophie Wilde), the 16-year-old protagonist of Everything Now, asks as the school bus conversation jostles around her: “Fuck. How can I have missed so much in seven months?” </p>
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<p><strong><a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/quarter-life-117947?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=UK+YP2022&utm_content=InArticleTop">This article is part of Quarter Life</a></strong>, a series about issues affecting those of us in our twenties and thirties. From the challenges of beginning a career and taking care of our mental health, to the excitement of starting a family, adopting a pet or just making friends as an adult. The articles in this series explore the questions and bring answers as we navigate this turbulent period of life.</p>
<p><em>You may be interested in:</em></p>
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<p>Everything Now is a thoughtful, sensitive and entertaining journey through Mia’s experience of teenage life following her discharge from the eating disorder inpatient unit she has been confined to for seven months. </p>
<h2>The image of eating disorders</h2>
<p>White, middle-class girls with anorexia have long since dominated the representation in film and TV. But eating disorders cut across ethnic boundaries. </p>
<p>Although there can never be any simple correlation between popular media representations of eating disorders and reality, they play a role in shaping wider understandings of eating problems. This includes who might be affected by them. As a result, this under-representation contributes to a culture in which people from minority ethnic backgrounds are under-diagnosed and <a href="https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/17465721211236363/full/html">less likely to access treatment</a>. </p>
<p>Everything Now should be praised for recognising that it’s not just white, middle-class girls who experience eating disorders.</p>
<p>Also, a significant part of the early plot focuses on Mia’s crush on a female student. Historically, clumsy assumptions have supposed that LGBTQ+ girls and women are <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/19419899.2011.603349?needAccess=true">somehow more “protected”</a> from eating issues than their heterosexual counterparts. This has long since been challenged. <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/eat.23830">Research</a> has shown that sexual minorities may be more at risk due to the complex relationships between oppression, gender identity and sexuality. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-male-character-on-heartstopper-has-an-eating-disorder-thats-more-common-than-you-might-think-211912">A male character on Heartstopper has an eating disorder. That's more common than you might think</a>
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<h2>Nuanced representation</h2>
<p>Everything Now is one of the first TV shows about eating disorders that did not make me cringe. It is sensitive, carefully researched and it resonated.</p>
<p>The show does a good job of exploring the complexities of recovery – a long and uncertain process that is rarely depicted, perhaps because it is seen as less arresting than the descent into the illness. </p>
<p>Switching between flashbacks of her time in the clinic and her present life at school and home, Mia’s voiceover communicates her struggles and anxieties. It also shows how difficult it is to navigate other people’s perceptions of recovery. Her grandmother, for example, bakes her a coconut sponge to welcome her home, to which Mia internally exclaims: “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” </p>
<p>Her grandma then pinches her cheek and says: “You look so wonderful, so healthy.” The implied link between flesh and healthiness can make such <a href="https://recoverywarriors.com/look-healthy-difficult-comments/">comments</a> a minefield for people in recovery.</p>
<p>Mia aims to throw herself back into adolescence, but the series poignantly explores her new status as an insider and outsider – how she is irrevocably changed by her eating disorder. </p>
<p>As the camera pans over the nibbles and drinks at a party she asks: “How can they just eat and drink? How am I 16 and I can’t just do that?” This captures the way spontaneity with food and drink becomes utterly unimaginable, not only during the throes of an eating disorder but during the pressures, regimens and routines of a recovery meal plan. </p>
<h2>Representing recovery</h2>
<p>The voiceover is particularly good at showcasing the disjuncture between Mia’s eagerness and how her eating disorder pulls the brake: “Shots, OK. At least I can track what’s in that. Maybe I can skip something tomorrow. I need to show them I’m better. That I can be normal.” She is both present and not present – one of her peers yet so separate.</p>
<p>Everything Now depicts positive moments of recovery too, in ways that are touching and insightful. As Mia walks to school for the first time, she reflects on “All the everyday beauty I forgot how to see – and all the things I get to rediscover now.” </p>
<p>While the eating disorder has made the everyday strange (the snacks and drinks at the party seem impossible) it has also made the everyday more beautiful. The scene reminded me of a quote from a student in sociologist Paula Saukko’s 2008 book <a href="https://sunypress.edu/Books/T/The-Anorexic-Self">The Anorexic Self</a>: “I used to be able to see the sky, but now I only think about food.” </p>
<p>Everything Now is an original, heartwarming and insightful story of learning to see the sky again.</p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Su Holmes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The series should be praised for recognising that it’s not just white, middle-class girls who experience eating disorders.Su Holmes, Professor of TV Studies, University of East AngliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1959202022-12-22T03:35:53Z2022-12-22T03:35:53ZPolice gun violence is glorified on screen. But more armed and aggressive policing doesn’t actually make us safer<p>American popular culture dominates international markets. Among its most enduringly successful products are police dramas and movies. Many of these feature frequent and overwhelmingly positive depictions of police gun violence – a popular example, and a favourite at this time of year, is Die Hard.</p>
<p>These works are, of course, fictions. But popular fictional depictions of policing can have real-world consequences for police and communities.</p>
<p>Our <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-13013-7_13">new book chapter</a>, published in November, argues that continued exposure to frequently repeated media tropes and narratives can affect public perceptions and expectations of policing.</p>
<p>In many parts of the world, <a href="https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1805161115">policing is becoming more militarised</a>. Even in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/sep/22/one-in-three-uk-officers-want-all-police-to-carry-guns-survey-finds">Great Britain</a> and <a href="https://www.policeassn.org.nz/news/we-need-general-arming#/">New Zealand</a>, two of the small number of jurisdictions where police do not routinely carry firearms, the appetite for armed policing has increased. This shift is justified by police in the name of ensuring safety.</p>
<p>But there’s <a href="https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-15-9526-4">no clear empirical evidence</a> that routinely armed police are less likely to be killed or injured in the line of duty, or that communities whose police routinely carry firearms are safer.</p>
<p>On the contrary: <a href="https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/vio.2019.0020">our research</a> indicates that a more armed and aggressive style of policing is associated with lower levels of safety.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"982010993197776896"}"></div></p>
<h2>Weapon product placement</h2>
<p>Most of us are familiar with product placement – the use of identifiable products and brands in media. When the products are relatively harmless, such as sunglasses or luggage, the practice is arguably relatively innocuous.</p>
<p>But there’s greater concern when the <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10641734.1997.10505056">products are inherently more risky</a>, such as alcohol and tobacco, where their use can be harmful in the real world.</p>
<p>On-screen depictions of smoking have become steadily more restricted. </p>
<p>But less attention has been given to the sponsored use of recognisable branded firearms, particularly in United States’ police procedural dramas and movies. We call this “<a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-15-9526-4_7">weapon product placement</a>”.</p>
<p>Firearms company Glock has its weapons <a href="https://features.hollywoodreporter.com/the-gun-industrys-lucrative-relationship-with-hollywood/">prominently</a> <a href="https://productplacementblog.com/tag/glock/">featured</a> in many US TV dramas and movies, so much so that in 2010, a branding website gave Glock <a href="https://theconversation.com/hollywoods-love-of-guns-increases-the-risk-of-shootings-both-on-and-off-the-set-170489">a</a> “lifetime achievement award for product placement”.</p>
<p>Product placement can have a significant and long-lasting influence on behaviours, expectations, and popular understandings. Prior to the <a href="https://www.publichealthlawcenter.org/topics/commercial-tobacco-control/master-settlement-agreement">restrictions</a> introduced during the 1990s, <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/pcn.12365">smoking on TV and in movies</a> was often synonymous with glamour, sophistication and success. US police-based dramas and movies now present firearms as essential for successful policing. </p>
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<h2>On-screen police gun violence is often revered</h2>
<p>A study of US TV programming between 2000 and 2018 found the rate of gun violence has <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33730080/">increased in popular TV dramas</a> – both in absolute terms, and as a proportion of the violence in these programs.</p>
<p>Depictions of police gun violence in US movies and TV dramas typically reflect the well-worn <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-20817967">US National Rifle Association mantra</a>: “the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun”. </p>
<p>Viewers of US police-focused dramas and movies are exposed to frequent and extreme gun violence by police officers. Much of it is presented as essential, positive and heroic.</p>
<p>But such valorisation risks eroding the public’s understanding of the crucial <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003047117-4/doctrine-minimum-force-policing-richard-evans-clare-farmer">doctrine of minimum-force policing</a>. This requires police officers to use the minimum force necessary to bring a situation under control.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/police-are-more-likely-to-kill-men-and-women-of-color-121158">Police are more likely to kill men and women of color</a>
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</em>
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<p>On-screen glorification of police gun violence can create unrealistic and undesirable public expectations of how police go about their work, and how critical incidents should be resolved.</p>
<p>Police-focused movies and TV shows rarely include realistic depictions of the consequences of a shooting, such as wounded people screaming. There’s typically little consideration of the potential for police shooting the wrong person, or a <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-13013-7_12">person who has a mental illness</a>, or a person assumed to be an offender because of <a href="https://mappingpoliceviolence.us">racial or other stereotyping</a>. </p>
<p>The human consequences of gun violence – pain, suffering, loss – are usually acknowledged only when one of the “good guys” is hurt or killed. The overall effect is to dehumanise those depicted as “bad guys” and to present their deaths as being of <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/blog/47894/the-normalization-of-fatal-police-shootings/">little consequence</a>.</p>
<h2>Excessive force</h2>
<p>Too often, this dangerous perception plays out in real-world policing.</p>
<p>In the US, <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01846-z">excessive force is commonplace</a>, and <a href="https://mappingpoliceviolence.us/">roughly 1,000 people are killed each year</a> by police officers, many of them needlessly, and some unlawfully.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-13/breonna-taylor-boyfriend-kenneth-walker-2m-settlement-louisville/101767160">Breonna Taylor</a> and <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-minneapolis-police-officer-derek-chauvin-sentenced-more-20-years-prison-depriving">George Floyd</a> are recent high-profile examples.</p>
<p>Yet <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-13013-7_16">research</a> examining public perceptions of US police gun violence has found respondents typically support the use of deadly force.</p>
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<h2>Media priming</h2>
<p>Do these media tropes contribute to a belief that firearms are central to effective policing? And do they contribute to instances of police aggression in the real world?</p>
<p>There’s no simple causal link between the fictional presentation of police gun violence and specific actions in the real world. Indeed, the effects of <a href="https://fusion-journal.com/issue/007-fusion-mask-performance-performativity-and-communication/police-as-television-viewers-and-policing-practitioners/">screen depictions</a> of police gun violence are complex, nuanced and multidimensional.</p>
<p>However, the associations between <a href="https://oxfordre.com/criminology/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264079.001.0001/acrefore-9780190264079-e-33?TB_iframe=true&width=921.6&height=921.6">media priming and copycat behaviours</a> are well documented. That is, people can perceive what they view (such as how police behave in a TV drama) as being indicative of real life, and some may even act out what they see on screen.</p>
<p>Imitation is a key learning tool. We derive such learning from many sources, including family and friends, and also broader social and cultural influences.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-kumanjayi-walker-murder-case-echoes-a-long-history-of-police-violence-against-first-nations-people-179289">The Kumanjayi Walker murder case echoes a long history of police violence against First Nations people</a>
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<p><a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-13013-7_13">Our research</a> suggests that the prominent use of firearms by police within US TV and movies, and the particular ways in which their use is depicted, can affect public perceptions and <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0093854815604180?journalCode=cjbb">expectations of policing</a>. For example, it might lead to a belief that it’s appropriate for police, in almost any scenario, to arrive with their firearms drawn and ready to discharge. </p>
<p>Despite the publicity surrounding high-profile unlawful killings, one <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0093854815604180?journalCode=cjbb">study</a> found respondents who watched US crime shows were more likely (than those who do not view such shows) to believe that force is only used by police officers when necessary.</p>
<p>Serving and potential future police officers are also viewers of TV and movies. Our contention is that the widespread and positive depictions of a firearms-focused, aggressive yet heroic style of fictional policing has the capacity to influence the way in which police officers themselves behave.</p>
<p>Ultimately, <a href="https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/vio.2019.0020">real-world evidence</a> confirms that <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13642987.2020.1811694">minimum-force policing is safer</a> and often more effective than the style of policing so colourfully depicted in US police dramas and movies such as Die Hard.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/195920/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Evidence confirms that minimum-force policing is safer and more effective than the style of policing so colourfully depicted in US crime shows and movies like Die Hard.Clare Farmer, Senior Lecturer, Criminology, Deakin UniversityRichard William Evans, Honorary Fellow, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1291242019-12-30T08:49:08Z2019-12-30T08:49:08ZDracula: free movement of vampires a fitting horror story for the Brexit era<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/307872/original/file-20191219-11939-3p89lp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=17%2C0%2C3976%2C2994&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Bloody and unbowed: Claes Bang as Dracula.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC/Hartswood Films/Netflix/David Ellis</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Fictional vampires tend to reflect the politics of the times that produce them: “Because they are always changing, their appeal is dramatically generational,” says the late American scholar Nina Auerbach in her classic work of criticism <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ILOzzQFU8ooC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false">Our Vampires, Ourselves</a>. The figure of the vampire, she suggests, always tells us as much about ourselves as it does about vampires <em>per se</em>.</p>
<p>With this in mind, the first episode of the new adaptation of Dracula for the BBC and Netflix by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss is at first perplexing. Unlike Moffat’s previous, modernising adaptations of 19th-century fiction – Jekyll (2007) and Sherlock (2010-17) – the series returns to 1897, the year in which Bram Stoker published his novel. </p>
<p>The setting is high Gothic, featuring a crumbling, eastern European castle (Orava Castle in Slovakia) and a convent full of crucifix-toting nuns. Eschewing the sentimental romance of <a href="https://www.headstuff.org/culture/literature/literature-on-film-part-1-francis-ford-coppolas-adaptation-of-bram-stokers-dracula/">Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 adaptation</a> or the wildly successful <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/nov/02/ten-years-of-twilight-the-extraordinary-feminist-legacy-of-the-panned-vampire-saga">Twilight franchise</a>, Moffat and Gatiss appear – initially at least – to take us back to the horror of the original text.</p>
