Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen

Abstract

Glen Creeber, Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen. London: BFI, 2004, 184pp, and Jonathan Bignell and Stephen Lacey (eds), Popular Television Drama: Critical Perspectives. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005, 230pp. At the Cultures of British Television Drama conference held in September 2005 at the University of Reading, one of the event's participants voiced a personal concern that the field of television studies now seems to lack the political drive and force that it had in the 1980s. Perhaps this is a generational issue, she suggested; younger academics writing about television just aren't as politicized as those that led and contributed to the discipline twenty-five years ago. Certainly, with the recent dispiriting rise of the flimsy pop-academic edited collection devoted to single (almost always American) television series threatening to overwhelm certain publishers' catalogues, the days of Days of Hope debates can seem long gone.1 Reassuringly, however, the two books under review here both contain healthy, hearty doses of politics within their pages – indeed, this constitutes one of the major strengths of both texts. This may not be the committed Marxism or socialism of the Days of Hope critics; but then, as Creeber acknowledges in Serial Television, ‘there has been a shift in the very nature of what “politics” may actually mean to a contemporary audience’ (p. 118).