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This thesis analyses multi-episode British drama programmes in the spy and conspiracy genres over a period from 1979 to 2010, investigating televisual issues of form and genre and interrogating a model of how television is considered to 'work through' the concerns and anxieties of the nation. Chapter One provides a literature review of the conventions of the spy and conspiracy genres. Chapter Two looks at a cycle of ‘prestige’ adaptations of spy novels beginning with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (BBC2, 1979), considering the new developments they brought to form and genre, particularly in terms of complex serial narratives. Chapter Three analyses a cycle of 'authored' conspiracy serials emerging from traditions of 'radical' television drama across the 1980s, including Edge of Darkness (BBC2, 1985) and A Very British Coup (Channel 4, 1988). Positioning them in relation to the oppositional anxieties of the era, I argue that there emerges a greater tendency for such programming to engage with topical 'headline' issues, thereby playing a greater role in television's 'working through' than the more traditional spy series. Chapter Four takes a more longitudinal approach and examines how the spy series evolved over these decades, from The Professionals (ITV, 1977-83) to Spooks (BBC1, 2002-11), finding that these also display a greater tendency towards topical concerns but that the manner in which this is accomplished is substantially affected by the series form. Finally, Chapter Five analyses a revival of the conspiracy genre in the context of the 'war on terror', considering how programmes such as The State Within (BBC1, 2006) approach the same issues as Spooks but from an alternative perspective. Across the thesis, I explore how over time the formal and generic innovations introduced at the beginning of the period of study are absorbed into and managed by existing traditions and a growing generic self-consciousness, which comes to partially blunt the process of 'working through'.

Comic mockumentaries have been a regular fixture on cinema and television screens since the early 1960s, and texts such as A Hard Day’s Night, This is Spinal Tap, The Thick of It and the work of Christopher Guest have all achieved mainstream popular success. However, current scholarship has side-lined virtually all discussion of these comic texts, which are both the most popular and the most common examples of the fake documentary form, in favour of those instances which exhibit an intense reflexive relationship with the straight documentary. This thesis proposes a critical and aesthetic re-evaluation of the comic mockumentary form, by using detailed textual analysis of a range of radio, television and film texts, to explore how they function critically and historically, and how the comedy within them works. I also argue for the consideration of the mockumentary as a genre rather than simply an aesthetic mode. My main contention is that the primary aspiration of the comic mockumentary is entertainment, rather than the construction of a reflexive critique of the straight documentary form. As a result, the mockumentary has begun to sever its direct links to documentary, and it is no longer useful to examine these texts solely in terms dictated by their relationship with documentary proper. By emphasising the role that comedy and tone play within the genre, I hope to open the form up to a wider range of critical approaches than current discussions have so far allowed. The thesis also highlights the centrality of performance, suggesting that the performative aspects of genuine musicians such as The Beatles and Bob Dylan, and the public personae of politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, are the focus of the mockumentary text. Examples such as This is Spinal Tap and The Thick of It can be seen to create an ironic critical distance, complicating the way that we understand the straight documentary through the comedic interplay of the real and the fictional.

As a Japanese cultural genre, animated works for girls serve as sociocultural texts which articulate hegemonic social norms and ideologies regarding gender in Japanese society. This thesis aims to critically examine representations of 'magical girl' protagonists in Jpanese Magical Girl TV animation programmes (anime) for girls from 1966 to 2003, and to analyse female audiences' viewing experiences and understanding of those programmes in relation to the context of sociocultural and feminist movements in Japan. By using a combined methodology of close textual analysis of six Magical Girl TV anime and of qualitative research, in which individual interviews with female audiences and a focus group discussion among girl audiences were conducted, this thesis explores how representations of Western-oriented witches and witchcraft in the Magical Girl TV anime facilitated constructions of female gender identity and idealised 'self' and how actual female audiences in three different age cohorts understood, took pleasure in, consumed, negotiated, resonated with and/or reconciled with those representations. Although Japanese witch animation texts articulated Japanese normative moral values and hegemonic femininity as well as ideal gender equality, they served as sites in which female audiences took pleasure in constructing an ideal 'self' and self-assertion through negotiating, resonating and reconciling with Western-oriented fashionable female protagonists and their lifestyle, and attaining self-expression through 'textual poaching' or exercising imagined magical transformations in an all-female or solitary environment. This thesis attempts to contribute to uncovering little-explored but important Japanese cultural texts of Magical Girl TV anime and explicate the way in which actual Japanese audiences responded to this gender-segregated genre of Japanese TV anime.

The relationship between television institutions and film in Britain has a complex history, influenced by profound changes in both industries over time. The involvement of public service broadcasters (PSBs) in British cinema has been a regularly-acknowledged, but under-examined phenomenon. There is a dearth of up-to-date scholarship dealing with the relationship, particularly as it unfolded over the turbulent decades of the 1990s and 2000s. This thesis updates and expands the existing field on the relationship between British television and film cultures. It does so by examining the ways in which PSBs have been involved in film culture, as producers, distributors and exhibitors. It also discusses the significant changes to this relationship wrought by the coming into dominance of digital technologies, and the responses of the PSBs to digitalisation. The body of the thesis is separated into two parts. Part One examines the relationship between television and film at the end of the analogue era, ending roughly in 2002. The first chapter explores the historical background to television films in Britain, discussing the semantic turn from describing single dramas shown on television as ‘plays’ and ‘films’. The second chapter outlines three case studies which explore the relationship between television and distribution. The third chapter discusses the industrial relationship between film and television, and the distinct discourses of ‘quality’ applied to each form. The second part of the thesis discusses the effects of digital technologies on the PSB’s role as producer, distributor and exhibitor of films. Chapter Four explores the position of the PSB as patron of low-budget, digital production schemes. In Chapter Five, the opening night and subsequent decade of broadcasting on the FilmFour digital television channel is analysed. Chapter Six takes as its subject the online film output of the BBC, particularly via its iPlayer platform, and its short film distribution network, the BBC Film Network.

