This article offers a comprehensive overview of class in Television Studies, focusing on public service broadcasting (PSB) in Britain. We examine both off-screen and on-screen dynamics, investigating workforce composition, commissioning processes, production practices and representation across genres, with a particular focus on drama. By synthesising research from scholars, industry professionals and policy-makers, we trace the evolution of class depictions from early social realist plays to contemporary outputs. On-screen, our analysis illuminates how class narratives have evolved and intersected with broader societal changes in PSB dramas throughout the 2020s. Off-screen, we investigate the television industry's employee make-up, highlighting significant class imbalances, especially in key creative roles. We also assess the impact of diversity initiatives and shifting viewing habits on class representation and industry dynamics. Throughout, the article underscores the importance of an intersectional approach, exploring how class interacts with factors such as race, gender and regional identity within both off-screen production contexts and on-screen content. A central finding is the television industry's paradoxical approach to class: while working-class stories are increasingly visible, structural inequalities persist both on- and off-screen. The article concludes by suggesting future research directions to foster a more in-depth understanding of the complex relationships between class, television production, representation and reception in contemporary Britain, addressing gaps in current scholarship and methodologies.
This study examines the efforts undertaken by the UK government and the British Film Institute to mitigate the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the UK film industry. The pandemic posed significant challenges, particularly in terms of production opportunities, cinema operations and audience viewing experiences. This study evaluates the efficacy of the measures taken to reduce the impacts on the industry and aid its recovery, as well as potential implications for future policy-making. Drawing on a range of sources, including official documents, trade publications and interviews with industry professionals, the study argues that while the support measures provided some relief, the pandemic's long-term effects on the UK film industry remain uncertain. The study highlights the need for continued support and strategic adaptation to navigate the evolving industry landscape.
This article is the first extended analysis of British screenwriter Angus MacPhail's long-term, albeit intermittent, collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock between the 1920s and 1950s. It contributes to the debates about authorship which have been a feature of Hitchcock scholarship since the 1950s. MacPhail first worked with Hitchcock within the British studio system during the 1920s and 1930s and Hitchcock chose to continue their collaboration after he moved to Hollywood. The article explores MacPhail's involvement in refining the intertitles for The Lodger (1927), often identified as 'the first true Hitchcock film', the implications of MacPhail's conceptualisation of the MacGuffin, which still continues to be primarily associated with Hitchcock, his contribution to what Raymond Durgnat (1974: 20) memorably described as Hitchcock's 1930s 'classic thriller sextet' and his role as a conduit for the psychoanalytic scenarios and concepts which feature in Hitchcock's later films. The article highlights how MacPhail was one of the sources of the humour in the films he worked on with Hitchcock and also explores how he fed British and London knowledge and cultural reference points into the projects he worked on after Hitchcock's move to Hollywood. The question of gender is also explored in relation to the role played by another long-term Hitchcock collaborator, Joan Harrison. This article is a companion piece to 'Angus MacPhail's Frozen Credits: Film Authorship and Collaboration in British Middlebrow and Celebrity Culture', published in Journal of British Cinema and Television, 21: 2 (2024).
This article is concerned with representations of artistic work and labour in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes (1948). In contrast to previous readings, which have tended to emphasise the film's variously inauthentic, impressionistic or 'magical' depictions of labour, I suggest the film offers us two much more earthly lessons about the nature of artmaking. Firstly, the film quite consistently reveals that the performance of art is not so much a supernatural or transcendent labour but one that is derived from (and visibly demonstrates) some of the material conditions and the personal and social relations necessary for its production. Secondly, the film's seemingly archaic and stylised representations of workplace politics offer some instructive insights that resonate with more recent debates on the unequal social organisation of artistic labour-or as I prefer to term it, 'cultural work'.
