‘The Politics of Television Space’, University of Leicester, 8 April 2011

Abstract

This event sprang from the ongoing research of the AHRC-funded project, ‘Spaces of Television: Production, Site and Style’, a joint initiative between the Universities of Reading, Glamorgan and Leicester, which aims to analyse how spaces of production (in TV studios and on location) condition the form and visual styles of programmes. Several of the project contributors, including principal investigator Professor Jonathan Bignell, presented papers, but the programme also drew on a wider resurgence of interest in television as historiography, and more precisely how the spaces of television are influenced by cultural, institutional and technological contexts and constraints. Organisers were pleased to welcome both broadcast programmers and academics, and the intersection of industry and academia fostered new understandings and readings of television history. The symposium opened with Peter Hutchings’ keynote, ‘Dangerous spaces: studios, video and the 1970s psychological thriller’ in which he suggested that, counter to the prevailing model in current television history which privileges ‘escape’ from the studio, the boundaries of studio and video production may have offered certain advantages, especially for genre productions. Hutchings cited ATV’s anthology series, Thriller, as an example, arguing that the programme makers created, sustained and escalated the textual sense of menace through the use of studio and video, and highlighted their construction of spaces of work, as well as domesticity, as ‘sites of dread’. A number of parallel panels followed, looking at the politics of television space in terms of production ecology, human geography and the political construction of television itself, particularly in