The Imperial Legacies of Television within Europe

Abstract

The article argues for creating a mutually beneficial connection between postcolonial and television studies in order to understand how imperial legacies have shaped contemporary television regions. What it contributes to this work, more specifically, is the beginnings of a postcolonial account of intra-European broadcast regions. As both the original center of colonialism and the site of recent global economic, social and cultural crises, Europe is a major reference point in such attempts to re-historicize “empire” in order to understand industrial and ideological configurations within present-day media regions. I zoom in on three examples to highlight the imperial layers that have informed television in Europe: industrial collaborations between East and West, the imperial vestiges of 1960s to 1970s historical adventure series, and the imperial connections that tie together forms of TV comedy across Europe. The three examples demonstrate an opportunity to bypass the obligatory nation-state framework and begin to write the region’s history of television in a postcolonial, regional, and European perspective, outlining the imperial legacies of aesthetic, infrastructural and economic factors that underscore all cultural industries in the region.