The Universe will be televised: space,science, satellites and British television production, 1946–1969

This essay uses material from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) archives to show how space-related technoscientific activities played a key role in the development of BBC television. The essay focuses on a crucial period when this influential cultural institution transitioned away from radio as their primary broadcast medium in the 1930s and 1940s to reluctantly embrace television in the 1950s and 1960s. Space-related activities, including astronomy, cosmology, rocketry, aerospace engineering, astrophysics and interplanetary research, played a key role in the modernization of BBC television broadcasting in two intersecting ways. Space-related material provided informative, yet popular, programmatic material that helped BBC television compete in an increasingly commercialized media market, and, later, space projects supplied technologies that impacted on the mechanics of broadcast production and transmission. The profile and prestige of space as a topic, in particular, its visuality, the drama of exploration it presented, and its association with celebrity scientists like Bernard Lovell and Fred Hoyle, meant that such programming became a crucial business asset for the BBC and a professional asset for ambitious producers who saw its commercial potential. Following the launch of Sputnik in 1957, space technology became further intertwined with the development of British broadcasting as the fields of satellite communications and broadcasting transmissions infrastructure converged. In particular, BBC producers promoted the potential development of communication satellites within their television programming by portraying such satellites as plausible and necessary for the advancement of civilization, and most crucially, as a prospective British Space Race achievement.     

Contemporary Social Change as the Context for Geographical Enquiry: Towards a Reinvigoration of the Concept of Place

The nature of contemporary social change is explored by posing questions about the implications of neoliberalism, the character of leisure, the perils of materialism, and the shift from consumption to consumerism. Momentum is a powerful force in human affairs. Investigating its nature illustrates how the concept of equilibrium has been given undue emphasis in models of human behaviour. Momentum encourages ‘more of the same’ and is implicated in the way people fail to use leisure fully or effectively and in the way they subscribe to an emphasis on materialism and consumption as a path to happiness. Geography needs to engage with popular social scientific writing if it is to have a place in public intellectual debate. In many ways contemporary social change promises a reinvigoration of the concept of place and therefore challenges to both the substance and nature of geographical inquiry.     

‘This is disco-wonderland!’ Gender,sexuality and the limits of gay domesticity on The Block

Gay men have been positioned as arbiters of ‘desirable’ domestic style—a domestic imaginary epitomised through their presence as designers and participants on lifestyle television. This paper offers a post-structural critique, examining how the intersections of gender and sexuality shape the contours of, and public responses to, gay domesticity. I scrutinise one telling example: commentaries on the domestic design created by a gay couple on The Block, an Australian lifestyle-reality programme. Applying discourse analysis to the public reception of their design, I argue the acceptability of gay domesticity is proscribed by norms of sexuality and gender, and consequently gay domesticity must be understood in both normatively feminine and masculine terms. While the desirability of gay domesticity reflects a feminisation of gay men, it is also constrained by processes of masculinisation that associate gay men's domestic tastes with Playboy-style bachelor domesticity. Through bachelor domesticity, tropes of partying and seduction undermine traditional feminine homemaking and the heteronormative ideology of home championing privatised nuclear family life. Scrutinising the intersections of gender and sexuality thus reveals limits to gay domesticity, with implications for the cultural politics around mainstream acceptance of gay masculinity: gay men and their homes are welcome when they reinforce heteronormative ideals.     

A quota for the outsourcing of television programmes: an economic analysis of its effectiveness

A European Directive stipulates that at least 10% of programmes broadcast by each European broadcaster must be produced by an independent producer. By stimulating independent productions the European Union and the Dutch government aim to improve the quality of television programmes. In 1997, the Netherlands increased this requirement to 25%. This paper evaluates the policy, using a unique Dutch dataset that includes all independent productions appearing on public television from 1996 until 2000. We show that: (i) the producers are highly specialised; (ii) programming is volatile; (iii) entry of new firms is substantially reducing average rates of turnover; (iv) the producers who lobbied for the higher quota were losing market share and were relatively well‐organised. Therefore, the outsourcing requirement does not lead to the desired levels of stable production by individual producers and it is unlikely to be an effective instrument.     

The creation of shared space and the definition of a ‘light’ community in Italian television in the 1980s

In the mid-1970s the reform of Italy's radio and television system led to the end of RAI's monopoly and the advent of commercial television stations. This resulted in a reorganisation of the system according to the precepts of daily life and domesticity, with viewers at the centre of the relationship with the medium. This article, by analysing televisual archives such as game shows, explores how television formed part of the changes taking place in society and reveals how it became a kind of meeting-place, coinciding with the rise of an affluent society, between aspirations and desires and stereotypical models dictated by the market. These models were able to express new values that went beyond the boundaries of ideological affiliations and were in effect a response to the search for new forms of identity. In particular, television's place became an open space that was defined through modes of socialisation. It thus constructed a wider intimacy, a ‘mediatised hearth’, that progressively eroded the barriers between the private and the public sphere and led unexpectedly towards a ‘relationship of interest’ between television, competitors, viewers and financial backers. A new community then emerged, characterised more by possessing than by existing.     

