Abstract
This article's subject is Ghostwatch (BBC, 1992), a drama broadcast on Halloween night of 1992 which adopted the rhetoric of live non-fiction programming, and attracted controversy and ultimately censure from the Broadcasting Standards Council. In what follows, we argue that Ghostwatch must be understood as a televisually specific artwork and artefact. We discuss the programme's ludic relationship with some key features of television during what Ellis (2000) has termed its era of ‘availability’: principally liveness, mass simultaneous viewing, and the flow of the television super-text. We trace the programme's television-specific historicity while acknowledging its allusions and debts to other media (most notably film and radio). We explore the sophisticated ways in which Ghostwatch's visual grammar and vocabulary and deployment of ‘broadcast talk’ ( Scannell 1991 ) variously ape, comment upon and subvert the rhetoric of factual programming, and the ends to which these strategies are put. We hope that these arguments collectively demonstrate the aesthetic and historical significance of Ghostwatch and identify its relationship to its medium and that medium's history. We offer the programme as a historically reflexive artefact and as an exemplary instance of the work of art in television's age of broadcasting, liveness and co-presence.
Highlights
The notion that a given medium of expression and/or communication possesses certain defining and determining characteristics - that is, the notion of mediumspecificity - is one that has been subject to a series of extensive elaborations and refutations across the histories of Film and Television Studies
We began our discussion with an examination of liveness, one of the key communicative affordances of television across much of its global history, and ended by exploring Ghostwatch’s dialogue with the other programmes appearing on British television in the early 1990s
Lisa Gitelman has suggested that ‘media are curiously reflexive as the subjects of history’ (2009: xi)
Summary
The notion that a given medium of expression and/or communication possesses certain defining and determining characteristics - that is, the notion of mediumspecificity - is one that has been subject to a series of extensive elaborations and refutations across the histories of Film and Television Studies (and, elsewhere). The sense of liveness, is shored up by coordination of and communication between various ‘simultaneous elsewheres’ (Marriott 2007: 102) We encounter another set of possibilities of the medium played upon by Ghostwatch: the potential for large segments of the population to be watching the same broadcast of a television programme at the same time. While superficially no different from previous reactions to factual and fictional hybrids in other forms of culture, the public outcry and critical controversy following broadcast of Ghostwatch relates to a history of television drama-documentary reception. The institutional legacy of BBC editorial policy is exploited to produce a fantasy text credible within televisual production and reception contexts
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
