Responses to Rosenthal: A Comparison of Audience Reaction to Jack Rosenthal's Bar Mitzvah Boy and Eskimo Day

Abstract

We are told that television audiences are changing. Television technologies such as multi-channel, digital video recording, Internet television and the constant availability of linear TV clips on YouTube, are altering where, when and how people watch television. But have audience tastes changed as radically when it comes to the actual programmes? During August 2008, TV Heaven – the National Media Museum’s free-to-access television viewing gallery – hosted two special screening and discussion sessions to explore this question in relation to the work of the television playwright Jack Rosenthal. Established in 1994, TV Heaven allows National Media Museum visitors to choose from a selection of over 1,000 television programmes from the last 60 years of British broadcasting. Some of the most popular are – predictably enough – comedies and children’s programmes, with episodes of Doctor Who (BBC, 1963–89, 2005–), Little Britain (BBC, 2003–) and Aardman’s Wallace and Gromit caper The Wrong Trousers (1993) receiving well over 2,500 requests each since its reopening as a completely refurbished fully digital facility in June 2006. As well as these perennially popular family favourites, TV Heaven holds some gems of British television drama, including thirteen of Jack Rosenthal’s plays and comedies. Part of my role as TV Heaven Curatorial Assistant is to encourage visitor engagement with our programme collection and the wider history of television broadcasting. Since visiting Sheffield University’s Special Collections in 2007, I had been looking for an opportunity to link the Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection and the more recently acquired Maureen Lipman papers with our own archive