Summary and Outlook

Abstract

This chapter synthesises the book's main results: how television drama, or at least certain genres of television drama, oscillates between affirmation and scepticism of the heroic. By revealing the tensions in contemporary notions of heroes and heroisms, television drama employs the heroic as a lens through which to scrutinise contemporary British society and its response to crisis and change. British television drama is a cultural forum in which contemporary Britain's problems, wishes and cultural values are revealed and debated; as a result, television drama is extensively engaged with the heroic. Looking back on the development of heroic representations in British television drama over the last twenty years, it is made clear how the analysis of heroisation simultaneously reacts to and thereby reveals shifts in British structures of feeling in a time marked by insecurity.