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Elana Levine’s terrific new book is accessible and authoritative, of interest to anyone concerned with the study of television, and an excellent demonstration of how to handle a complex media studi...

This article examines changes in casting practices which have begun to put black, Asian, and minority ethnic actors more regularly on British screens and in more significant parts. In the context of calls for improving BAME involvement at all levels of the film and television industry, I look in particular at how colour-blind casting has begun to have an impact on British cinema. The article looks initially at how calls for the campaign for changes entwine with the British tradition of public service broadcasting and examines the socially conscious criteria for casting introduced by the BBC and the BFI in 2016. I suggest that some of the ambiguous expectations of audiences in relation to colour-blind casting are similar to the potentially contradictory aspirations placed on institutions which receive public funding. In order to examine these issues in some detail, I draw on textual and paratextual analysis to demonstrate how frames of reference for understanding new approaches to casting can be found in recent period adaptations, a British genre strongly associated with whiteness by actors and critics. The examples discussed span the decade: Wuthering Heights (Arnold, 2011), Lady Macbeth (Oldroyd, 2016), and Mary Queen of Scots (Rourke, 2018). The analysis demonstrates that while casting for the public good is becoming more common it nevertheless remains a complicated and controversial strategy.

At a time when television (TV) studies was still an emerging subject, the soap opera attracted a number of high-profile studies, largely conducted by feminists, that also set the agenda for TV studies as a whole. While the soap opera no longer finds the same level of attention, the scholarship of that time remains important to the work of feminist TV researchers of different generations. In this dossier, five researchers, three of them emerging and two of them mid-career, reflect on the importance of the scholarship to their own work and careers, how their own work expands on it and what it tells us about problems that feminist TV scholarship might encounter tomorrow.

This article looks at The Iron Lady (2011) as a biopic in which discourses of history and feminism might appear to clash but are reconciled in the figure of Meryl Streep as the star. It considers the divisive figure of Mrs Thatcher, in the context of a film which was directed, written and edited by women, and uses this to consider the approach to history in this biopic and to contribute to debates about how far the makers of biopics are free to create their own version of a historical figure. Drawing largely on contemporary accounts of Thatcher as a political figure in the 1980s, I argue that the film offers a reading of her which can claim to be both feminist and historically plausible. Finally, the article examines the discourses of characterisation, stardom and performance which allowed Meryl Streep to be so successful in taking on the role of a politician who was herself a consummate performer.

Over 20 years, the European Journal of Cultural Studies has been an important\ud resource for those writing and thinking about television, and this article reflects\ud on the rich material contained in the long run of issues published since 1998. As\ud part of ‘On the Move’, the Special Issue to mark the 20th anniversary of the journal,\ud it also introduces the special online dossier of articles on television. It offers an\ud impressionistic reflection on the author’s experiences of engaging with work on\ud television as it has appeared in this journal. In homage to Raymond Williams, that\ud great writer about television (and much else), this article focuses on three key words\ud which seem crucial to this enterprise – journal, television and European.

Long unavailable, the BBC’s 1985 adaptation of Tender is the Night has now reappeared generating particular interest in Dennis Potter’s role as adaptor. An expensive and prestigious production characteristic of 1980s television, it was nevertheless an unusual adaptation for the BBC: based on an American classic, co-produced with Showtime, featuring U.S. stars and shot in Europe. I argue that this neglected adaptation throws light on some of the key questions still at play in adaptation theory including: the different media practices in literature, film, and television; questions of authorship arising from Fitzgerald’s particular interest in cinema; the interaction between images and words. Looking particularly at the serial’s structure, its narrative voice and its handling of performance and drawing on insights from Executive Producer Jonathan Powell, I argue that it is the intertwining of the verbal and visual and the dissolving of boundaries between three different media which make this such a rewarding adaptation.

This article responds to recent shifts in television studies and argues that those developments have resulted in the invisibility of the most popular form of British programming, the soap opera. Through analysing existing work on soaps it demonstrates that a critical orthodoxy has arisen, which stifles further analysis of the genre. Drawing on a range of possible approaches - including realism, melodrama, textual analysis and the role of the family - it is argued that the genre requires a reappraisal which not only takes into account its generic development but which also acknowledges the complexity of it as a aspect of television culture.

Adaptation has been a feature of cinema since its beginning but the adaptation of classic novels has always prompted complaints about lack of faithfulness. The emphasis on intertextuality in theori...

about television and to academic research, or that soap opera should feature largely in such debates. Defining genres, marking out the boundaries and then crossing them with glee, is a practice engaged with by producers and viewers of television alike while genre definition, in a relatively new discipline like television studies, is a crucial way of mapping the field, of identifying precisely what it is that is there to be studied. The study of soap opera has been particularly important in the discussion of genres and debates about television as a whole. Firstly, defining soap opera was one way of separating the characteristics of television drama from drama in theatre or cinema and of assessing distinctions within television drama itself by setting soap opera against other forms such as the series or serial. More recently, the fictional elements in cross-generic programmes have been described by comparisons with soaps in the development of docu-soaps, for instance, and of the various formats of Reality TV. Secondly, how soap opera has been studied and defined has affected the development of television studies itself and continues to shape the way we look at certain kinds of issues. Work on soap opera allowed an entree for feminist work on television; it has also provided the basis for crosscultural explorations of considerable richness. Finally, in debates about the mass media, soap opera continues to brand television as a whole as a mass medium which produces particular kinds of products. That the term ‘soap opera’ is often used as a metaphor for rather tacky activity in other spheres – politics, sport, business – tells us something about how the pleasures and possibilities of popular television are defined. It could be argued that the notion that soap opera is fiction for women is largely a product of a particular contingency. Work on soap opera was developed by theorists with a strong background in feminist film theory in relation to a very particular mass media product (US daytime soaps) at a time when feminism was having some impact on the academic world and beyond. Asking to what extent soap operas are women’s fiction enables us to look at the various ways this question has Women’s Fiction Still? The Study of Soap Opera in Television Studies