This thesis examines the impact of writers, producers and directors on programming and production in several periods of US television drama history. I address the role authorship plays in shaping US television drama aesthetics and how creativity functions within its production cultures. I also address the personalisation of programmes through media and textual visibility and the place of authorship within the commercial and industrial contexts of US network television. My methodology involves textual analysis of a large viewing sample of programmes and a combination of archival research into original production documentation and analysis of US TV coverage in newspapers, magazines and trade journals. The thesis is divided into four case studies, each looking at the spaces for authorship, creativity and personalisation in key historical moments of US TV drama production and programming: early 1950s anthology writers, producers and directors (e.g. Paddy Chayefsky, Fred Coe, Delbert Mann); anthology producer-hosts of the late 1950s (e.g. Rod Serling, Alfred Hitchcock); executive producers of the 1980s-2000s (e.g. Steven Bochco, Jerry Bruckheimer); and guest writers and secondary producers in the 1980s-2000s (e.g. David Mamet, David Chase). The thesis aims to debunk the critical notion that authorship is present only in boutique quality television or that authorship is purely an invention of branding strategies and suggests new formulations of US TV authorship specific to historical production contexts. The thesis extends the author paradigm to include multiple authorship and a range of production roles and also revises several historiographical assumptions about authorship, programming and production. The thesis offers a model of authorship studies in television studies which frees authorship from quality prescription. It addresses the issue of industrial collaboration and incorporates it into our understanding of TV authorship. I relocate authorship studies from cultural mythology to aesthetics and production analysis, and provide more medium and industrial specificity.

This thesis examines the spaces of urban-industrial northern England within the context of post-industrial change. This work combines close textual analysis and an interdisciplinary approach, which includes an examination of sociological, economic and political contexts relating to de-industrialisation and the growth of the service economy. The thesis is organised into four chapters, each dealing with a different manifestation of northern space, including ‘The Red-Brick Terraced Street’, ‘The Council Estate’, ‘The Mill and the Mosque’, and ‘The Gentrified North’. I argue that within a range of texts, the representation of northern space reflects the fragmentation that is a key feature of both the post-industrial experience. Furthermore, it is argued that the gendered balance of northern representation has shifted, spatially and generically, back towards a feminine paradigm. Contrary to surface appearances, it is also argued that important elements of traditional hegemonic representations of northern space are seen to persist within the spaces of the new despite the fragmentation that characterises the post-industrial era.

The impetus for this project was to consider how the digitalisation of television stood as an important moment to re-evaluate key concepts and debates within television studies. To this end, my focus is on public service broadcasting and television studies' textual tradition. I examine how linear models of the television text are challenged, usurped and at times reinforced by interactive television's emergent non-linear, personalisable forms. In so doing, I am concerned to analyse interactive television's textual structures in relation to the BBC's position as a public service broadcaster in the digital television age. Across these two concerns I aim to historicise the moment of digitalisation, drawing on longer positionings of television's technological and cultural form as a 'window-on-the-world'. An introduction is followed by section 1 of the thesis that includes a review of key literature in the field, focusing particularly on work on the 'text' of television studies. The chapters in section 1 mix this review with an historical argument that understand the current digital television era as one of 'excess', placing television at the boundaries of new and old media concerns that can be usefully understood through the presence of a dialectic between television's position as window-on-the-world and its emergent position as 'portal'. Section 1 demonstrates how this dialectic is called up by the prominence of discourses of 'choice' in new media practices and textualities and, more importantly, the debates about public service broadcasting's role in the digital age. As I go on to show in section 2, this dialectic evidences a tension between the 'imaginative journeys' television's window offers and the way in which these are then 'rationalised'. The second half of the thesis maps out emergent textual forms of interactive television by analysing the way choice and mobility are structured, providing a series of case studies in non-fiction television genres. Chapter 4 demonstrates the persistence of key discourses subsumed within the window-on-the-world metaphor in the formation and 'everydaying' of interactive television, elucidating key institutional and gendered tensions in the way these discourses are mobilised in the digital age. In turn, Chapter 5 connects the kinds of mobility promised by interactive television's window to longer historical practices of public institutions regulating spectator movement. Chapter 6 examines how television's window has been explicitly remediated by interactive television, placing it within the 'database' ontologies of computing. Finally Chapter 7 demonstrates the way in which television's window increasingly comes to function as a portal through which to access digital media spaces, such as the Internet. Across the chapters I am concerned to connect the textual and discursive form of each case study to the academic debates and public service concerns of the various applications' generic identity. Although I am interested in the challenges television's digitalisation poses to both public service broadcasting and traditional television studies approaches to the text, a more important motivation has been to re-affirm the role of both in the digital television landscape. Thus through close textual analysis that connects aesthetics with production and regulation, the thesis aims to demonstrate the relevance of television studies and the BBC, as a public service broadcaster, as an 'old media' becomes a 'new' one.