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<p>But as the episode progresses the European setting becomes more than just spooky window dressing. One of the most famous arguments about the novel, first made by <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3827794?seq=8#metadata_info_tab_contents">Stephen D. Arata</a>, is that Dracula enacts “reverse colonisation” – Stoker’s vampire expresses the threat that imperialism might not be a one-way operation. From his home in eastern Europe, the count travels to Britain to buy up its real estate and add its women to his harem, bypassing the need for a passport or immigration documents and threatening British manhood in the process.</p>
<h2>‘Brexit Gothic’</h2>
<p>Seen in this light, Dracula offers a clear application to our times. In an article for The Guardian on “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2019/feb/11/project-fear-what-will-brexit-gothic-fiction-look-like">Brexit Gothic</a>”, Neil McRobert points out:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When Nigel Farage expresses concern about <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-27459923">Romanian men moving in next door</a>, it makes one wonder if he has read Dracula – the story of a Romanian man who literally moves in beside some stuffy British people.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Moffat and Gatiss are too canny to give us a straightforward metaphor for Brexit – and yet there are clear nods to contemporary anxieties in the first episode. Dracula quizzes Jonathan Harker on English language and culture out of a desire to “pass among your countrymen as one of their own”. He will be the good immigrant who assimilates, who blends invisibly with the host culture. There is a moment of discomfort, however, as he promises to “absorb” Harker – this immigrant is a parasite who feeds off its host.</p>
<p>There is no direct correlation with itinerant agricultural workers, however, as Dracula seeks to infiltrate the highest echelons of society. In a warped version of late 19th-century eugenics, we discover that Dracula’s choosiness about his victims is the secret to his vampiric success – consuming only the blood of the best enables him to retain his human qualities. Hence his appetite for the British Empire. “Vampires go where power is,” says Auerbach. “You are what you eat,” quips Claes Bang’s Dracula.</p>
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<span class="caption">Dolly Wells as Sister Agatha with Joanna Scanlan as Mother Superior.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC/Hartswood Films/Netflix/Robert Viglasky</span></span>
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<p>Moreover, this is a tale of two Europeans. Sister Agatha, the Dutch nun who questions Harker after his escape from Dracula’s castle (a significantly expanded role from the book, played with exquisite exasperation by Dolly Wells), scoffs at Jonathan’s English masculinity when he fails to realise the incongruity of a secret message written to him in English in a Transylvanian castle: “Of course not! You are an English man! A combination of presumptions beyond compare.” British exceptionalism looks set to take a tumble as Dracula reaches England in the second instalment.</p>
<h2>Dark humour</h2>
<p>The episode displays the acute self-aware characteristic of vampire films, which are what <a href="http://sensesofcinema.com/2013/book-reviews/new-vampire-cinema-by-ken-gelder/">Ken Gelder calls “citational”</a>, constantly referring to previous examples of the genre. There are multiple moments when viewers anticipating romance have their expectations rudely shattered. Twilight in particular comes in for some sharp debunking, with Mina playing the role of Twilight’s heroine Bella, appealing to her lover’s higher moral fibre and coming in for a shock as she discovers that true love does not trump bloodlust after all. Instead of Twilight’s lingering shots of gleaming male torsos we get intimate body horror in excruciating close up – a fly crawling across an eyeball, a blackened nail flaking off a finger.</p>
<p>One of the most striking features of Moffat and Gatiss’s adaptation is its humour. Comedy has always been a crucial element of Gothic literature, which continually teeters between terror and laughter. “King Laugh,” a metaphorical figure invented by Professor Van Helsing in Bram Stoker’s novel to explain his own hysterics, is a version of death, leading the characters in a kind of <em>danse macabre</em>. The novel exhibits black humour in the character of the lunatic Renfield, in particular, who calculates how many lives he can consume, starting by eating flies and trading up the food chain.</p>
<p>As I argued in my recent book, <a href="https://irishgothichorror.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/catherine-spooner.pdf">Post-Millennial Gothic</a>, a distinguishing characteristic of contemporary vampires is their increasing comic agency. The first self-conscious vampire joke is the iconic one-liner first spoken by Bela Lugosi in Tod Browning’s classic 1931 film: “I never drink … wine.” Moffat and Gatiss get this out of the way in the first few minutes – and even add a callback later in the episode.</p>
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<p>There are more zingers to come as Bang quips his way across Europe like an infernal James Bond. When Harker spots him with a glass and queries that he never drinks, I almost expected him to clarify: “Shaken, not stirred.”</p>
<p>The comparison between Dracula and Bond is not a casual one. Bond props up a crumbling British Empire – Dracula aims to infiltrate it and use it to his own ends. They emerge from the same social and historical concerns, two sides of the same coin. Both reflect us back in multiple ways, and neither offers a flattering picture.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/129124/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Catherine Spooner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The latest version of the Gothic vampire chiller is brought to you with the trademark humour of writers Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss.Catherine Spooner, Professor of Literature and Culture, Lancaster UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1194862019-06-27T11:00:36Z2019-06-27T11:00:36ZYears and Years: Russell T Davies drama gazes into near future with unmissable dread<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/281579/original/file-20190627-76734-1k73e5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Emma Thompson is populist demoagogue Vivienne Rook.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Warning: contains spoilers</em></p>
<p>Time flies, as they say, but sometimes not in the direction we would wish. That is very much the premise of Years and Years, Russell T Davies’ dystopian TV drama which has <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/what-to-watch-on-tv-tonight-years-and-years-premieres-on-hbo-etc/2019/06/21/c703ea52-92a7-11e9-aadb-74e6b2b46f6a_story.html?utm_term=.5bad8924d6e6">just debuted</a> in the US after ending its <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m000539g/years-and-years">six-part run</a> on BBC One in the UK. </p>
<p>For those who haven’t seen it, the drama follows the ups and downs of the Lyons family: gran (Anne Reid) presides over a brood of four grown-up grandchildren, their partners and assorted offspring. We start in 2019 and chart these people’s lives over the next 15 years – while glimpsing our own futures, too. </p>
<p>Births, marriages and deaths; couplings and break-ups; triumphs and tragedies – the indomitable “British Lyons” experience them all, always against the backdrop of a UK and wider world spiralling into ever greater turmoil. </p>
<h2>Futures past</h2>
<p>Years and Years squarely fits the truism that the best science fiction is an indirect meditation upon our own present and past. The Lyons live through a heightened national mood of anti-immigration that is making life hostile for refugees; a banking crisis that presages economic austerity and enforced impoverishment for millions; technology that is stealing everyone’s children away from them; and a climate crisis in which sections of the UK are consistently flooding. </p>
<p>Alongside this is the irresistible rise of Vivienne Rook, a populist politician of the far right, played to unsettling effect by Emma Thompson. The drama skilfully charts how she rises to “national character” status by baiting controversy on programmes like <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b006t1q9/question-time">BBC Question Time</a> and <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b006mkw3/have-i-got-news-for-you">Have I Got News For You?</a>, before gaining election to parliament on a wave of anti-establishment fury. She exploits and exacerbates each successive crisis before finally capturing Number 10, and ushering in a new era of authoritarian rule. </p>
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<p>That the final broadcast episode of Years and Years in the UK was immediately preceded by an impromptu BBC Conservative leadership election debate called Our Next Prime Minister must have had Davies and his production team cackling with glee – not least given the prominence in the race of Boris Johnson, one of the new breed of media-made politicians upon which Rook was clearly modelled. </p>
<p>Years and Years belongs to the same great warning tradition as works by George Orwell (<a href="http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180507-why-orwells-1984-could-be-about-now">Nineteen Eighty-Four</a>, <a href="https://observer.com/2017/05/donald-trump-george-orwell-animal-farm/">Animal Farm</a>) and Sinclair Lewis (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/shortcuts/2016/oct/09/it-cant-happen-here-1935-novel-sinclair-lewis-predicted-rise-donald-trump">It Can’t Happen Here</a>). Davies is saying that it very much “can happen here”; that far from being immune by virtue of geography or national temperament, the breeding conditions for fascism exist in the UK here and now. The chaotic conditions of the 1930s, which led to the rise of Hitler, have a 21st century mirror. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/281454/original/file-20190626-76697-hfyd66.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/281454/original/file-20190626-76697-hfyd66.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/281454/original/file-20190626-76697-hfyd66.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281454/original/file-20190626-76697-hfyd66.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281454/original/file-20190626-76697-hfyd66.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281454/original/file-20190626-76697-hfyd66.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281454/original/file-20190626-76697-hfyd66.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281454/original/file-20190626-76697-hfyd66.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The Lyons in 2034.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC</span></span>
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<p>The elder Lyons brother, Stephen (Rory Kinnear), becomes the mouthpiece for those like Davies who were born into the more stable post-war era and are unsettled about the current direction: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We were lucky for a bit … We had, like, for the first 30 years of our lives, we had a nice time … Turns out, we were born in a pause.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Standing on shoulders</h2>
<p>Davies is also a product of growing up with post-war British television, and Years and Years is steeped in references to old programme classics. Like the 1950s sitcom, it is quite literally <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048881/">Life with the Lyons</a>. Its depiction of civil breakdown nods to the great early dystopian TV science fiction of writer Nigel Kneale and director Rudolph Cartier with their <a href="http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/438573/index.html">Quatermass</a> BBC serials of the 1950s and famous 1954 BBC adaptation of Orwell’s <a href="http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/438460/index.html">Nineteen Eighty-Four</a>. </p>
<p>I can see why members of the Years and Years cast have <a href="https://inews.co.uk/culture/television/years-and-years-russell-t-davies-black-mirror-our-friends-in-the-north/">described</a> the drama as “Our Friends in the North meets Black Mirror”. <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115305/">Our Friends in the North</a>, the nine-part 1996 epic by Peter Flannery, traced a group of Newcastle friends against the backdrop of successive national and political crises from 1964 to 1995. Years and Years achieves something similar but using the future rather than the past, while echoing Black Mirror’s hit exploration of dystopian fears surrounding digital technology. </p>
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<p>Then there is the Bomb, which drops at the end of Years and Years’ first episode. The scenes of the Lyons panicking as sirens wail and the four-minute warning broadcasts across all channels must have come as a profound shock to many viewers. We are no longer used to seeing such contemporary dramatisations of nuclear warfare on TV, but we should be: the <a href="https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/">Doomsday Clock</a>, scientists’ prediction of the likelihood of global catastrophe, is now only two minutes to midnight, the closest yet to apocalypse. </p>
<p>Davies depicts Donald Trump casually loosing off a nuclear weapon against China on the eve of stepping down as US president in 2024. This is strongly reminiscent of Peter Watkins’ famous 1965 film, <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-war-game-how-i-showed-that-bbc-bowed-to-government-over-nuclear-attack-film-42640">The War Game</a>, which imagined a devastating nuclear strike on the UK after US President Lyndon Johnson used such missiles as payback for Chinese aggression in South Vietnam.</p>
<p>Watkins’ naming of a sitting US president in his own futuristic scenario was a key reason The War Game was <a href="https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/jbctv.2017.0351">notoriously banned</a> by the BBC from television screens in 1965 in active consultation with the government. It is a measure of our wearier, more cynical times that Davies and his production team have managed to evoke Trump in this context with almost no protest. </p>
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<p>Davies has himself <a href="https://www.radiotimes.com/news/tv/2019-05-21/russell-t-davies-writer-discusses-losing-his-husband-years-and-years-tv-screenwriter-interview/">cited</a> The War Game in relation to Years and Years, and indeed there is a little nod to this in episode one: the school which some of the Lyons kids attend is called Heber Watkins Lower School. <em>Heber</em> is a word sometimes used in Islam to denote “prophet”, which seems to be implying that Watkins was far ahead of his time. </p>
<p>Years and Years did not do well in the UK ratings on initial broadcast, <a href="https://www.radiotimes.com/news/tv/2019-06-19/russell-t-davies-explains-why-hell-never-do-a-years-and-years-series-2/">consistently beaten</a> by Brian Cox’s astronomy series The Planets – despite the latter being on the more niche BBC Two. With our own world going through such troubled times, perhaps many of us prefer to look to the stars for our entertainment rather than ponder depressing depictions of where we might be heading down here on Earth. </p>
<p>But Davies’ drama certainly deserves to be viewed. It looks forwards to deliver a bleak critique on where we have just been. And who knows, if that <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2018/05/31/politics/trump-tv-viewing-analysis/index.html">renowned television watcher</a> in the White House were to catch an episode or two during its current US broadcast, there is even maybe an outside chance that it might have a positive impact on history.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/119486/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Cook has received past funding from AHRC.</span></em></p>Tune in, Donald Trump: it might just save a lot of lives.John Cook, Professor in Media, Glasgow Caledonian UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1191072019-06-19T13:18:49Z2019-06-19T13:18:49ZKilling Eve, sausages and the sexual politics of meat<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/280235/original/file-20190619-171271-yl4rqh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C1985%2C994&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC/Sid Gentle/Steve Schofield</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>SPOILER ALERT: this article contains plot references to episodes from both series one and two.</em></p>
<p>Killing Eve, the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/may/12/killing-eve-takes-top-prizes-in-bafta-tv-awards-2019">much-praised BBC America thriller</a>, is remarkable for the way in which it <a href="https://theconversation.com/killing-eve-twisting-the-spy-genre-with-comedy-tragedy-and-strong-women-103809">uproots and challenges</a> many of the male-centric conventions of the spy thriller genre. And though watching the show might make you hungry with the sheer amount of food and eating on screen, what might be less obvious, is that these food choices are political. </p>
<p>Particularly noteworthy at a time in which <a href="https://theconversation.com/vegan-is-the-new-vegetarian-why-supermarkets-need-to-go-plant-based-to-help-save-the-planet-116754">veganism is growing</a> and where we are constantly being reminded that our carnivorous tendencies are <a href="https://theconversation.com/five-ways-the-meat-on-your-plate-is-killing-the-planet-761280">killing the planet</a>, is the prevalence of meat in the show. </p>
<p>In the first season, it’s “sausages galore” – with series creator <a href="https://www.indiewire.com/2018/05/killing-eve-sausages-phoebe-waller-bridge-1201968750/">Phoebe Waller-Bridge admitting to</a> “some kind of subliminal sausaging going on”. The pervasiveness of the sausage is difficult to ignore with IndieWire’s <a href="https://www.indiewire.com/2018/05/killing-eve-sausages-phoebe-waller-bridge-1201968750/">Hanh Nguyen pointing out</a> that, in half of the eight episodes in season one, “ground meat in casings” crop up at some point or another. </p>
<p>In episode four, for instance, one of the show’s protagonists – MI5 operative Eve Polastri – rendezvouses with MI6’s head of Russia desk, Carolyn Martens, in a butcher’s shop. As Eve enters, the camera pans in on the gaudy model sheep out the front of the shop to find Carolyn inspecting the sausages. Carolyn directs Eve to “take a minute” and “look at the sausages”, to which Eve replies “Okay. So … Wow, that’s a lot of sausages” as the camera gazes at the two women through the glass of the meat counter while nestled among sausages. </p>
<figure> <img src="https://media.giphy.com/media/3aYg6EBCfhZpH8n2ox/source.gif"><figcaption>Meat is murder.</figcaption></figure>