Media studies and its related areas such as communications, cultural studies and film studies are frequently the subjects of ill-informed attack, both inside and outside the academy. This article offers a series of reflections on some of the key issues facing the subject area including its status and disciplinary formation, the tensions and possibilities of the theory/practice mix on many courses, questions of vocationalism and the views of students. Although the article tries to set the record straight in some areas, it is essentially a personal and sometimes polemical view which seeks to generate further discussion.

Stellar Encounters: stardom in popular European cinema TYTTI SOILA (ed.) New Barnet, Herts, John Libby Publishing Ltd, 2009 viii+294 pp., illus., $27.95 (paper) It's a brave book that bookends its ...

British cinema has traditionally looked to Europe for heroines who are sexually freer than their British counterparts while British politics is marked by a deep ambivalence about what it means to be European. This paper looks at the crossover between sexuality and politics by examining three British films made when the boundaries of the Cold War were being literally and symbolically drawn. It suggests that the power of the European woman depends on the way she combines sexual experience with a tragic knowledge of the Second World War, a knowledge which enables her to understand emotionally the post-war realities which escape the Anglo-Saxon protagonist. The paper argues that, while much film theory focuses on the repression of sexuality, in these films it is politics which is repressed while sexual relations are brought to the fore. British/European political relations are thus figured in sexual encounters but remain unresolved and Britain's ambivalent position on the fringes of Europe is confirmed. The question of Europe is a troubling one in British politics. It cuts through the attempted hegemonies which political parties try to build around nationality, the economy and class, as politicians call for a united British position on Europe and yet fail to achieve it. Although the questions are often posed as economic (should economic unity extend to a common currency? is Britain a net loser or gainer in financial terms?), the answers are framed in the context of a political and cultural history which shapes the terms which can be used to conceive of Britain's relationship with Europe. The question of Britain's complex cultural interaction with America has been the subject of debate in British cultural studies since its inception in the 1950s when Richard Hoggart (1958) in particular sought to define British working-class culture in order to assert its difference

The rigidity of an abstract poses problems for a piece which is meant to be a series of reflections, an invitation to debate rather than the assertion of an argument. In considering the range of approaches used by work on cultural studies, I suggest that a historical approach offers ways of teaching which can emphasize context, evidence and argument as well as personal response. While there are practical and theoretical difficulties, of which I give examples, this approach can inform textual analysis and work on audiences in a way that acts as a brake on the tendency (unhelpful to many students) for ‘theory’ to be abstract, global and destabilizing. It seems to me that given the formative role of novels as a place where our subjectivities, our very ideas of ourselves, are fashioned, any critical practice which does not find fellow-feeling with past readers and writers, however distant they seem from our own conscious projects and beliefs, is … unable to understand the historical meaning of such w...

British soap operas have a history which is rooted in realism, a strong sense of community and the serious treatment of social issues. This essay argues that in the late 90s/early 2000s British soaps have adopted a more melodramatic aesthetic with an emphasis on the isolated individual, extreme situations, symbolic landscapes and moral polarity. Following Zygmunt Bauman, it suggests that such changes reflect the feeling that the idea of society is under siege. As soap operas britânicas têm uma história enraizada no realismo, um forte senso de comunidade e um tratamento sério de questões sociais. Este ensaio sugere que, no final dos anos 90 e início dos anos 2000, as soap operas britânicas adotaram uma estética mais melodramática com uma ênfase no indivíduo isolado, nas situações extremas, nas paisagens simbólicas e numa polaridade moral. Seguindo Zygmunt Bauman, sugiro que estas mudanças refletem o sentimento de que a idéia de sociedade está sob ataque.

Described by Stuart Hall as 'one of the most riveting and important films produced by a black writer in recent years', My Beautiful Laundrette was a significant production for its director Stephen Frears and its writer Hanif Kureshi. Omar, member of a Pakistani family 'getting ahead' in 1980s Thatcher's Britain is charged to make over a rundown launderette, and in the process falls in love with the brooding Johnny (Daniel Day Lewis in career-making form). Christine Geraghty interrogates My Beautiful Laundrette as a crossover film: between television and cinema, realism and fantasy, and as an independent film targeting a popular audience. She deftly shows how it has remained an important and watchable film in the 1990s and early 2000s and her exploration of the film itself is a remarkable, original and entertaining achievement.

Finally, a word of advice for Coronation Street. Forget the social action garbage with councillors and social services. Your research is totally up the spout. Besides, if we want to be depressed, we’ll watch EastEnders.