Wheatley Helen. Re-viewing Television History. Critical Issues in Television Historiography

I.B.Tauris, 2007. — 245 p.Written by leading scholars in the field, this book is an internationally relevant, cutting-edge reassessment of both current methods and practices in television historiography and of assumptions about television history itself. The book focuses on debates about the canon, on institutions, texts and audiences, and the interconnections between these distinct areas. Through discussions and case studies, it covers a wide selection, from television's approaches to immigration and natural history to economic histories of television, the framing of television aesthetics, and problems in constructing a television canon. Each section opens with the editor's overview of the historical research and an appendix details the main research resources for television historians in the UK.Introduction: Re-viewing television histories
Helen Wheatley
Debating the Canon
Is it possible to construct a canon of television programmes?
Immanent reading versus textual-historicism
John Ellis
Citing the classics
Constructing British television drama history in publishing and pedagogy
Jonathan Bignell
Salvaging television’s past: what guarantees survival?
A discussion of the fates of two classic 1970s serials, The Secret Garden and Clayhanger
Máire Messenger Davies
Textual HistoriesNegotiating value and quality in television historiography
Catherine Johnson
A friendly style of presentation which the BBC had always found elusive’?
The 1950s cinema programme and the construction of
British television history
Su Holmes
BBC English Regions Drama
Second City Firsts
Lez Cooke
Production and InstitutionsNostalgia as resistance
The case of the Alexandra Palace Television Society and the BBC
Emma Sandon
Shifting sentiments
BBC Television, West Indian immigrants and cultural production
Darrell Newton
Piecing together ‘Mammon’s Television’
A case study in historical television research
Jamie Medhurst
History on television
Charisma, narrative and knowledge
Erin Bell and Ann Gray
AudiencesResearching the viewing culture 159
Television and the home, 1946–1960
Tim O’Sullivan
Writing the history of television audiences 170
The Coronation in the Mass-Observation Archive
Henrik Örnebring
Teenagers and television drama in Britain, 1968–1982 184
Rachel Moseley
Appendix: Directory of Key Research Resources for Television History
in the United Kingdom