Lost in participation

Abstract

In a keynote address to the most recent London Film Festival, the veteran film and television director Ken Loach rehearsed two not altogether unfamiliar complaints: one that managerial and editorial controls at the BBC are stifling creative agency and expression; the other that British television has manifestly failed to live up to early expectations. ‘Television began with such high hopes. It was going to be the national theatre of the air. It was going to really be a place where society could have a national discourse, and they've reduced it to a grotesque reality game.’1 It is timely then that John Caughie's recent essay, ‘Mourning television: the other screen’,2 should commence with an observation as to how a sense of loss has also lately inflected academic discourses and conversations about television. He reminds us that writers for Screen once sought to intervene in television practice as well as theory, apparently inviting a debate which could again contribute to the collective imagination of ‘a different television’, not least by identifying the ‘other possibilities of meaning and engagement’ it might yet offer. Mindful of my description of his earlier expression of regret for ‘serious drama’3 Caughie takes care to distance his perspective from one of nostalgia, and concludes with the observation that television theorizing needs to continue to work through a particular lost dimension, ‘the loss of a public space, television's part in the waning of the public sphere’.4 The drama Occupation (BBC, 2009) is cited to compare present with past, an eloquent demonstration of how even a hard-hitting serial that engages with issues of national controversy is today more likely to provoke private affect than political and collective debate. It is an example that dovetails quite neatly with his earlier citations of scholarship that functioned as intervention, thus imbricating radical practice and effect alongside radical academic writing, all dimensions of a period of lost possibility.