<p>In episode five, after Eve’s nemesis-cum-object of obsession, Villanelle, dismembers one of her victims, MI5 boss Frank Haleton, the camera pans to frying sausages which the assassin is preparing in her apartment. The phallic symbolism of the meat product is only enhanced by the butchering nature of the kill. As Eve declares: “She chopped his knob off.” Villanelle poignantly labels Frank “squealer” which, as well as being slang for an informer, also might be an allusion to George Orwell’s manipulative pig minister of propaganda in the novel Animal Farm. Frank is meat for Villanelle in more ways than one. </p>
<p>As <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/killing-eve-finale-spy-thriller-genre_n_5b0331cce4b0a046186ee1ff">critic Priscilla Frank pointed out</a> in Huffington Post, Villanelle objectifies her kill by dressing the dead body provocatively in a cocktail dress and laying him out on the bed of the (not so) safe house in which he is staying. Frank notes that Killing Eve subverts trends in pop culture where “body counts tend to skew female” and one of the few guises in which females are over-represented are as corpses. While Villanelle has victims of both sexes, typically it is the man who is butchered.</p>
<h2>On the slab</h2>
<p>Though the “sausage gags” – which were, apparently, “<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-48341381">a Phoebe thing</a>” – dry up in the second season of Killing Eve (where Emerald Fennell has taken over as head writer from Waller-Bridge), meat continues to play a prominent role. In the first episode of the second season, Eve feels a little queasy when confronted by a body in the morgue. After being offered water or whisky, Eve plumps for a burger: “That’s the formaldehyde. The smell of the bodies makes you crave meat.” </p>
<p>The next shot sees Eve and Carolyn finishing off their fast food meal in front of the body on the slab. And when Eve asks Carolyn how she always looks so good on so little sleep, Carolyn admits to using a moisturiser made of “pig’s placenta” that “smells like arse”. </p>
<p>However, the climax of the meat theme occurs in episode four. Villanelle, in her attempt to win back Eve’s attention, finds inspiration for her next “exciting” assassination in Jan de Baen’s painting, <a href="https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/SK-A-15">The Corpses of the De Witt Brothers </a> at The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/280180/original/file-20190619-171222-25nst0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/280180/original/file-20190619-171222-25nst0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/280180/original/file-20190619-171222-25nst0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/280180/original/file-20190619-171222-25nst0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/280180/original/file-20190619-171222-25nst0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=691&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/280180/original/file-20190619-171222-25nst0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=691&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/280180/original/file-20190619-171222-25nst0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=691&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">The Corpses of the De Witt Brothers, Jan de Baen (attributed to), c.1672-1675.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Rijksmuseum</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Johan de Wit, Grand Pensionary of the Dutch Republic, along with his brother, were <a href="https://www.historyextra.com/period/stuart/is-it-true-that-an-angry-mob-of-dutchmen-killed-and-ate-their-own-prime-minister-in-1672/">allegedly killed and eaten by an angry mob</a>. Connoisseur as she is, the work of art makes Villanelle think of bacon. Fittingly disguised in a cartoon fluffy pig head and pink Bavarian-style dress, Villanelle leads her victim with a penchant for animal fetish, into a window brothel in Amsterdam’s red light district. Here she proceeds, in a very public performance – with his wife watching from the street – to string him up upside down like a pig on a butchers hook and slit his torso with a knife. Carolyn later describes the scene as: “A bit of a butcher shop, apparently.” </p>
<h2>Getting the chop</h2>
<p>In placing a woman at the top of the food chain, as the butcherer and consumer of her kill, Killing Eve is subversive. Historically, meat eating has been associated with power and masculinity. As <a href="https://books.google.se/books/about/Meat.html?id=zbDknvICzRoC&redir_esc=y">Nick Fiddes asserted</a> in his cultural history of meat: “Meat has long stood for man’s proverbial ‘muscle’ over the natural world.” </p>
<p>Meat is, according to Carol J. Adams, author of the feminist vegan bible <a href="https://caroljadams.com/spom-the-book">The Sexual Politics of Meat</a>, “a symbol of male dominance” with the act of butchering being the “quintessential enabling act for meat eating”. Enjoying meat has been naturalised in western culture as an essentially masculine desire, and as The Sexual Politics of Meat would have it, this impulse simultaneously animalises and objectifies women, and feminises the meat product.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/meat-is-masculine-how-food-advertising-perpetuates-harmful-gender-stereotypes-119004">Meat is masculine: how food advertising perpetuates harmful gender stereotypes</a>
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<hr>
<p>In the world of Killing Eve, being the apex predator is not only a matter of overturning traditional patriarchal structures of power, it is a matter of life or death.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/119107/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ellen Turner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>What’s with all the sausages in Killing Eve? It’s a thriller that gives butchery a new meaning.Ellen Turner, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Lund UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1153302019-04-12T13:14:23Z2019-04-12T13:14:23ZGame of Thrones: dangerous world where LGBTQ characters die young or rot in jail<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/268800/original/file-20190411-44794-txz3hg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=14%2C42%2C4678%2C3081&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen in season 8 of Game of Thrones.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">HBO/Helen Sloan </span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Game of Thrones is back. The most-watched show from HBO in nearly half a century is in its home straight after seven years – and the last six episodes will be among the <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/09/game-of-thrones-how-much-does-the-final-season-8-cost-per-episode-15-million">most expensive television ever made</a>. Given the way the world of television is rapidly splintering into audiences self-scheduling their viewing across different platforms, the show’s final episode could be the last global TV mega-event. Watch it or not, you will have heard of it. And it matters.</p>
<p>It matters in terms of representation. This show will be screened in countries where homosexuality is illegal, where women’s sexual choices are controlled and where trans identities are violently subjugated. How GoT reflects sexuality and what lessons are implied is culturally important. As the show moves towards its conclusion, it’s time to ask whether, given that cultural importance, the show has missed an opportunity with its queer storylines.</p>
<p>The story’s creator, George R.R. Martin, acknowledges his general <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkNZjRoI15s">debt to European history</a> for inspiring plots and characters. At a recent fan convention, Martin <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ9BQzjEYMk">identified some specific queer icons</a> of the past, citing Alexander the Great, Richard the Lionheart, and Edward II and saying: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>If indeed those men were gay it had a significant effect upon history and it has a somewhat significant effect on the events in my book … I wanted to include the full range of humanity, including the full range of sexual preferences and sex is an important part of the books.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Knights and lovers</h2>
<p>The first big gay relationship is between Renly Baratheon and Loras Tyrell. Renly is the younger of two brothers of King Robert Baratheon, who sits on the Iron Throne of Westeros as the series opens. After the king’s death, it is Renly’s champion knight Loras – also his lover – who first puts the idea of claiming the throne into Renly’s head.</p>
<p>One of the biggest threads of online debate about the show is the way the television series deviates from the books. Loras’s characterisation is hotly contested. In the books, his sexuality is more ambivalent, his adoration of Renly more ambiguous. HBO has outed the couple, given them sex scenes and created a fully-formed relationship. But they have also made Loras more effeminate, interested only in fine clothing and fripperies. He beds almost any man who crosses his path. There’s nothing wrong in that in itself, but take away the plots that revolve around Loras’s sexuality in the TV show, and the character disappears.</p>
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<h2>A matter of tastes</h2>
<p>There is also plenty of lesbian lust blooming in GoT. Daenerys Targaryen, mother of dragons, is headed throughout the show’s long narrative to Westeros to claim back the Iron Throne that was stolen from her murderous and insane father. But, before any of that begins we see her as as a nervous virgin being instructed in how to please her man by acting out positions and intimate touches with another woman. Bi-curiosity pops out of the screen.</p>
<p>It’s a bi-curiosity that Daenerys shows again five seasons later with the show’s fully-fledged Sapphic lover Yara Greyjoy – a potential ally with a much-needed navy – in a brilliant scene where flirtation and political consummation mingle inextricably.</p>
<p>Yara is such an attractive seductress that Ellaria Sands, another potential ally of Daenerys, also comes to find her hand between Yara’s legs at one point in the political assignations, while she purrs that she’s “developing a taste for it”.</p>
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<p>Bisexuality is embodied not just by Ellaria Sands, but also by her male lover Oberyn Martell. When Oberyn is shown a line-up of women in a brothel, he admires each woman’s beauty and character before turning to the young man who is pimping them and demanding to sleep with him. Such a beautiful man as Oberyn is not met with any form of disgusted denial. The pimp/host Olyvar simply replies that he’s “wildly expensive”. Perhaps “gay for pay” exists in Westeros too?</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/268798/original/file-20190411-44776-1r8colo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/268798/original/file-20190411-44776-1r8colo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/268798/original/file-20190411-44776-1r8colo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/268798/original/file-20190411-44776-1r8colo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/268798/original/file-20190411-44776-1r8colo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/268798/original/file-20190411-44776-1r8colo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/268798/original/file-20190411-44776-1r8colo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Brienne of Tarth: woman as warrior, defying gender expectations.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">HBO/Helen Sloan</span></span>
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<p>All the worlds in GoT contain a basic gender binary. There are women who defy the gender expectations that others attempt to force upon them. Cersei Lannister, Robert Baratheon’s widow, casts off her husband’s name and claims the throne for herself. Daenerys Targaryen co-operates with her brother’s brutal murder to blossom into a leader of global proportions and Brienne of Tarth is perhaps this world’s only honourable knight. But there are no prominent characters who move between genders and no societies in which gender has broken down or moved beyond a binary opposition.</p>
<h2>Dangerous liaisons</h2>
<p>The show’s famous maxim: “When you play the Game of Thrones, you win or you die”, leads inevitably to a lot of deaths. Part of what makes the show so gripping is that any character, even the central protagonist, can be killed. And these are homophobic times. In most of Westeros, open same-sex desire is impossible.</p>
<p>So, what has happened to our queer cast? Renly Baratheon, dead. Loras Tyrell, dead. Ellaria Sands, chained up with her daughter’s rotting corpse. Oberyn Martell, dead. Yara Greyjoy, imprisoned. </p>
<p>Vitto Russo, the gay film critic, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/374224.The_Celluloid_Closet">noted a trend</a> in some film representation where the gay man is presented only to meet an unhappy, punishing and often fatal ending. Lesbian characters meet similar fates, or are raped into compliance. US academic John Clum <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Still_Acting_Gay.html?id=VWDVrJ41tfsC&redir_esc=y">observed the same trend</a> on stage and referred to it as “ritualistic purgation”. A queer character is presented simply to be destroyed, thus reassuring and reaffirming heterosexual orthodoxy.</p>
<p>A lot of heterosexual characters die in GoT. But in world where Brunei has just joined the list of pariah nations that have the death penalty for male homosexuality, a queer character’s murder might reasonably be argued to carry more contemporary weight and resonance. And the list of gay men that the show has killed weighs heavy.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/game-of-thrones-and-the-fluid-world-of-medieval-gender-40245">Game of Thrones and the fluid world of medieval gender</a>
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</em>
</p>
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<p>In GoT, we are still waiting for a love that endures, for a fully-formed same-sex relationship that offers more than a prelude to death, for a queer character who enjoys promiscuity and gets away with it, for more expressions of gender fluidity. As we enter the final season it looks like the central heterosexual characters will grab the focus. We can still hope to see some queer characters move centre screen. And, if they do, we want them to live up to the motto of House Crakehall: “None so fierce.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/115330/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stephen M Hornby receives funding from Arts & Humanities Reaesrch Council for his PhD research.</span></em></p>For all its queer characters, Westeros is a gender binary world.Stephen M Hornby, PhD researcher studying playwriting, University of SalfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1045152018-10-07T19:18:29Z2018-10-07T19:18:29ZDoctor Who: Jodie Whittaker excels and inspires as the BBC’s Time Lord<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239582/original/file-20181007-72113-19vvugx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>SPOILER ALERT: this review assumes you’ve seen the first episode of the Doctor Who series starring Jodie Whittaker, and includes detailed plot and character information from the outset.</em></p>
<p>The 13th Doctor Who, <a href="https://theconversation.com/chinks-in-the-world-machine-on-the-casting-of-the-13th-doctor-who-81116">played by Jodie Whittaker</a>, falls into this story in the middle of the action, crash landing on a train where her new companions are trapped. </p>
<p>In case you’ve been hiding on Mars (or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallifrey">Gallifrey</a>), her first appearance is given a pulse of the famous theme music for identification purposes – not that anyone in the massive earthbound audience will need much persuading that Whittaker <em>is</em> the Doctor. </p>
<p>She plays an absolute blinder throughout, ranging from quietly amusing moments such as asking to have a police car’s “lights and siren on”, through to smelting her own sonic screwdriver. There’s also some convincing stunt action on show – and a moving account of long-lost family thrown in for good measure. </p>
<p>But the classic BBC series’ new showrunner, <a href="https://twitter.com/bbcdoctorwho/status/1046733512043302912">Chris Chibnall</a> (the writer of smash-hit drama series <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2249364/">Broadchurch</a>), is preoccupied with overturning expectations in “The Woman Who Fell To Earth”. The episode begins with 19-year-old warehouse worker Ryan (Tosin Cole) vlogging about the “greatest woman” he’s ever met – but just who is she? Before long, Ryan’s grandmother Grace (Sharon D Clarke), her second husband Graham (Bradley Walsh) and a former schoolmate of Ryan’s, police officer Yasmin Khan (Mandip Gill), are united on a train that’s under attack near the city of Sheffield, England. </p>
<p>Ryan assumes that an unknown entity moving through the train carriages has killed someone. A classic Doctor Who set-up, you might think, only for the Doctor to counsel that, no, this death was more likely from shock – while linked to the alien incursion, it wasn’t intended or executed by a traditional monster. The expected storyline is quickly overturned.</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/chinks-in-the-world-machine-on-the-casting-of-the-13th-doctor-who-81116">'Chinks in the world machine' – on the casting of the 13th Doctor Who</a>
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<p>Later, the Doctor comes up with an “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0370263/">Alien vs Predator</a>”-style explanation of events, only to accept that unusually she too has got things wrong – this isn’t one alien against another, instead it’s a hunt for human trophies. And Chibnall wrong-foots viewers by depicting the character of Karl Wright, another passenger caught up in the train attack, as classic monster fodder – only to make him rather more “randomly” central to the narrative than standard conventions might dictate. </p>
<h2>Shock of the new</h2>
<p>“New can be scary”, the Doctor cautions her latest friends – while reflecting on the fact that – post-regeneration – she’s temporarily become “a stranger to myself”. And there’s a mission statement of sorts put front-and-centre, as she hails “Tim Shaw” – her name for the alien warrior chasing around Sheffield – with an inspirational account of transformative self-identity: “We’re all capable of the most incredible change. We can evolve, while still staying true to who we are. We can honour who we’ve been and choose who we want to be next.”</p>
<p>“The Woman Who Fell To Earth” is preoccupied with gender – but probably not the one you were expecting. It is sometimes less about the Doctor’s newfound femininity (which gets some great one-liners) and more about wayward masculinity, represented by both Karl and “Tim Shaw”. The former is obsessed with inspirational quotes (“I am brave”, “I am confident”, “I am special”) while lacking many of these positive qualities, and the latter is an intergalactic cheat, insecure about his ability to become a leader. </p>
