Space and the small screen: an afterword

Abstract

To reprise a point from this dossier’s introduction, the shared fate of public architecture and public broadcasting in British culture is one worth exploring. From their communal Reithian origins to their Thatcherite unravelling, the two central strands of the postwar state are at their most imperative when they confront each other in the same space.1 In 2015, London-based arts production company Artangel presented the filmmaker Ben Rivers’s installation The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers in the abandoned space of the former drama production block of BBC Television Centre, months before it was due for demolition and before the surviving Grade II listed buildings were sold to Stanhope plc for over £200 million. The works, consisting of footage that Rivers had shot in different parts of Morocco, formed of a series of loops showing abandoned film sets in the North African desert and were projected in interconnecting spaces within the studio – the very spaces where, for forty years, sets were designed, built and dismantled for BBC dramas. Stanhope has since rebranded BBC Television Centre as simply ‘Television Centre’, and at the time of writing it is West London’s leading complex of luxury apartments: two- and three-bedroom units have a starting price of £970,000; a small slice of one the most recognizable architectural symbols of public ownership in Britain may now be bought for just shy of a million pounds.