The Spaces of Television

Abstract

There are many different ways of talking about the spaces of television, especially television drama, and many of them are represented in this themed issue. For example, there is space in its physical sense – the spaces in which television is shot, including the studio, and the uses made of location (at which point ‘space’ interconnects with ‘place’); space as it is transformed by representation, which cannot be divorced from considerations of genre and style; and space as it is framed on the screen, in which choices of camera format and aspect ratio play a part. All of these have their histories, are underpinned by technological change, production practices and institutional processes, and require a variety of methods and approaches to be fully analysed and appreciated. Space as an analytical category has been relatively under-researched but was the main focus of an AHRC-funded project, ‘Spaces of Television: Production, Site and Style’, which ran from 2010 to 2015. Based at the University of Reading, the project was led by Professor Jonathan Bignell, with two Co-Investigators, Professor Stephen Lacey (University of South Wales) and Professor James Chapman (University of Leicester); three postdoctoral researchers, Dr Leah Panos, Dr Billy Smart and Dr Lucy Donaldson; and two PhD candidates, Ben Lamb and Victoria Byard. This special issue has been edited by Leah Panos with the support of members of the project team. Full details of the project’s outputs so far can be found at our website: www.reading.ac.uk/ftt/research/spacesoftelevision.aspx. The scope of the project gives an indication of how questions of space might be thought about, particularly in their historical contexts. It examined television fiction produced in the United Kingdom between 1955 and 1994, a period running from the beginning of the BBC/ITV ‘duopoly’ period to the year of the last drama anthology series shot on video in the BBC’s Television Centre studios, Performance (1991–94). It analysed how the material spaces of production, in TV studios and on location, conditioned the aesthetic forms of programmes and how modes of production and available technologies impacted on performance, camerawork, sound and visual design. It connected institutional histories to questions of stylistic practice and mise en scene, interrogating a wide range of production practices employed and revealing the aesthetic specificity of television via its conventions of spatial representation. The articles in this issue offer a glimpse of both the variety of methodological approaches used and the spectrum of production spaces and modes considered