<p>There is, also, a stronger sense of male vulnerability in this tale than ever before: we have the story of Ryan’s dyspraxia to follow in coming episodes and it seems unlikely that Graham O'Brien’s cancer remission will be mentioned just this once (Graham is Ryan’s step-grandad as well as Grace’s partner, and is superbly played by Walsh). </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239584/original/file-20181007-72133-ky0tha.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239584/original/file-20181007-72133-ky0tha.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239584/original/file-20181007-72133-ky0tha.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239584/original/file-20181007-72133-ky0tha.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239584/original/file-20181007-72133-ky0tha.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239584/original/file-20181007-72133-ky0tha.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/239584/original/file-20181007-72133-ky0tha.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Who are you? Grace, Yasmin, the Doctor, Ryan and Graham.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC Pictures</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>Indeed, the decision to include these real-world problems – the energetic Grace having been Graham’s chemo nurse when they first met – strikes me as a genuinely brave move for a family entertainment show, and one to be applauded. This is a grounded, challenging view of Doctor Who – one which displays its humanity not via reassuring neoliberal tales of self-celebration, but instead through a (public service) sense of needing to “work through” difficulties.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1048877164245000192"}"></div></p>
<p>However, given recent <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StuffedIntoTheFridge">debates around “fridging”</a> – the trope where a female figure (often a girlfriend) has to be killed in order to motivate a male character’s angst-filled storyline – the demise of courageous Grace feels like a misstep. Her loss leaves a symbolic gap for the Doctor to fill, perhaps – as well as a reason for Ryan and Graham to become time travellers rather than wanting to return to Sheffield, 2018. But she’s the one character who instantly feels as if she should have been a “companion” to this Doctor. </p>
<h2>Brave new Who-niverse</h2>
<p>“The Woman Who Fell to Earth” is sharply directed by Jamie Childs (His Dark Materials) and benefits from some impressive incidental music from Segun Akinola (Dear Mr Shakespeare: Shakespeare Lives). Whittaker doesn’t put a foot wrong and – with a convincing group of new friends, a brilliant cliffhanger and a showrunner unafraid to incorporate mentions of cancer, chemo and dyspraxia – this looks to be a show in safe hands. </p>
<p>Male heroics will no doubt earn an ongoing place in the new “Who-niverse” – if Ryan and Graham can be shaped, inspired and remade by the transformational zest of Whittaker’s Doctor. In time, they will have an opportunity to properly learn the lessons of human rather than Time Lord regeneration, and how “we’re all capable of the most incredible change”. </p>
<p>This is a strong opening to a new phase in Doctor Who’s history: it is accessible, bravely grounded and inspiring in its own right. The Doctor is in.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/104515/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matt Hills does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Embracing change is the theme of Doctor Who’s fizzing series opener.Matt Hills, Professor of Media and Film, University of HuddersfieldLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1031242018-09-18T06:07:15Z2018-09-18T06:07:15ZVanity Fair: Thackeray’s classic novel may be too modern for audiences today<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/236170/original/file-20180913-177956-1gzm7hy.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Olivia Cooke as Becky Sharpe in ITV's Vanity Fair.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mammoth Screen for ITV</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The latest TV adaptation of Thackeray’s 1848 novel Vanity Fair has polarised audiences expecting a traditional period drama. The first two episodes of Vanity Fair, co-produced by ITV and Amazon, received a mixed response on Twitter where viewers commented using the hashtag #VanityFair. </p>
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<p>Comments seemed to broadly fall into two camps: those who admired the adaptation for its “fresh, modern take” on a period drama, and those who didn’t like what they saw as the needless modernisation of a period drama.</p>
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<p>Interestingly, some of the features most identified as modernisations were actually from the original 1848 text: elements such as Becky Sharp throwing from her coach a dictionary she’d been given by her hated headmistress as she rode away from the school. Others took offence at Becky Sharp’s description of herself as a “secretary” – women were not secretaries at that time, one tweet protested. Meanwhile the frequent breaking of the fourth wall (Olivia Cooke, playing Becky Sharp, looks knowingly at the camera for dramatic effect) also caused a fair bit of angst.</p>
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<p>These were not features that viewers associated with the genre of “period drama” and unfavourable comparisons were made with the popular BBC period drama Poldark (based on Winston Graham’s novels from the mid-20th century). That some viewers should so easily confuse historical accuracy with genre conventions is a striking example of the power of those genre conventions.</p>
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<p>It is ironic, too, given that Thackeray subverted and satirised the conventions and tropes of his own time. This was true across his writing. In <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pendennis">Pendennis</a>, for example, a novel about the titular young gentleman making his way in London, Thackeray writes in his preface: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Perhaps the lovers of “excitement” may care to know, that this book began with a very precise plan, which was entirely put aside. Ladies and gentlemen, you were to have been treated, and the writer’s and the publisher’s pocket benefited, by the recital of the most active horrors.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In Vanity Fair, such subversions are frequent. In the first episode of the new adaptation, Becky Sharp – attempting to charm the wealthy and credulous Jos Sedley into proposing marriage – attends the Vauxhall pleasure gardens. This takes place in chapter six of the book, which Thackeray introduces satirically:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We might have treated this subject in the genteel, or in the romantic, or in the facetious manner … Or if, on the contrary, we had taken a fancy for the terrible … we should easily have constructed a tale of thrilling interest, through the fiery chapters of which the reader should hurry, panting. But my readers must hope for no such romance, only a homely story, and must be content with a chapter about Vauxhall, which is so short that it scarce deserves to be called a chapter at all.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Within the full version of that quoted passage, Thackeray offers suggestions of how the story might have been written in these different “manners”. He plays with these kinds of conventions to set up readers’ expectations, only to subvert and parody them. One of the century’s other great novelists, <a href="http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/authors/trollope/thackeray/3.html">Anthony Trollope, wrote</a> that Vanity Fair raised the fundamental question of “what a novel should be.” Trollope takes issue with some of the same things as modern viewers: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>There are absurdities in it which would not be admitted to anyone who had not a peculiar gift of making even his absurdities delightful. No schoolgirl who ever lived would have thrown back her gift-book, as Rebecca did the ‘dixonary’, out of the carriage window as she was taken away from school. But who does not love that scene with which the novel commences? How could such a girl as Amelia Osborne have got herself into such society as that in which we see her at Vauxhall? But we forgive it all because of the telling.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Same story, different flavours</h2>
<p>Like Thackeray, Lewis Carroll, the Victorian author of Alice in Wonderland, was also highly attuned to the way stories become categorised via genre, satirising this in an 1855 short story entitled <a href="https://archive.org/stream/lewiscarrollpict00carruoft#page/28">Photography Extraordinary</a>. Carroll’s story, presented like a newspaper article, reports an invention which literally transcribes narrative fiction directly from the human brain. Not only can Carroll’s machine “develop” a story onto paper directly from the brain, but the story can then be redeveloped into different genres. Story writing, Carroll seems to suggest, was a question of mechanically adjusting language to fit the conventions of distinct genres and meet readers’ expectations.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/236435/original/file-20180914-177941-1p2wkl.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/236435/original/file-20180914-177941-1p2wkl.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/236435/original/file-20180914-177941-1p2wkl.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/236435/original/file-20180914-177941-1p2wkl.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/236435/original/file-20180914-177941-1p2wkl.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/236435/original/file-20180914-177941-1p2wkl.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/236435/original/file-20180914-177941-1p2wkl.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Becky Sharpe at Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mammoth Screen for ITV</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>As 21st-century readers and viewers, we still consume media in this way. Our genres have changed – we are not likely to talk about <a href="https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/specialcollections/collectionsa-z/novelcollection/silverforknovels/">“silver fork” novels</a>, for instance – but our use of genres has not. If anything, we have only become more reliant on them as we create <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1461444814538646">more and more sophisticated algorithms</a> for organising our digital media.</p>
<p>We also risk letting our expectations shape our understanding of the past. One of the big divergences between Thackeray’s book and the ongoing adaptation is that the series’ producers have elected to depict the Battle of Waterloo. When his military characters depart for the battlefield, Thackeray lets them drift out of view, writing: “We do not claim to rank among the military novelists. Our place is with the non-combatants.”</p>
<p>Thackeray, in other words, is willing to disappoint and frustrate readers’ expectations – he does not feel the need to conform to expectations. It is – as the book’s subtitle warns us – a “novel without a hero” (and in its serial form, not even a novel, simply “<a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vanity_Fair_11_cover.jpg">pen and pencil sketches of English society</a>). But, of course, to adapt for television is to adjust the story to meet a different set of expectations. In that sense, adapting Vanity Fair is a bit like churning it through Carroll’s fiction machine one more time.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/103124/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jonathan Potter does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Many viewers think that the recent adaptation of Vanity Fair plays fast and loose with Thackeray’s novel. But the writer was surprisingly modern.Jonathan Potter, Lecturer/Tutor, Coventry UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1019132018-08-22T14:22:50Z2018-08-22T14:22:50ZThe real Emily Brontë was red in tooth and claw, forget the on-screen romance<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233083/original/file-20180822-149490-1ns34tc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights in 1847, at a time when writing was largely the preserve of men. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC/PBS</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>With their fierce, independent heroines, brooding anti-heroes and all sorts of dastardly plots, it’s no surprise the Brontë sisters and their novels occupy a special place in screen adaptations of literature.</p>
<p>Emily Brontë’s <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/18836/wuthering-heights-by-emily-bronte/9780307455185/">Wuthering Heights</a> (1847) tends to attract different kinds of film and TV adaptations to the usual polite drawing-room dramas. This is partly because Wuthering Heights is a brutal novel, despite all the romance associated with it. But it’s also down to how Brontë is remembered as an author. In this, <a href="https://www.bronte.org.uk/bronte-200/events/548/emily-bronte-a-peculiar-music/561">her bicentenary year</a>, her enduring appeal as a romanticised figure is much discussed.</p>
<p>This can be traced back to her older sister Charlotte’s own myth-making around Emily following her death in 1848. The myth of Emily relies on her image as a noble savage: a child-like innocent who had little contact with the world beyond her Yorkshire village and beloved moors. Charlotte’s defence relied on the idea that Emily didn’t really know what she was doing when she wrote this extraordinary novel.</p>
<p>It’s easy to understand why Charlotte felt compelled to defend her sister. In the 19th century, writing was still considered a masculine creative act, and taking up the pen as a woman brought accusations of being “unfeminine”. The Brontës existed in the real world and had to navigate their social reputations within it, especially if one of the aims of their writing was economic independence. But Charlotte’s defence of her sister set the scene for how adapters would later approach Emily and her work.</p>
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<h2>Bringing out Emily</h2>
<p>A good example is the <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104181/">1992 film adaptation</a> of Wuthering Heights starring Ralph Fiennes as Heathcliff and Juliette Binoche as Cathy. This version neatly does away with the novel’s complicated story-within-a-story structure and its two main narrators – housekeeper <a href="http://www.pfspublishing.com/character_analysis/2012/11/character-analysis-wuthering-heights-nelly-dean.html">Nelly Dean</a> and the pompous visitor <a href="http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=403">Lockwood</a> – and instead casts Emily herself as the storyteller.</p>
<p>Played by the waif-like Irish singer <a href="http://www.sinead-oconnor.com/">Sinéad O’Connor</a>, Emily stumbles upon the ruins of a real house while wandering the moors and, under a mysterious hooded cloak, tells the viewer:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>First I found the place … something whispered to my mind, and I began to write.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Emily as a mystical medium is the ultimate visual symbol of how authors are commonly conjured up – as divine geniuses, inspired from above. Of course this is far more attractive than showing the blood, sweat and tears that come with the real craft of writing. But there is something more going on here – something which is representative of wider cultural politics and what often happens with authors like Emily Brontë: they are turned into easily consumable, harmless, generic figures.</p>
<p>Western culture tends to invest in ideas of transcendence around well-known writers. People like to think of them as unique beings who move above and beyond their own cultural and social moments. But when it comes to Emily Brontë, perhaps there is also an unspoken desire to neutralise her complex and subversive engagement with her own world.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233080/original/file-20180822-149463-dqa3bj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233080/original/file-20180822-149463-dqa3bj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233080/original/file-20180822-149463-dqa3bj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233080/original/file-20180822-149463-dqa3bj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233080/original/file-20180822-149463-dqa3bj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233080/original/file-20180822-149463-dqa3bj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233080/original/file-20180822-149463-dqa3bj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hollywood’s 1939 version of Wuthering Heights is a strongly romantic interpretation that ignores much of the novel’s original plot.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">United Artists</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>An explosive tale, Wuthering Heights is unflinching in its depiction of domestic abuse, racism, women as property and the abuse of social power. The direct, unromantic way in which this is explored in the novel is itself threatening to the social order it portrays, and seems like a subversive act for a female author. Adapting the story as romance sells better, and plays down the book’s uncomfortable brutality, as does the idea of Emily Brontë as an “unworldly” young woman who existed outside of conventional society. </p>
<p>This results in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/aug/21/classic-novels-film-tv-eyre-wuthering">constant adaptations</a> of her novel that rely on almost identical images of natural transcendence, beginning with an image from William Wyler’s hugely popular <a href="http://www.filmsite.org/wuth.html">1939 Hollywood version</a> starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon. It shows Cathy and Heathcliff together on the moors, which seems to encapsulate for many people what the novel is about. Most adaptations <a href="https://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9780230294042">repeat this imagery</a>, but you’d have to search hard to find it in the novel, as Cathy and Heathcliff aren’t really depicted as adult lovers frolicking on the moors.</p>
<p>This iconic imagery is not just due to Hollywood creating a visual “template” for the novel through romance; it’s also the product of how adapters have woven the myth of Emily as a transcendent noble savage into her own characters.</p>
<figure>
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<h2>A more realistic Emily</h2>