Television documentary,history and memory. An analysis of Sergio Zavoli's The Gardens of Abel

This article examines a celebrated documentary made for Italian state TV in 1968 and transmitted in 1969 to an audience of millions. The programme – The Gardens of Abel – looked at changes introduced by the radical psychiatrist Franco Basaglia in an asylum in the north-east of Italy (Gorizia). The article examines the content of this programme for the first time, questions some of the claims that have been made for it, and outlines the sources used by the director, Sergio Zavoli. The article argues that the film was as much an expression of Zavoli's vision and ideas as it was linked to those of Franco Basaglia himself. Finally, the article highlights the way that this programme has become part of historical discourse and popular memory.     

UNDERPOPULATION, TELEVISION ECONOMIES, AND THE POWER OF THE GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINATION

This article addresses the power of popular geographical ‘imaginations’ and ‘knowledges’ to foreclose public debate and, in the process, to reinforce often contentious policies or practices. It argues that historically, a prominent example of such a powerful geographical knowledge has been that of ‘ overpopulation’. The concept of ‘underpopulation’, meanwhile, has been much less discussed, but in this article I argue that it, too, needs to be queried in much the same way that critics have examined claims of overpopulation. I make this case first at a generic level, describing some of the main situations in which notions of underpopulation are popularly invoked, before substantiating it in much greater detail in one specific context: that of the television economy in New Zealand, a country, it is frequently said, with ‘too few people’ to support a publicly funded broadcaster. I show that in this particular instance the underpopulation thesis is backed by flawed arguments, but that none the less it is widely accepted and seldom countered, hence serving to protect its protagonists from disclosing in public debate the real reasons for the television policies they pursue and which the idea of underpopulation actively allows.     

The Crisis of the “Disadvantaged Child”: Poverty Research,IQ, and Muppet Diplomacy in the 1960s

In the early 1960s, the US federal government deemed poverty to be a national crisis, and actively intervened to solve this problem. My question for this article is how did preschool education become a key site to remedy this crisis? Government interventions were a combination of poverty research, racialized politics, and child development. I show how the discipline of early childhood education cohered around the term “disadvantaged child”, in turn influencing the War on Poverty policies, including the basis of Head Start preschool education. During this same decade proponents of Sesame Street—with private funding, along with extensive testing mechanisms by consultants—argued that the television could reach more children, therefore be more cost effective. This paper investigates how surplus populations became determined and demarcated, as early as three years old. I question how televised preschool taught “affective skills” and proper social relations during times of political crisis.     

Triad Dramas as Commentaries on Revolutionary Disharmony,Totalitarian Nostalgia,and a Yearning for Past Chivalry

In 2007, amateur on-line writer Kong Ergou’s triad novel series, Past Events of the Northeast: Twenty Years of the Triads, became a hit as a piece of network original literature. Five years later, the first volume of the book series was adapted into a network television drama of the same title. Focusing on the television drama, this paper examines three interrelated “dimensions” of the text. The first “dimension” relates to the correspondence between the inception and development of underworld gangs, and the vicissitudes experienced by the Chinese people during the harsh and unprecedented economic and cultural conditions that were introduced during the post-Mao era. A second “dimension” of this dramatic text finds that the nostalgia for and admiration of totalitarian times, together with a postmodern parody and deconstruction of Maoist society and its ideology, are juxtaposed in contemporary popular cultural products such as Past Events, thus demonstrating the complex and obscure emotions of ordinary Chinese people in relation to socialist revolutionary times. The final “dimension” compares the chivalrous spirit espoused by the gangsters with the ever-deteriorating morality and ethical values prevalent in present-day China.     

Something to Compete with ‘Gunsmoke’: ‘The Big Picture’ Television series and selling a ‘modern,progressive and forward thinking’ Army to Cold War America

Airing from 1951 until 1971, ‘The Big Picture’ was the United States Army’s primary means of marketing itself to the U.S. public, particularly between the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Drawing for the first time on archival records concerning the show’s production, this paper documents how information officers sought to escape the stock-footage straightjacket embedded in the show’s origins and showcase an Atomic Age Army standing sentry at the Cold War’s ramparts. Ultimately, they fought dual losing battles against parsimonious budgets and public indifference, while their insistence on content control hampered potential exposure in more appealing prime-time entertainment programmes.