Life on Mars: From Manchester To New York PDF
Preview Life on Mars: From Manchester To New York
Contemporary Landmark Television Life on Mars From Manchester to New York Edited by Stephen Lacey and Ruth McElroy University of Wales Press CONTEMPORARY LANDMARK TELEVISION LIFE ON MARS Series editors Professor Steve Blandford (University of Glamorgan) Professor Stephen Lacey (University of Glamorgan) Professor Ruth McElroy (University of Glamorgan) CONTEMPORARY LANDMARK TELEVISION LIFE ON MARS FROM MANCHESTER TO NEW YORK Edited by Stephen Lacey and Ruth McElroy UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS CARDIFF 2012 © The contributors, 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publica- tion should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP. www.uwp.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-0-7083-2359-5 e-ISBN 978-0-7083-2360-1 The right of the contributors to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Designed and typeset by Chris Bell Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire CONTENTS Series Editors’ Preface vii Notes on Contributors ix Introduction 1 Stephen Lacey and Ruth McElroy Part I Quality TV Form and Aesthetics 1 Life on Mars 19 Hybridity and Innovation in a British Television Context Robin Nelson 2 ‘Am I Mad, in a Coma or Back in Time?’ 31 Generic and Narrative Complexity in Life on Mars Nichola Dobson 3 Immersion versus Alienation 43 Listening to Life on Mars Rob Smith Part II Contesting the Past Television and History 4 Memory Banks Failing! 57 Life on Mars and the Politics of Re-imagining the Police and the Seventies Andy Willis 5 Sam Tyler and the ‘New North’ 69 John Curzon 6 ‘Moonage Daydreams’ 79 Nostalgia and Cultural Memory Contexts of Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes John R. Cook and Mary Irwin Part III Recalling the Past Television as Memory 7 ‘Up The Wooden Hills to Bedfordshire’ 91 Time Travel, Childhood and the Uncanny Home in Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes Peter Hughes Jachimiak 8 The Medium is the Monster . . . or the World? 105 Discourses of Uncanny ‘Old Media’ and Immersive ‘New Media’ in Life on Mars Matt Hills 9 Consuming Retrosexualities 117 The Past Live On Screen, Online Now Ruth McElroy Part IV Life on Mars as International Television 10 ‘American Remake – Shudder’ 133 Online Debates about Life on Mars and ‘British-ness’ Brett Mills 11 The Emigration of Life on Mars 145 Sam and Gene Do America David Lavery 12 Locating Generational and Cultural Clashes in the Transfer of Successful Formats between the United Kingdom, Spain and the United States 153 The Case of Life on Mars Joseba Bonaut and Teresa Ojer Part V Debating Production 13 Julie Gardner and Claire Parker 169 In Conversation Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes 185 Production and Transmission Details Bibliography 193 SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE T HERE IS NO DOUBT that the landscape of broadcasting has been trans- formed in recent years, and the pace of change shows no sign of slow- ing. Technological change (satellite and digital television, the rise of the Internet), the internationalisation of television formats and programmes, the availability of the DVD box sets, new technologies for recording and time- shifting viewing, the proliferation of TV channels and the segmentation of the TV audience – these have all ensured that television, once dubbed ‘ephem- eral’, is now a major cultural commodity in a global marketplace. The disci- pline of television studies, although a relative newcomer to the field of cultural and media studies, has grown confident in its ability to confront and debate the challenges that the new ecology of broadcasting poses. Contemporary Landmark Television focuses on one corner of the wider picture in recognition of its continuing significance for both home and over- seas audiences. The series offers scholars and lecturers timely investigations of current broadcasting, especially in the UK context, through a focus upon television’s prime output: programmes. By being responsive to the contem- porary television landscape, the series recognises that television scholarship benefits from engaging with the current viewing experience of scholars and students. For us, one of the enduring values of television as a mass medium lies in its contemporaneity with its audience: television exists in the moment – even when that ‘moment’ is lengthened by new technologies of recording and distribution – and in so doing, enjoys a privileged position as a creative source of artistic and social intervention in the world of its viewers. The choice to engage with programmes themselves is recognition of the turn towards television aesthetics in recent scholarship, and of the now- contentious nature of some of the accepted categories. The term ‘landmark’ is used cautiously in the series title to denote programmes that may be sig- nificant to a variety of people – audiences, critics, programme makers – in a number of contexts. However, we recognise that landmark, and its syno- nyms such as ‘classic’ or ‘quality’, cannot be assumed but must be debated, SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE and a reflection on key terms is an important aspect of the series’ approach. Also, broadcasters such as the BBC and Channel 4 in the UK have sought to meet the challenge of digitalisation by exploiting online programme assem- blages (the chat room, forum, and programme games and quizzes), and these have become staples of British television drama, in the process significantly extending our understanding of what constitutes a television programme. Therefore, an important emphasis of the series is the treatment of individual programmes or series ‘in the round’ – in their production and reception con- texts, and where relevant in their different iterations. It also draws on, where possible, the perspectives of practitioners and television professionals them- selves. Programmes – even long-running series – exist in a wider context of other programmes, and the series will occasionally consider clusters of pro- grammes linked by a common theme. Although aimed primarily at students and scholars of television, Con- temporary Landmark Television intends to be accessible to the general reader with an interest in how television programmes have been commissioned, produced, debated and enjoyed, as well as to professional broadcasters. Whoever the reader, we hope that he or she will be both stimulated and chal- lenged by the experience. viii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Joseba Bonaut is currently an instructor and researcher at San Jorge Univer- sity (Spain). He obtained his PhD on television and sport at the University of Navarra (Spain). His research interests are sport and the media and Spanish cinema and television history, and he has published on these topics in both Spanish and English. He is a member of the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS) and the European Communication Research and Education Organization (ECREA). John R. Cook is Reader in Media at Glasgow Caledonian University. He has written numerous articles on television drama and its contexts of production for journals such as the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, the Journal of British Cinema and Television and Critical Studies in Television. He has recently completed an edited collection with Peter Wright, Critical Essays on Star Wars (I. B. Tauris, forthcoming). John Curzon recently completed his doctoral thesis at the University of Warwick on the representation of the spaces of post-industrial northern England in film and television drama. Nichola Dobson completed her doctoral dissertation on the animated situation comedy genre and has since taught at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh and Glasgow Caledonian University where she was also research assistant on ‘Television fiction, society and identity: Catalonia and Scotland’ with Universitat Rovira i Virgili Tarragona, Catalonia. She has a guest column in Flow, the online television journal. Matt Hills is Reader in Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University. He is the author of Fan Cultures (Routledge, 2002), The Pleasures of Horror (Con- tinuum, 2005) and Doing Things with Cultural Theory (Hodder-Arnold, 2005) and is currently completing a monograph on the BBC series Torchwood.
The list of books you might like