<p>A notable and recent exception is <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/dec/30/to-walk-invisible-review-a-bleak-and-brilliant-portrayal-of-the-bronte-family">To Walk Invisible</a>, the 2016 BBC biopic of the Brontës, in which the sisters are shown discussing the economic necessity of becoming writers. When debating whether to take up male pseudonyms, Emily, played by a straight-talking Chloe Pirrie, says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When a man writes something it’s what he’s written that’s judged. When a woman writes something it’s her that’s judged.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This blunt assertion seems to summarise how authors of the past – particularly female authors – are dealt with: who they are as human beings and their specific cultural environment are often ignored. They are rendered harmless and powerless to speak to us in a politicised way about the past we’ve inherited, and about our own world. With Emily, the emphasis is instead on romanticising the female author as a child-mystic, rather than focusing on her fiction as informed adult social critique.</p>
<p>Mythologising an author like Emily Brontë may provide a consistent and comfortable way to “consume” famous writers in contemporary culture, but it does a disservice to the potential for a more complex dialogue between past and present – after all, the realities of power, race, gender and class that Brontë wrote about in the 19th century are still issues being tackled today. </p>
<p>The question is, in 2018, should adaptations continue to collude in the screen legacy of a “safe” Emily Brontë, viewed from a transcending distance, or could they consider a more dangerous, unpredictable Emily who compels the reader to examine forms of power and powerlessness in contemporary times? It’s time to shed the romance for the reality.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/101913/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Hila Shachar does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Cast as some unworldly young woman who wrote a 19th-century romance, Emily Brontë is more powerful and relevant than she is given credit for.Hila Shachar, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, De Montfort UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/897192018-01-16T12:39:04Z2018-01-16T12:39:04ZKiri: another unrealistic and damaging portrayal of social workers on screen<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/202045/original/file-20180116-53292-vvfglq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Sarah Lancashire (left) stars in the Channel 4 drama, Kiri. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Channel 4 </span></span></figcaption></figure><p>A child dies. A nation mourns. The professionals gather to ask how and why. The media and the public want answers, then justice. It’s sadly an all too familiar process.</p>
<p>With Channel 4’s new TV drama Kiri, the British public peek into the world of the social worker at the centre of a horrific scandal. The show is about a social worker called Miriam, played by Sarah Lancashire, and her actions around the disappearance of a child called Kiri. </p>
<p>Sadly, the first episode bombarded the viewer with a litany of potentially damaging images of social work. Miriam is seen adding alcohol to her morning coffee, sporadically drinking from a hipflask throughout the day, gossiping with colleagues, drink driving, and engaging in an inappropriate friendship with an ex-service user. Social workers on Twitter were less than impressed. </p>
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<p>What appeared to frustrate social work viewers most, though, was Miriam’s dog in the office. Perhaps a trivial point, but one which seems emblematic of how easily a portrayal can go astray. </p>
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<h2>Exploited for TV drama</h2>
<p>Social work, though a relatively burgeoning profession after it became a protected title as recently as 2005, appeared on TV screens as early as the 1960s. But portrayals, such as <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056753">East Side/West Side</a> in 1963-4, <a href="http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/jssw/vol15/iss4/7/">depicted the profession as bureaucratic and inefficient</a>. In 2016, after the BBC soap opera EastEnders portrayed an emotive scene in which a child is removed from the care of its mother, social workers <a href="http://www.whatsontv.co.uk/eastenders/eastenders-news/eastenders-lola-baby-plot-angers-social-workers-206552">took to Twitter</a> to express their disappointment at the missed opportunity to represent child protection effectively. </p>
<p>Despite the criticism, EastEnders writers leaned on the profession again to progress their plot, this time when one character <a href="http://www.communitycare.co.uk/2017/10/09/irresponsible-inaccurate-social-workers-react-eastenders-child-removal-storyline/">had two children removed</a> from her care following anonymous reports of bruising.</p>
<p>Positive representations of social work do exist – such as the true story turned 1980s film <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1438216/">Oranges and Sunshine</a> – but they are seemingly few and far between. </p>
<p>The writer of Kiri, Jack Thorne, <a href="http://www.channel4.com/info/press/press-packs/interview-with-writer-Jack-Thorne">said he was inspired</a> to “examine the pressures (social workers) are put under” after watching his mother work in the caring professions. It was a similar story for comedian Jo Brand, co-writer of <a href="http://www.channel4.com/programmes/damned/">Damned</a>, a Channel 4 comedy set in the offices of a fictional local authority. Brand <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/social-care-network/2016/sep/23/damned-jo-brands-new-sitcom-finds-the-humour-in-social-work">said</a> she was hoping to make social workers “seem like real people” and to dispel the stereotypes. </p>
<p>My own ongoing research hopes to uncover whether social workers feel that Damned, and other shows like it, are successful in achieving positive or accurate representations. </p>
<h2>Impact on the profession</h2>
<p>Poor representation and portrayal of the profession has been <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1021145713542">associated with lower salaries</a>, and poor <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.5175/JSWE.2006.200500502">recruitment and retention</a> – so it is no wonder that social workers have had enough. A 2009 Social Work Taskforce <a href="http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130321034206/https://www.education.gov.uk/publications/eOrderingDownload/01114-2009DOM-EN.pdf">report</a> described how a “culture of defensiveness … serves only to exacerbate media frenzy”, and the public image of the profession is “unremittingly negative”.</p>
<p>Despite some of the negative character flaws we see in Miriam during Kiri, she is represented as a fully imagined and complex person, struggling on. She is seen caring for her mean and racist mother, as well as her sick dog, and juggling a number of complex cases. </p>
<p>With her alcoholic tendencies and inappropriate behaviour, Miriam might not be the best portrayal of the profession, but her character bucks the trend of “child snatcher” or “child catcher”, for which social workers had become, almost exclusively <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1468017316637221">synonymous with</a>.</p>
<p>Kiri is being aired less than a year after the government’s new Children and Social Work Act gained <a href="http://www.communitycare.co.uk/2017/04/28/children-social-work-act-2017-social-work-reforms-become-law/">royal assent in April 2017</a>. The changes brought about by the law include a new regulatory body for social work, as well as a restructuring of national child safeguarding in England. Some of this has been <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/social-care-network/2017/apr/25/the-government-is-jeopardising-progress-on-child-sexual-exploitation">criticised</a>, but there is still hope that a new regulator, to be named <a href="http://www.communitycare.co.uk/2016/11/04/social-work-england-quick-guide-regulator-set-replace-hcpc/">Social Work England</a>, could be just what the profession needs to help boost public confidence. </p>
<p>Social work arguably offers a great wealth of stories for writers to weave the complex and dramatic stores of 21st-century Britain. But the depth of complexity that is the reality for social work practice is not in keeping with the momentum of an engaging drama. The pace and drama demanded by modern television has been described by some researchers as <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1468017307080352">at odds</a> with realistic or positive portrayals of social work. </p>
<p>However, in shows such as Channel 4’s <a href="http://www.channel4.com/programmes/999-whats-your-emergency">999: What’s your Emergency</a>, complex issues of the emergency services are made palatable for viewing, giving an insight into what it’s like to work in such contexts. This style and genre of reality television documentary offers the opportunity for social work to be explored on screen without reliance on the stereotypes that can be deleterious to the profession. The problem with stereotypes is not that they are necessarily untrue, but <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story/transcript">they are incomplete</a>. And social work needs and deserves complete stories.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/89719/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Robert Meredith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A new Channel 4 drama has drawn criticism from social workers for its representation of the profession.Robert Meredith, Social Work Researcher and Teacher, Keele UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/843402017-10-25T11:23:59Z2017-10-25T11:23:59ZStranger Things: inventiveness in the age of the Netflix original<p>The Netflix series <a href="https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80057281">Stranger Things</a>, which shortly returns for a second season, was the surprise TV hit of summer 2016. Fans and critics revelled in its allusions to Hollywood hits from the American 1980s in which it is set. Every haircut, every rippling synth pattern, BMX chase and adolescent gesture of friendship seemed to come from an 80s movie. Its young protagonists communicated through references to Star Wars and Dungeons and Dragons and the first trailer for season 2 shows them trick-or-treating as the <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087332/">Ghostbusters</a>. </p>
<p>So what made Stranger Things feel fresh and new? Was it somehow innovative in its referencing? It certainly wasn’t because of a new kind of aesthetic recycling, as JJ Abrams had already done an 80s Steven Spielberg pastiche with <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1650062/">Super 8</a>, and borrowing or referencing has long been prevalent in American cinema. From Film Noir’s adoption of German expressionist techniques in films like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maltese_Falcon_(1941_film)">The Maltese Falcon</a> or Touch of Evil to the postmodern genre-mashing of Pulp Fiction, Hollywood storytelling has a rich history of pastiche, allusion and homage. </p>
<p>But what happens when serial TV does this? Stranger Things featured eight hour-long episodes developing characters who inevitably cannot exist solely in the stylistic shoes of Spielberg or <a href="http://stephenking.com/">Stephen King</a>. And though the referencing is there, the immediate pleasures of its clever nods to <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083866/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">E.T.</a> or <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089218/">The Goonies</a> evolve into a more sophisticated meditation on the processes of allusion. </p>
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<h2>Nostalgia and trauma</h2>
<p>The achievement of Stranger Things is twofold. It is not just highly referential – it is actually about referencing. The series explores the way people – especially young people – communicate through patterns of reference or allusion. The programme’s retro register is also paired with an ongoing discussion of what we can see as the opposite of nostalgia – traumatic memory.</p>
<p>The casting of <a href="http://time.com/4380330/winona-ryder-comeback-stranger-things-netflix/">Winona Ryder</a> is integral to this convergence of nostalgia and trauma. Ryder’s star power was born in the 1980s, when she was a teenager, through films like Heathers and Beetlejuice. In the 1990s her screen successes were accompanied by extreme tabloid scrutiny of her personal life. This included high-profile coverage of her struggles with drugs and anxiety. Because of this public history, the casting of Ryder was itself referential, as is the casting of any “star”. </p>
<p>As Keith Reader argued in <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Intertextuality.html?id=2xcNAQAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">Intertextualty: Theories and Practice</a>: “The concept of the film star is an intertextual one, relying as it does on correspondences of similarity and difference from one film to the next and on supposed resemblances between on and off-screen personae.” So while Stranger Things’ teen drama story, centring on Nancy Wheeler, evokes the high school world of Heathers, Ryder’s performance as Joyce Byers, draws on her real life experiences. Joyce is a loving, thoughtful, single mother and a sufferer of anxiety. This is exacerbated by the disappearance of her youngest son and for much of the first series she is upset and hysterical.</p>
<p>Ryder’s performance was widely acclaimed – including by Rolling Stone journalist, Noel Murray, who <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/news/how-stranger-things-brought-back-the-iconic-winona-ryder-w433355">suggested</a> Stranger Things “brought her back”. Murray notes that the performance is powerful because the show takes advantage of what we already know about Ryder: that she is a “likeable celebrity who’s fallen on hard times”. Joyce’s hysteria certainly carries the power and authenticity of experience and it sharply juxtaposes the nostalgic innocence of <a href="http://strangerthings.wikia.com/wiki/Eggos">Eggo waffles</a> and BMX chases.</p>
<p>Joyce’s experiences are also echoed by other strands of the story. We learn that Chief Hopper is still struggling with the traumatic loss of his daughter and it is inferred that mystery child Eleven, who is the subject of sinister experiments, was taken as an infant from her now-institutionalised mother. Ultimately, Stranger Things’ nostalgic frame magnifies the intensity of its traumatic realism and stories of loss and psychosis. </p>
<h2>Navigating an ‘upside down’ world</h2>
<p>But Stranger Things is also invested in how its characters communicate through allusion. The boys, Dustin Henderson, Mike Wheeler, Lucas Sinclair and the missing Will Byers use these references to map out and understand their world – and that of The Upside Down (a dark alternate dimension existing in parallel to the human world). In the first episode we learn that they have renamed the streets of their small Indiana town using references to The Hobbit and in episode three, puzzling over the mysterious Eleven, Dustin asks his friends: “I wonder if she was born with her powers like the X-Men or if she acquired them like Green Lantern?” </p>
<p>Sometimes references serve as a code that adults and other kids won’t know – which is important as the boys are outsiders (geeks before geeks were cool). Sometimes references are charged with imaginative and emotional meaning. For example, Mike cites his missing friend’s boldness and bravery in a Dungeon’s and Dragons “campaign” as a reason for him and his friends to be brave in trying to find him in real life. </p>
<p>Literature academic and blogger <a href="https://thenewinquiry.com/author/aaron-bady/">Aaron Bady</a> has <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/stranger-things-season-one/">pointed out</a> that what makes Stranger Things’ allusions unique is that it has no “anxiety” over its gratuitous borrowing. This subverts the need “to play authenticity detective.” This is undoubtedly the case and it is striking in the world of “Netflix originals” where everything seems to be an adaptation or re-imagining, like House of Cards or Daredevil. But I believe what sets the show apart is its clever use of allusion to amplify the impact of its depictions of anxiety, trauma and loss and its exploration of allusion as a mode of communication.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/84340/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Arin Keeble does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Stranger Things is re-writing the ‘reference’ book on homage and intertextuality.Arin Keeble, Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Culture, Edinburgh Napier UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/838592017-09-18T23:14:01Z2017-09-18T23:14:01ZThe Deuce: Porn, nostalgia and late capitalism<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/186238/original/file-20170915-8108-1ppqsu7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=2165%2C310%2C2801%2C2964&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Paul Schiraldi/HBO)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>“Gritty” and “authentic” — these words of praise are now commonplace when discussing the television dramas of David Simon. And no less so with <a href="http://www.hbocanada.com/the-deuce"><em>The Deuce</em></a>, his series about the rise of the pornography industry in the 1970s, which debuted Sept. 10 on HBO. But there’s another term that helps explain the show’s appeal: Nostalgia. </p>
<p>Simon’s <em>The Deuce</em> is a searing critique of late capitalism, with the central thesis that pornography itself ushered in an era of libertarian market forces and with it, misogyny.</p>
<p>It was probably only a matter of time before high-quality television attempted to dig into the complex world of 1970s porn, a world that, once profoundly visible, is all but erased from the streets of 21st century New York City. </p>
<p>Today’s porn, now primarily based in Los Angeles, bears little resemblance to the porn produced in the time known as the “Golden Age.” Simon is riding a swell of renewed interest in this curious blip in porn history. </p>
<p>Companies such as <a href="https://vinegarsyndrome.com/">Vinegar Syndrome</a> and <a href="http://distribpix.com/">Distribpix</a> lovingly restore and re-release HD copies of classic porno of the era, while artsy cinemas such as the <a href="http://thenewbev.com/">New Beverly</a> in Los Angeles and <a href="http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=09&year=2014#day-18">Anthology Archives</a> in New York run XXX retrospectives. Showtime channel aired two seasons of <a href="http://www.cinemablend.com/television/Showtime-Pairs-Dave-Porn-With-Gigolos-Unscripted-Series-Premieres-Later-Month-36013.html"><em>Dave’s Old Porn</em></a> as well as two documentaries, <em>X-Rated</em> and <em><a href="http://www.sho.com/titles/3420285/x-rated-2-the-greatest-adult-stars-of-all-time">X-Rated 2</a></em>, that listed the greatest adult films and adult stars of all time. </p>
