Political culture and television fiction

Abstract

Recently, the study of politics has expanded its scope by recognizing the constitutive power of `political culture' at the same time as cultural studies has become more interested in formal political processes and their relationship to popular culture. This article is a case study of political culture in the United Kingdom, focusing on one example of fictional expression, a television drama series broadcast in 2006: The Amazing Mrs Pritchard . The premise of the article is that the imaginative work of political fiction provides an opportunity to explore the cultural mediation of uncertainties and tensions in contemporary politics and political values. The framing of the series involves a generic mixture of realism and fantasy unusual in the British context and the key themes, which include political trust and the limits of political action, are discussed in relation both to their fictional articulation and their wider reference.