Chapter 5: 'MRS KNIGHT MUST BE BALANCED'

In this article, the author provides information about his research regarding methodological problems in researching early British television. He informs that in Great Britain, commercial broadcasting began in September 1955. Televisual news, in a form that one would recognize today, only began in the mid- 1950s. By the mid-1960s, however, there was a multi-channel operation, schedules and genres had settled into a form not dissimilar to that which we enjoy today, and audiences had come to accept television as primary in the routines of daily life. During this formative period the institution necessarily addressed an audience including women, indeed women were acknowledged to be central to the project of inserting television into domestic spaces and routines yet at the same time the female presence on screen was carefully contained. In this context he states about "punctum." By this, he meant a sentence, a remark, possibly an image or an intonation which was innocently offered, but which seemed to the author to reference assumptions which he found contentious and which, therefore, he understands to have been made strange by the passing of time, by history.