<h2>Understanding sex workers</h2>
<p>Marketing surrounding <a href="http://example.com/"><em>The Deuce</em></a> has highlighted the authentic portrayal of the New York City that once was, including the players that lived the golden age.</p>
<p>Series co-star Maggie Gyllenhall has been particularly vocal about her commitment to understanding the women sex workers of the time, reading <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Porno-Star-tina-russell/dp/B0000E8Q64">Tina Russell’s autobiography <em>Porno Star</em></a> and speaking with show consultant, <a href="https://twitter.com/AnnieSprinkle">Annie Sprinkle</a>, a former sex worker and sex educator.</p>
<p>Simon has repeatedly insisted <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/sep/10/david-simon-george-pelecanos-the-deuce-pornography-drama-interview-the-wire">pornography is central to problems of 21st century labour and gender</a> relations. But if we accept pornography (and the sex industry in general) is to blame for everything that went wrong with postmodern America, what does that mean for the progressive politics of work and sex?</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/186447/original/file-20170918-420-1hs30mj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/186447/original/file-20170918-420-1hs30mj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/186447/original/file-20170918-420-1hs30mj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/186447/original/file-20170918-420-1hs30mj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/186447/original/file-20170918-420-1hs30mj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/186447/original/file-20170918-420-1hs30mj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/186447/original/file-20170918-420-1hs30mj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"><em>The Deuce</em> follows twin brothers, Vincent and Frankie Martino (Franco) and street-based sex workers, Candy (Gyllenhall) and Darlene (Fishback).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Paul Schiraldi/HBO)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The show follows twin brothers, Vincent and Frankie Martino (played by James Franco), and street-based sex worker Eileen “Candy” Merrell (played by Maggie Gyllenhall). They’re looking for ways out of poverty by getting in on the ground floor of the emerging pornographic film industry. For Candy, especially, pornography is a chance to exert more control over her work by moving indoors and selling sex as a performance instead of a trade. </p>
<h2>Gender diversity</h2>
<p>Simon and his co-creator, George Pelacanos, went to great lengths to consult with sex workers of the era, most notably Sprinkle. They also hired women such as <a href="http://www.meganabbott.com/">crime novelist Megan Abbott</a> and <em>Breaking Bad’s</em> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0533713/">Michelle MacLaren</a> into significant creative roles. Gyllenhall also serves as a series producer. </p>
<p>The conscious gender diversity adds considerably to the nuanced portraits of the women characters. Candy, an independent worker, is unique among the women strolling 42nd Street, who typically rely on pimps who simultaneously protect and abuse them. </p>
<p>Yet, Candy is not the only one who sees opportunity in pornography. Darlene (<a href="https://www.instagram.com/domfishback/?hl=en">Dominique Fishback</a>), a sweet-faced young worker, feels exploited when she realizes a client is making money from a film of their date, and turns to her pimp for fair remuneration. It dawns on her that there may be alternatives to the street. Importantly, that doesn’t mean leaving sex work completely, but transitioning into other fields.</p>
<p>There is a lot of promise, then, that as the series unfolds. We will see more than the usual downtrodden prostitutes upstaged by colourful pimps and mobsters. So why suggest, as Simon and Pelacanos have, that <a href="http://variety.com/2017/scene/news/the-deuce-premiere-david-simon-maggie-gyllenhaal-james-franco-1202552037/">pornography is the driving force of 21st century misogyny</a>? </p>
<h2>Lessons on pornography</h2>
<p>Disgust toward sex work runs deep in our culture and will be very hard to redirect if the headlines about <em>The Deuce</em> are anything to go by. “Sleazy,” and “dirty” seem to be <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/24/arts/television/the-deuce-hbo-david-simon.html">popular adjectives</a>, alongside some strange longings for the era before a porn industry existed, when misogyny was a little more palatable. </p>
<p>More concerning is the claim that it isn’t pornography per se, but its co-ordination into a major media industry, that has led to the systematic exploitation of women. This is typical of contemporary anti-porn rhetoric which <a href="http://ca.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0745651933.html">combines sex panic with vulgar Marxism</a> to suggest the very act of commercializing sex causes gender violence. Such arguments contribute to the stigma that make sex work dangerous in the first place.</p>
<p>Sure, Pelacanos confides, he and his friends would drive downtown to <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/2017/09/08/deuce-david-simon-richard-price-george-pelacanos-tv-656421.html">purchase sex when they were 16</a> and engage in “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/sep/10/david-simon-george-pelecanos-the-deuce-pornography-drama-interview-the-wire">locker-room talk</a>” about women, but not as badly as kids these days do. </p>
<p>It’s not surprising many of the reviews of <em>The Deuce</em> focus on the lessons of pornography in the same way <em>The Wire</em> invoked conversations about the drug trade. But there is something qualitatively different going on. </p>
<p>In <em>The Wire</em>, it wasn’t drugs themselves as much as failures of the “<a href="http://www.history.com/topics/the-war-on-drugs">War on Drugs</a>” that were dramatized: carceral or prison culture, institutional racism, political corruption and media sensationalism were searingly depicted as the structural causes for the drug crisis. </p>
<p>Similarly, sex work rights advocates and harm reduction agencies point out the issues that make sex work far more dangerous and its representation more disturbing than it needs to be. These include: Criminalization, whorephobia, gendered poverty and <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Stigma-and-the-Shaping-of-the-Pornography-Industry/Voss/p/book/9780415821179">stigma</a>. </p>
<p>There is no question many were harmed in the early porn industry — and many continue to be harmed today. Organized crime underfunded much of the production and pocketed most of the profits. Performer pay was low, with no unionization or occupational health and safety regulations. </p>
<p>But to focus on the sleaziness of porn and not on the kinds of social forces that made the early porn industry rife for labour abuse exacerbates a titillating gaze on sex workers as objects of both prurience and pity. </p>
<h2>A turning point in misogyny?</h2>
<p>While it’s clear <em>The Deuce</em> has no nostalgia for the industry, the sentimentality comes through the claims of its creators who say the era is marking a turning point in misogyny. At the same time, they invest in the stylistics of ‘70s American cinema — an era well-documented for its own sexism, objectification and systematic discrimination of women. </p>
<p>The era of Frankenheimer and <a href="https://www.filmcomment.com/article/martin-scorsese-silence-interview/">Scorsese</a> is <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/nyregion/john-frankenheimer-dead-72-resilient-director-feature-films-tv-movies.html">known for great social commentary cinema</a>, but is hardly known for its advancement of women’s rights either representationally or professionally. Meanwhile, feminist champions such as <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0366573/">Veronica Hart</a>, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/11/movies/candida-royalle-maker-of-x-rated-films-dies-at-64.html">Candida Royalle</a>, <a href="http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/veronica-vera-and-robert-mapplethorpe-pioneering-transgender-new-york/">Veronica Vera</a>, <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv-movies/ex-porn-actress-gloria-leonard-dead-73-article-1.1601920">Gloria Leonard</a> and Annie Sprinkle found a home in New York’s pornography industry. </p>
<p>Along with many others, <a href="http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/veronica-vera-and-robert-mapplethorpe-pioneering-transgender-new-york/">they thrived personally and artistically</a>, despite the abuse and neglect they faced by systems that should have been working to make them safer. At the same time, they were honestly critical of sex work. Early on, they founded <a href="http://www.beacon.org/Sex-Workers-Unite-P993.aspx">Club 90, a support group</a>, which focused on improving both representation and workplace for women in the industry. Crucially, they built a foundation for sex worker politics to combat both the sleaze and the moral panic inside and outside the industry.</p>
<p>The global pornography industry of today is rife with the same abuses that confound labour activists across all sectors. Monopolies, outsourcing, tax evasion, digital piracy, zoning and gig economies are destroying sex workers’ livelihoods and with them whatever labour victories they had previously earned. </p>
<p>It is also creating new kinds of collectives, built on the foundations of the '70s and the legacies of women porn producers who survived. Does that make up for the misogyny? Of course not. </p>
<p>It is crucial, therefore, to distinguish between exploitative and self-determined sex work and to look for the structural causes rather than claim that sex work itself is at the root of its own exploitation. </p>
<p>Moreover, as sex worker <a href="https://medium.com/@MissLoreleiLee/dear-new-york-times-9f64155b5e19">Lorelei Lee recently indicated</a>, mainstream media might take a look in the mirror. While they borrow the voices, images, and work of sex workers for prestige, awards, and of course, money, the subjects they claim to depict remain at the margins of society.</p>
<p><em>The Deuce</em> has the talent and the expertise to do justice by sex workers. Let’s hope it doesn’t get caught in its own nostalgic gaze.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/83859/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rebecca Sullivan receives funding from University of Calgary Research Grant for project on anti-porn documentary film, Not a Love Story.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Laura Helen Marks does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>“Gritty,” “authentic” are words of praise often used for TV director David Simon: No less so with The Deuce, his new series about the rise of the porn industry in New York City in the 1970s.Rebecca Sullivan, Director, Women’s Studies Program Professor, Department of English, University of CalgaryLaura Helen Marks, Postdoctoral Fellow, Tulane UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/780462017-05-19T17:44:19Z2017-05-19T17:44:19ZDarkest taboos: how Fleabag busted unrealistic portrayals of women on TV<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/170124/original/file-20170519-12266-19zl3rt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=fleabag+images&safe=off&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiYxsLe6PvTAhVlDMAKHRj4DUAQsAQIJQ&biw=1440&bih=713#imgrc=IvDNJVB98Z1PNM:">BBC</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Cringeworthy moments, eye-watering sex scenes, gleeful swearing, naked vulnerability and vulgarity of every stripe: groundbreaking BBC sitcom <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/aug/05/fleabag-a-hilarious-sitcom-about-terrible-people-and-broken-lives">Fleabag</a> fully deserved its recent BAFTA award.</p>
<p>Fleabag (2016-) is part of an extraordinary new trend in television that kicked off a few years ago with Netflix prison drama <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/03/netflix-orange-is-the-new-black-accurate-prison">Orange is the New Black</a> (2013-). Both are shockingly stark and deliberately vulgar when it comes to exposing the taboo corners of female psychology, biology and anatomy. Both are realistic to the extent of being naturalistic in terms of visuals, dialogue and narrative.</p>
<p>This is writing by women which promises to show female characters as they really are, and not through society’s obligatory filters that exist to pigeonhole women.</p>
<p>Fleabag’s titular protagonist, played by its writer <a href="https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/fleabag-star-phoebe-waller-bridge-on-unlikable-women-and-sexual-validation">Phoebe Waller-Bridge</a> and adapted for the screen from her one-woman play <a href="http://www.sohotheatre.com/whats-on/touch/">Touch</a>, is a twenty-something Londoner struggling to find meaning in life. She is a promiscuous, pornography-watching sex-addict juggling a string of grotesque relationships and random encounters with managing a failing café business.</p>
<p>She is also trying to come to terms with the death of her best friend who committed suicide after her boyfriend cheated on her. Halfway through the first season, we learn he cheated with Fleabag herself.</p>
<h2>Defying expectations</h2>
<p>Waller-Bridge’s character comes from an upper-middle class family, but defies all expectations that normally come with this kind of background. For example, she is a compulsive liar and a thief. The stealing bit comes from a deep sense of insecurity and the need to attract the attention of her emotionally unavailable father.</p>
<p>Fleabag’s entire life is a series of shameful mishaps, ranging from taking her top off at a bank interview to stealing a statuette of a naked woman, made by her infuriating stepmother (wonderfully played by <a href="http://www.bbcamerica.com/shows/broadchurch/extras/an-interview-with-olivia-colman">Broadchurch actress Olivia Colman</a>) who considers herself to be an artist. Fleabag’s unpolished “neglected orphan” image (the opposite of what a young woman is expected to be) is partly the result of her mother’s death from breast cancer. </p>
<p>Traditionally, female protagonists in TV dramas have been “presented” to us rather than speaking for themselves. We can’t hear their real voices as they are obscured by various societal roles and expectations collectively reflected in narratives: passive, objectified sexuality, longing for a partner and a family, looking elegant and groomed, emotional maturity, readiness to provide emotional support, sacrificial motherhood, and so on. They are “clean” characters.</p>
<p>This “cleanliness” is both internal and external – the purity of character and body. A “proper” woman does not steal, or lie to your face, or swear, or talk about inappropriate things at the table. Likewise, she does not sweat or smell, does not have hairy legs, is not seen to have periods, or use the toilet.</p>
<p>Nudity on screen has become so common that it no longer shocks. Yet filmmakers are still reluctant to show a female character who wakes up looking terrible; who has spots or rolls of fat (particularly outside comedic settings). Fleabag offers true naturalism; this is what is truly groundbreaking – not the increasingly dull sex scenes involving toned bodies to which film and TV audiences are treated to every day. </p>
<p>Of course, there were the four heroines of <a href="http://www.hbo.com/sex-and-the-city/about/index.html">Sex and the City</a> who candidly discussed sex and the perils of modern dating, but they were beautifully made up, successful, and fashionable. None of them evoked associations with a “fleabag”. Waller-Bridge’s creation is much closer to Lena Dunham’s series <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/feb/04/how-lena-dunham-show-girls-turned-tv-upside-down">Girls</a> (2012-2017), but still deliberately avoids HBO’s polish. Everything about Fleabag is rough and raw, from the music and camerawork to the POV (point of view) and monologues. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/170187/original/file-20170519-12221-i2irfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/170187/original/file-20170519-12221-i2irfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/170187/original/file-20170519-12221-i2irfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/170187/original/file-20170519-12221-i2irfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/170187/original/file-20170519-12221-i2irfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=536&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/170187/original/file-20170519-12221-i2irfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=536&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/170187/original/file-20170519-12221-i2irfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=536&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Sex and the City girls: candid but glossy.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/kim-cattrall-cynthia-nixon-sarah-jessica-183449639?src=4q5sfBjQxt316s-Od6g3SQ-1-55">Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>In fact, cinema and TV are generally still operating along the lines of these stereotypes for both female protagonists and secondary characters, making any deviation from the norm look refreshingly gritty. A “proper” woman is therefore so sterile she practically smells of chlorine.</p>
<h2>Blundering and failing</h2>
<p>It is this sense of blank sterility that Waller-Bridge defies with her depiction of a blundering, failing young woman. Her hilarious asides to the camera, often including candid, uncensored remarks on uncomfortable subjects such as anal sex, masturbation and survivor guilt, show that not only she is not ashamed of her behaviour – she is proud of it.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Kr6MDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA146&lpg=PA146&dq=hyper+naturalism+in+drama&source=bl&ots=2BuQ9J4_Nq&sig=mNlQZ2q9la8DP3zPvDMM3F9qftw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjjgpaa3vvTAhUDI8AKHY4_DHQQ6AEIejAS#v=onepage&q=hyper%20naturalism%20in%20drama&f=false">hyper-naturalism</a>, which is the hallmark of the series, is the result of this pride. After all, male protagonists in TV and film have been allowed to be make mistakes for decades. Men on screen are allowed to be funny, ridiculous, ugly, promiscuous and terrified of settling down. Why can’t women? </p>
<p>When asked what constitutes the “female journey” (that is, the difficulties the female protagonists have to overcome on their path in narratives), the American mythologist and author <a href="https://www.jcf.org/">Joseph Campbell</a> allegedly replied that there was no such thing as a female journey as a woman didn’t have anywhere to go in the first place.</p>
<p>In his books Campbell explored the path of the male hero in world mythology. The path consists of multiple steps, and is full of problems to be dealt with, puzzles to be solved and monsters to be killed. A woman need not bother to activate her agency like a man would: she is already “there”, already perfect. She is born at peace with herself, whereas the man has to endure trials and tribulations to become the true hero of his own story.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/170130/original/file-20170519-12266-vmbe8a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/170130/original/file-20170519-12266-vmbe8a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/170130/original/file-20170519-12266-vmbe8a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/170130/original/file-20170519-12266-vmbe8a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/170130/original/file-20170519-12266-vmbe8a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/170130/original/file-20170519-12266-vmbe8a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/170130/original/file-20170519-12266-vmbe8a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Fleabag is imperfect and unhappy and aching to go on her own journey to fight her demons.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=fleabag+images&safe=off&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiYxsLe6PvTAhVlDMAKHRj4DUAQsAQIJQ&biw=1440&bih=713#imgrc=V5wBoAzz6laxmM:">Soho Theatre</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This view implies that a woman does not have to face the journey of finding who she is, blundering and looking for meaning through trial and error, let alone looking stupid in the process. Her chlorine perfection stays unchanged through her life and guarantees happiness – particularly if she finds the right man with whom to start a family. </p>
<p>Fleabag’s rebellious naturalism successfully challenges this vision of the female protagonist (of whom we still have very few, although their number is growing – particularly on TV). Fleabag the woman is imperfect, unhappy, itching to go on her journey and fight all sorts of internal and external monsters: addictions; insecurities; the neglectful father; the dead mother; the chilly sister; the fake pompous stepmother; the weird arsehole guy; the rude bank manager. This is her way of becoming herself, of finding her own voice. </p>
<p>At last there is a trend that frees women from the bland stereotyped portrayals of feminine perfection and the need to conform to good girl expectations. We should be grateful to Fleabag for showing female characters who are not ashamed of being imperfect and real.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/78046/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Helena Bassil-Morozow does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>BBC sitcom Fleabag rewrites the rules on depicting women in drama, freeing the female character from the mindless stereotyping that has straitjacketed women for so long.Helena Bassil-Morozow, Lecturer in Media and Journalism, Glasgow Caledonian UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/776432017-05-15T12:22:49Z2017-05-15T12:22:49ZBAFTAs 2017: BBC sweeps the board as Netflix challenge fails to materialise<p>The big question of this year’s BAFTAs was how many awards Netflix would romp home with. Most of the industry attention was focused on the way the various subscription video on-demand services have grown to prominence over the past few years and most people expected Netflix’s much-lauded £100m drama, The Crown, to walk away with a hatful of awards – after all, it dominated with five nominations, including best drama, and for three of its actors.</p>
<p>But it wasn’t to be. On the night the <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/14/baftas-bbc-has-last-laugh-happy-valley-beats-100m-netflix-drama/">spoils went to the BBC’s Happy Valley</a>, which was made on a fraction of The Crown’s budget and which walked away with best drama series, while Sarah Lancashire won best actress. Damilola, Our Loved Boy – the BBC true-crime drama, which retold the story of Damilola Taylor’s tragic murder and his family’s fight for justice – also won two two awards. It was part of a dominant night for the public broadcaster which won awards in 18 categories, putting paid to predictions that this would be a trophy year for Netflix and its subscription stablemates.</p>
<p>But these are new big players in blue-chip content and their time will surely come. Gaining millions of new viewers each year and producing ever more of their own award-winning productions, Netflix, the market leader, is <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/mar/22/netflix-amazon-sky-uk-subscribers-streaming">now in nearly a quarter of British households</a>. BAFTA’s decision to remove the rule that 50% of all funding for a series and creative control <a href="http://awards.bafta.org/sites/default/files/images/british_academy_television_awards_rules_and_guidelines_2017_0.pdf">had to come from the UK</a> meant that dramas such as The Crown could compete on a level playing field whereas previously it could only have featured in the international category. </p>
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<p>Not all viewers were happy about these changes. After the nominations were announced, many took to Twitter to argue that The Crown and others should be in a new streaming category. But I think the impact these blockbuster series are having is hard to ignore if a contemporary award programme is to stay relevant. The best must compete with the best.</p>
<h2>Keeping it nice</h2>
<p>Most of the recent controversy had been got out of the way by the night itself. There had been much comment when Tom Hiddleston, who earlier won a Golden Globe for his starring role in The Night Manager, failed to garner even a nomination at the BAFTAs. Similarly there was a deal of head-scratching that the stand-out hit series Line of Duty – which attracted 8m viewers for its final episode – was only up for one gong.</p>
<p>According <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/may/12/bafta-tv-awards-2017-who-will-win-and-who-deserves-to">to the Guardian</a>, some of the seemingly strange nominations were down to the rule that only one piece of material could be submitted by each contender. This meant that, while a one-off TV drama could be entered in its entirety, judges were only allowed to view and assess a single episode of a multi-part drama. This might shed light on why Benedict Cumberbatch was nominated for his title role in Richard III, while Hiddlestone was not – judges had only seen a sixth of his work on The Night Manager. </p>
<p>Anyone hoping for overtly political speeches in this election year would have been disappointed. One wonders whether the reports that <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-39883744">BAFTA had emailed nominees</a> asking them to offer “a short anecdote or an interesting detail about the production in their victory speeches” might have had something to do with that. As it turned out, host Sue Perkins – of Great British Bake-Off fame – had the best line of the night, introducing the best leading actress category: “This award represents what so many actresses aspire to – being paid just under the same amount as the leading actor”. </p>
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<p>Meanwhile, James Nesbitt – who presented the award – made an impassioned speech to promote the cause of <a href="http://equalrepresentationforactresses.co.uk/">Equal Representation of Actresses</a> and noted that inequality on screen (there are three male leading roles for every female role) “is an inequality that is absorbed by everyone on their screens every day”. He added: “As the father of two children - two girls - this should change.” Hear hear.</p>
<h2>Ed Balls, Gangnam-style</h2>
<p>Just over a year after BBC3 went online only, it was feared that the channel’s knack for developing such little gems as Gavin & Stacey might have been lost, but a win for its scripted comedy, People Just Do Nothing, will go some way towards proving the doubters wrong.</p>
<p>The other highlight of what was actually a fairly tame night was Virgin TV’s “must-see moment” gong which gave us, among other highlights, Ed Balls dancing in “Gangnam-style” on Strictly Come Dancing as well as Michelle Obama doing Carpool Karaoke with James Corden and the great snake vs iguana chase from Planet Earth II. Great news for iguana fans everywhere as the thrilling death chase carried off the honours.</p>
<p>So it was actually a pretty life-affirming night for those people who consider that the “entertain” part of the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/insidethebbc/whoweare/mission_and_values">BBC’s mission</a> to “inform, educate, entertain” should remain at the centre of the broadcaster’s core values. We will, of course, continue to see the rise and rise of Netflx and video on-demand, there’s simply too much money involved for this not to happen. </p>
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<p>But I went to bed happy in the knowledge that the BBC can still create vivid, powerful and popular programmes. And, of course, with the indelible image of Ed Balls dancing Gangnam-style burned on to my eyelids. And that’s going to be hard to shift.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/77643/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lyndsay Duthie does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Police drama Happy Valley beat off the challenge of high-profile streamed dramas to carry off the big prize.Lyndsay Duthie, Programme Leader for Film & Television, University of HertfordshireLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/754232017-04-27T09:10:17Z2017-04-27T09:10:17ZSpeak up! Why some TV dialogue is so hard to understand<p>Within 24 hours of the first episode of wartime drama SS-GB being broadcast <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-39038406">the BBC received 100 complaints</a>. Viewers took to Twitter to vent their frustrations with the sound. Many highlighted their annoyance that SS-GB was just the <a href="http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2017-02-23/why-does-yet-another-tv-drama-have-mumbling-dialogue--and-whats-the-solution">latest drama to be plagued with audibility problems</a>. The debate has stretched to the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-39489713">House of Lords</a>, with peers asking whether consultation with broadcasters is needed to address the issue. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"833567761519493120"}"></div></p>
<p>So is making television sound understandable as simple as asking actors to speak up? The short answer is: no. Clean recordings and well enunciated speech will always make dialogue easier to understand. However, the relationship between the audio from our television and what we understand as speech is much more complex. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/shortcuts/2017/feb/20/flatscreen-tvs-actors-or-realism-whats-to-blame-for-ss-gbs-mumbling-problem">Many news sources</a> and <a href="https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2017-04-04/debates/F84C55A0-3D8B-41F7-A19C-CC216F8C7B0B/TelevisionBroadcastsAudibility">some of the Lords</a> blamed <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/20/ss-gb-bbc-re-examine-sound-yet-mumbling-complaints/">“modern flat televisions which place more emphasis on picture quality”</a> than sound quality. </p>
<p>There is some evidence to support this idea. A recent study
<a href="http://www.aes.org/e-lib/inst/browse.cfm?elib=18436">investigating how television sets effect speech intelligibility</a> showed the frequency responses (how loud different frequencies are, relative to each other) in different television sets differed by 10 to 20 decibels. This means the low pitched, rumbling background sounds might be made louder than intended, while the higher pitched voices stay the same volume. This issue is made worse by locating the speakers in the television sets so they point downwards or even backwards. </p>
<p>Speaker quality is likely a contributing factor but not all television programmes have suffered the same complaints as SS-GB. Assuming that viewers did not exclusively watch SS-GB with poor quality television speakers, this means there are other factors at play. </p>
<h2>Have I heard this before?</h2>
<p>Humans are quite good at understanding speech in challenging or noisy situations. <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982209016807">Research</a> indicates personal and psychological factors play a role in how well we are able to do this. Similarly, these factors may affect how we hear dialogue on television. </p>
<p>For example, you might find it easy to understand Bart and Homer’s banter in your 500th episode of The Simpsons while multitasking on Twitter and making a cuppa. But when the first episode of the newest crime drama comes on, you may find that you have to sit down and pay full attention to understand the speech. How well we understand speech is effected by whether we have heard a talker, a particular accent or what they are talking about before. </p>
<p>The effect of a familiar speaker on how well we understand speech is termed the “Familiar Talker Advantage”. <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24131605">Studies have shown</a> that we are able to understand our spouse’s voice (a highly familiar voice) better than unfamiliar voices. Even voices we have <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3081685/">only recently heard</a> are easier to understand than those we are completely unfamiliar with.</p>
<p>How predictable the content of the speech is also effects how easily we understand it. <a href="http://asa.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1121/1.381436">It has been well established</a> that when we have language or content cues in the speech, we recognise speech twice as accurately, even in the most challenging of listening situations. If we hear Homer Simpson’s brazen American voice exclaiming “Who ate all the …”, our brains are likely to insert the missing word as “doughnut”, not “bell peppers”. And we probably wouldn’t even notice we were doing it. </p>
<p>Happy Valley, another drama which had similar complaints to SS-GB, <a href="http://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/bbc-bosses-blame-accents-yet-7381498">had accents pointed to as the issue</a>. On that occasion, the Lords criticised “indecipherable regional accents”. It has been shown, for American English, that <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2744323/">some accents are generally harder to understand than others</a> regardless of your own accent. Though when hearing is greatly challenged by competing noise, speech in your own accent is easier to understand. </p>
<p>Familiarity with an actor’s voice, their accent and what they may be speaking about changes our perception of the clarity of dialogue. This does not solve the issue of audibility more generally though. </p>
<h2>I’m no expert, but I know what I like</h2>
<p>Part of what makes the problem of audible speech on television difficult to solve is that there is no consensus on what “good sound” sounds like. Even among the barrage of complaints about SS-GB, some found no issue with the dialogue. </p>
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<p>Similar patterns have been seen in previous research by the BBC. <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/publications/whitepaper272">An experimental football broadcast by the BBC</a> in 2013 allowed viewers to adjust the volume of the crowd compared with the commentary. While most users (77%) agreed that they liked the personalised broadcast, they differed in their preferences. Some balanced commentary and crowd noise while others preferred all crowd noise or all commentary.</p>
<p>The technology which allowed the user to alter the sound mix in the 2013 experiment is called <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2013/05/object-based-approach-to-broadcasting">object based broadcasting</a>. In the future, this may allow viewers to alter the levels of different segments of the broadcast based on their preference or their needs on their own televisions. Studies have shown that using the technology in this way can <a href="http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7270767/">improve speech intelligibility</a>. It has also been <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/publications/whitepaper324">proposed by the BBC</a> as a way forward for improving television sound for the hard of hearing. </p>
<p>The many factors effecting speech intelligibility mean that one particular sound mix will rarely make everyone happy. The provision of “personalisable” broadcast mixes, using object based broadcasting, may be the solution.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/75423/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lauren Ward does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The problems and how we might fix them.Lauren Ward, Doctoral researcher in Audio Engineering and General Sir John Monash Scholar, University of SalfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/727642017-02-10T11:13:13Z2017-02-10T11:13:13ZTaboo: working for the East India Company could make you rich … or dead<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/156211/original/image-20170209-8643-3dy1ib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Tom Hardy in Taboo.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Scott Free Prods/Robert Viglasky</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b088s45m">Taboo</a> is dark, menacing, violent and at times shocking. In episode one of the new BBC drama we see James Delaney (played by Tom Hardy at his swaggering best), thought long dead and gone, <a href="http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2017-01-21/tom-hardys-new-series-taboo-is-brilliantly-grim-viewing-for-saturday-nights">suddenly return home</a> from his travels overseas. His arrival is dramatic, to say the least. As he comes bursting through the church doors in the middle of his late father’s funeral service, the congregation is shocked to see the returned son.</p>
<p>An aura of sinister mystery surrounds him. Where has he been? Why has he stayed away for so long? What dark secrets is he hiding – and what evil deeds did he commit while in the service of the East India Company?</p>
<p>At this point in the series it’s not yet clear exactly what Delaney got up to while away (but presumably all will eventually be revealed). We know he’s been in Africa, and at some point was involved in a catastrophic shipwreck. Among those who drowned were slaves – what was his relationship to them? There are also hints of the supernatural, perhaps linked to his mysterious mother.</p>
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<p>A key player in this intriguing story is the <a href="http://www.theweek.co.uk/80189/tom-hardy-takes-on-the-east-india-company-in-bbcs-taboo">East India Company</a>. What started as a trading company in 1600 became a powerful imperial interest, with substantial commercial and political influence which <a href="http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/The-East-India-Company/">ruled over India</a> from the late 18th century. Tales of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/04/east-india-company-original-corporate-raiders">misconduct, dishonest dealings and exploitation</a> abounded. The famous <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Warren-Hastings">impeachment trial of Warren Hastings</a> during the 1780s and 1790s reinforced contemporary perceptions of a corrupt and unscrupulous organisation. </p>
<p>Fuelled by concerns of mismanagement, Pitt’s India Act was <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Government-of-India-Acts#ref70364">passed in 1784</a>, resulting in the British government overseeing the Company’s rule in India. What’s very clear in Taboo is that the East India Company is a dangerous force, reinforced by Jonathan Pryce’s portrayal of the ruthless chairman <a href="http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1790-1820/member/strange-james-charles-stuart-1753-1840">Sir Stuart Strange</a>.</p>
<h2>The Company</h2>
<p>While the tale that unfolds in Taboo is pure fiction, there are certain elements of fact. East India Company men did indeed spend years overseas in its service. Though many perished under harsh conditions, some did return home. Even if their repatriation wasn’t quite as dramatic as Delaney’s, nonetheless, a great deal of intrigue surrounded the homecomings. These men were <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2006.00333.x/abstract">mockingly nicknamed “nabobs”</a> and were seen as different. Most certainly looked different – in the same way that Delaney’s sun-scorched skin is a noticeable contrast in Taboo, returned Company men bore the mark of their time away under tropical climes.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/156323/original/image-20170210-8634-1yw0vhi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/156323/original/image-20170210-8634-1yw0vhi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=435&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156323/original/image-20170210-8634-1yw0vhi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=435&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156323/original/image-20170210-8634-1yw0vhi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=435&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156323/original/image-20170210-8634-1yw0vhi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=547&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156323/original/image-20170210-8634-1yw0vhi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=547&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156323/original/image-20170210-8634-1yw0vhi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=547&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">East India Company men at the surrender of Tipu Sultan in 1792.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Surrender_of_Tipu_Sultan.jpg">British Library</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Looking at the surviving memoirs, letters and diaries of returned Company men, the lasting impact of the east is a running theme. Some returned broken in health and spirits, bearing the physical and mental scars of their time abroad. Others however came back with tremendous wealth generated through imperial exploitation.</p>
<p>Indeed, entry into the service of the East India Company could be a ticket to adventure and great fortune. Through office holding, administration, trade, business or high-ranking posts in the Company’s army it was possible to secure great wealth. Other money-making opportunities, such as plundering or illegal trade, were available and huge fortunes were generated. On his death in 1774, the Company army officer and administrator Robert Clive, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/shropshire/content/articles/2005/03/29/robert_clive_feature.shtml">known as Clive of India</a>, had amassed a substantial estate amounting to <a href="https://www.britishonlinearchives.co.uk/9781851171859.php">more than £500,000</a>.</p>
<p>The voyage to the east was almost always temporary – these men were sojourners, with a view to returning home, but in a better financial position. The records of correspondence held in estate papers and family collections reveal <a href="https://fournationshistory.wordpress.com/2016/09/19/welsh-identity-in-india-c-1804-1813/">a desire to return and a longing for home</a> in many Company men.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/156213/original/image-20170209-8640-1suncd5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/156213/original/image-20170209-8640-1suncd5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156213/original/image-20170209-8640-1suncd5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156213/original/image-20170209-8640-1suncd5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156213/original/image-20170209-8640-1suncd5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156213/original/image-20170209-8640-1suncd5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156213/original/image-20170209-8640-1suncd5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A fleet of East India men at sea.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_fleet_of_East_Indiamen_at_sea.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span>
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<p>Those who survived returned to Britain as changed men, bearing the influences of their travels. Some brought fragments of their lives in the east back with them, influenced by cultures, customs, even culinary practices – using recipes for dishes such as curry jotted down in pocket books. There were also those who were accompanied on the return voyage by their <a href="http://www.ourmigrationstory.org.uk/oms/migrating-home-the-return-of-the-nabobs-of-british-india">illegitimate dual-heritage offspring</a>.</p>
<p>On their return to Britain, some Company men craved a quiet retirement, supported by their comfortable pension. Others looked to invest their new-found fortunes in <a href="http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1820-1832/member/wilkins-walter-1741-1828">local business or industrial enterprise</a>. These men ambitiously sought opportunities to further increase their personal fortunes. Some had aspirations of upward social mobility, purchasing country houses and landed estates, attempting to integrate into the local landed elite. They partook in the social round, indulged in philanthropy, undertook public duties, and <a href="http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/eicah/middleton-hall-case-study/">some even secured seats in parliament</a>.</p>
<p>We know for a fact that sojourning to the east was a risky business and there was no guarantee of going home. Though not all may have been as mysterious as Tom Hardy’s gritty portrayal of Delaney, their escapades would have been no less dangerous. Perilous voyages, disease, the unforgiving climate and even tiger attacks ended many a Company man’s life. But regardless of the danger, tales of wonderful riches enticed many an ambitious young man to join the East India Company.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/72764/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lowri Ann Rees does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The East India Company offered men untold travel and riches – if they survived.Lowri Ann Rees, Lecturer in Modern History, Bangor UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/691702016-11-21T15:02:01Z2016-11-21T15:02:01ZThe Singing Detective at 30: never mind the modern box sets, here’s a true TV masterpiece<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/146770/original/image-20161121-4518-pvu95e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Time for another viewing?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelrogers/3388376575/in/photolist-6ausPJ-6aqjcp-6aqjeg-6aqjiM-6aqjhR-9waZHK-6ausUo-64qbTH-79WijU-bLY73Z-6ihLzN-mG8Jp-8nSqhy-f8EN2y-8nPfCk-8nSqjj-8nPfvn-8nSqc5-8nSq9E-9dsPvL-8nSqkU-f6EsuE-fFwvaN-3xmchn-6KrpPi-BjUGaD-AHecJr-BjUG4M-APAJJf-BhE37L-CS7FYP-CxhGsY-BhE2Um-BeqXHo-BgJGqF-CxhGH7-CVvwaN-LY2UPD-L94W4Z-LVskqd-f9o9TQ-6pymt3-Dk9kE-HbsqX-4d8DCb">Pere Ubu</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Monday, mid-November, 30 years ago, British newspapers <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JXi7AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA351&lpg=PA351&dq=%22Every+Sunday+for+Six+Weeks:+Drama+from+Heaven%22&source=bl&ots=UHTizmN5f6&sig=TU4YwIH2817ByDym6ydIgDqMFY4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi7z-fs1rnQAhXpKsAKHaSCDQkQ6AEIGzAA#v=onepage&q=%22Every%20Sunday%20for%20Six%20Weeks%3A%20Drama%20from%20Heaven%22&f=false">were hailing</a> the first episode of a major “television drama event” that had aired the night before. “Every Sunday for Six Weeks: Drama from Heaven,” declared The Financial Times. “Stunning new serial,” wrote The Guardian. </p>
<p>Those of a certain age may be disconcerted to learn it has been three full decades since <a href="https://store.bbc.com/the-singing-detective">The Singing Detective</a>, the six-part drama by Dennis Potter, was first shown on British television on Sunday nights at 9pm. It still <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20110911083558/http://www.bfi.org.uk/features/tv/100/list/list.php">frequently</a> features in “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2010/jan/12/guardian-50-television-dramas">greatest-ever TV</a>” polls. </p>
<p>Much <a href="https://youtu.be/WvQRDQ59q7Q">parodied</a> over the years, many will be familiar with <a href="http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/487877/">the story</a> even if they haven’t seen it. A middle-aged misanthropic writer of pulp detective stories, the appropriately named Philip E Marlow (played by <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0002091/">Michael Gambon</a>), is hospitalised with a dreadful disease that inflames the skin and cripples the joints. <a href="https://twitter.com/BBCArchive/status/798920714535440384">Confined to</a> his hospital bed and suffering intermittent bouts of fever, Marlow hallucinates doctors, nurses and other patients miming to the old 1940s dance band tunes from his youth. </p>
<p>In his head, he starts to rewrite one of his own old detective novels, imagining himself as its hero, The Singing Detective, striding down the shadowy mean streets of 1945 post-war London. At the same time, he delves into his own childhood memories from the same year, reliving a sexual trauma that led to his mother’s suicide. </p>
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<p>What elevates The Singing Detective is the way in which these threads gradually intersect: individuals from Marlow’s childhood memories appear in his pulp detective fantasy; characters from the detective fantasy emerge in the “real” hospital ward. Reality and imagination finally completely fuse as a gun battle takes place in the ward and the seemingly “real” Marlow is killed off and replaced with his fantasy alter ego, The Singing Detective. The writer character has used his memory and imagination to renew himself psychologically, replacing his old sick self with a more positive and open persona that can leave hospital. </p>
<p>It provides arguably the most vivid representation of the workings of the human mind ever realised on screen. “This is the piece of work I’d like to be remembered for,” Potter <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=bUeGDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA166&lpg=PA166&dq=Detective+%22It+goes+leagues+forward+from+anything+I%E2%80%99ve+written%22&source=bl&ots=qD6136ecns&sig=bBb4fe5zAPBvk3fIwjkc-NIysIc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj_-aCM2rnQAhUHAsAKHefoBIoQ6AEIGzAA#v=onepage&q=Detective%20%22It%20goes%20leagues%20forward%20from%20anything%20I%E2%80%99ve%20written%22&f=false">told The Times</a> even as the drama was still being shot by its very able director, Jon Amiel. “It goes leagues forward from anything I’ve written.”</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/146772/original/image-20161121-4515-879hu8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/146772/original/image-20161121-4515-879hu8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/146772/original/image-20161121-4515-879hu8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146772/original/image-20161121-4515-879hu8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146772/original/image-20161121-4515-879hu8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146772/original/image-20161121-4515-879hu8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146772/original/image-20161121-4515-879hu8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146772/original/image-20161121-4515-879hu8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Michael Gambon as Philip E Marlow.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelrogers/3388376575/in/photolist-6ausPJ-6aqjcp-6aqjeg-6aqjiM-6aqjhR-9waZHK-6ausUo-64qbTH-79WijU-bLY73Z-6ihLzN-mG8Jp-8nSqhy-f8EN2y-8nPfCk-8nSqjj-8nPfvn-8nSqc5-8nSq9E-9dsPvL-8nSqkU-f6EsuE-fFwvaN-3xmchn-6KrpPi-BjUGaD-AHecJr-BjUG4M-APAJJf-BhE37L-CS7FYP-CxhGsY-BhE2Um-BeqXHo-BgJGqF-CxhGH7-CVvwaN-LY2UPD-L94W4Z-LVskqd-f9o9TQ-6pymt3-Dk9kE-HbsqX-4d8DCb">Pere Ubu</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<h2>Box-set generation</h2>
<p>While “quality” US TV dramas such as <a href="http://www.hbo.com/the-sopranos">The Sopranos</a>, <a href="http://www.amc.com/shows/mad-men">Mad Men</a> and <a href="http://www.amc.com/shows/breaking-bad">Breaking Bad</a> have taken up the baton of narratively complex and layered storytelling, arguably none have quite sustained the intense interior drama and rich metaphor of The Singing Detective. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2012/feb/02/singing-detective-addictive-bbc4">According to</a> one Guardian critic writing in 2012, it makes “the best current drama look like an amateur hour”. </p>
<p>Behind this may lie the different industrial constraints of modern long-form US TV dramas. There is always a commercial incentive to keep them running for more seasons than is artistically desirable, using a soap opera-like “infinitely extended middle” of interweaving storylines and story arcs to resist the audience’s desire for resolution. Contrast this with The Singing Detective, made by the public service BBC in a very different era. The whole drive was towards final narrative closure. </p>
<p>Running for only six episodes allowed it to benefit from the intensity of a single authorial vision. Contemporary US TV dramas extol authorial vision, too, but in the form of the showrunner – the head writer-producer who creates the series and develops the main story arcs. The showrunner leads a team of writers who write individual episodes which are passed to different directors to realise on screen. </p>
<p>The experience of both creating and watching long-form TV drama is therefore very different to the traditional BBC model of one writer and one director. </p>
<h2>The best of British</h2>
<p>America’s success with long-form drama has meant British TV drama has struggled to keep up in recent years. Potter’s closest British successor is probably <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0689081/">Stephen Poliakoff</a>, writer-director behind the likes of <a href="http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/523425/">Shooting the Past</a> and <a href="http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/523442/">Perfect Strangers</a>. </p>
<p>Poliakoff is given considerable freedom at the BBC to choose his own subjects and sculpt well-crafted dramas, often exploring forgotten or suppressed aspects of British history. His current drama, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b082sy3q">Close to the Enemy</a> (BBC Two), is interestingly set in the same immediate post-war time period as The Singing Detective. Yet Poliakoff’s dramas tend to lack the passion that animated Potter’s best works – and do not have the same popular reach. </p>
<p>Nor is there much to recommend recent occupants of the BBC’s Sunday night 9pm drama slot. This autumn has featured season two of <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07pn8mz">Poldark</a>, a ratings hit – but basically safe period fare; and <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08302gm">My Mother and Other Strangers</a>, which revolves around GIs arriving in Northern Ireland during World War II. It is “an incredibly hackneyed premise”, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/nov/20/week-in-tv-planet-earth-ii-nw-my-mother-and-other-strangers-kids-on-the-edge-grand-tour-review">according to</a> The Guardian. This is typical of the reviews. Both dramas are in the tradition of escapist feel-good British drama on Sunday nights against which The Singing Detective was bucking the trend even in 1986. </p>
<p>Far more interesting is <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07xt09g">The Missing</a>, whose second series will shortly end on BBC One. It has gripped viewers on Wednesday nights and won praise for its depiction of detective Julien Baptiste (played by <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001409/">Tchéky Karyo</a>) trying to solve the riddle of two missing schoolgirls in Germany a decade earlier, after one suddenly reappears. Critics <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3945140/The-Missing-fans-forget-mystery-Alice-Webster-panic-fate-Julian-Baptiste-health-dramatically-deteriorates.html">have praised</a> the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/oct/13/the-missing-review-a-missing-persons-reboot-with-more-than-one-way-to-keep-you-awake">complexity</a> of its storytelling and the narrative’s fluid shifts between past and present. </p>
<p>Here, then, is a legacy of The Singing Detective. Potter’s experiments 30 years ago with interweaving narratives and timelines have become part of the accepted grammar of television drama today. Yet in the case of The Missing, these innovations are principally being used to refresh well-worn TV crime staples – child abduction and serial killers. </p>
<p>This is very different from how Potter escaped fixed genre to play freely with the conventions of the hospital drama, detective story, childhood drama and so on. More than 20 years after Potter’s <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-dennis-potter-1421167.html">untimely death</a> at the age of 59, it is hard to find anything on British TV today that is truly the artistic peer of The Singing Detective.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/69170/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Cook has received funding in the past from AHRC. </span></em></p>Dennis Potter’s 1986 story of a writer in need of psychological renewal rewrote the TV drama rulebook.John Cook, Professor in Media, Glasgow Caledonian UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.