The TV drama series Years and Years (BBC/HBO, 2019), written by Russell T. Davies, is a speculative narrative that imagines a dystopian near-future (2019-34) which is clearly informed by then- (and still-) current concerns in the UK and wider world. This article considers the series' reimagining of discourses of the family and kinship. Placing at its centre the multi-generational Lyons family, a collective marked by queerness in a variety of ways, Years and Years interrogates the normative discourse of the family and represents new forms of kinship, with technology playing a key role in this reimagining of identities and relationships in the near future. However, the series is ultimately ambivalent about the possibilities inherent in the technological mediation of human kinship. Instead of fully exploring these possibilities, it ends up reaffirming the importance of familial solidarity and love, something that is part of the normative discourse of the family that the series in other ways seeks to challenge. Ultimately, while representing new forms of kinship, Years and Years stops short of de-centring the family but rather, invites us to think about possible forms of kinship that may bring about a different future.
Critics of film censorship in the United Kingdom often claim that the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) is biased in favour of foreign arthouse films, especially regarding depictions of sex. This article explores that claim by examining how ideas of 'Frenchness' -understood in Britain as a signifier of cinematic quality and of a serious approach to eroticism - have interfaced with the censorship of sexual imagery from the BBFC's establishment in 1913 to the present day. I argue that the extent to which Frenchness played a role in BBFC censorship decisions evolved over time, and was determined by a confluence of factors, such as: parliamentary legislation, central and local government priorities, the personalities of individual BBFC secretaries and changing public attitudes to sex. I discuss the trajectory of the BBFC's approach to sexual imagery by distinguishing four main periods: a period of political and moral propaganda, the post-WWII period during which film censorship was a balancing act, a brief period of crisis and the post-1977 period characterised by censorship decisions being guided by a statutory framework. Analysing censorship trends across historical periods, and drawing on the BBFC's own explanations (found in internal as well as published documents), this article traces the evolution of approaches to censoring sexual imagery in the UK, and the extent to which claims of leniency towards French films can be evidenced throughout the BBFC's history.
In British literature and film the figure recurs, manifesting as a patriarchal male sorcerer, of a guardian of the land. This character appears as Merlin in the work of Malory, Burne-Jones, Kipling and T. H. White, and as variations upon him in three distinctive British films: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale (1944), John Boorman's Excalibur (1981) and Ben Wheatley's A Field in England (2013). This article proposes to contrast these films' use of the liminal magus figure in order to interrogate what is contained within their triangulation of masculinity, magic and landscape. In A Canterbury Tale, Thomas Colpeper is an equivocal, even disturbing, character: the local magistrate who, as well as lecturing visiting American soldiers about the history of the Kent landscape, is unmasked as the Glueman, a nocturnal assailant of women temporarily stationed in his village. In Excalibur, Boorman's cinematic reimagining of Malory, Merlin is explicitly non-human, an alien wizard protecting the primal oak forest, intoning that he is 'a dream to some-a nightmare to others!' And in A Field in England, O'Neil is a necromancer held captive in the eponymous field during the English Civil War, until a small band of Cromwellian soldiers unknowingly frees him and, now enslaved, must dig at his behest for buried treasure. A comparison of the films' similarities and differences in their portrayal of this recurring guardian figure illuminates how they map shifting notions of what Kipling, in his novel Puck of Pook's Hill (1906), called 'Merlin's Isle of Gramarye'. The use of this morally ambiguous magus figure asks questions of the films' preoccupation with time past, present and future in the context of the landscape and its history. Beyond this, Colpeper, Merlin and O'Neil qualify as what Andrew Moor calls: 'magicians ... responsible for the magic spaces on screen' (2005: 14).
British television is seemingly obsessed with farming, but it is a subject which features relatively rarely in British cinema. Rural landscapes have long played a key role in British films in various different ways, as noted in much of the literature on heritage cinema, yet, although farmed landscapes feature in many of these films, they generally serve as little more than a picturesque backdrop and the actual activity of farming usually registers only incidentally. This article examines a number of films, covering both past and present, which, in different ways, do actually foreground agricultural practice. In particular it is concerned to explore how these films have registered changes in land use and ownership, and how they represent the consequences of these changes, particularly for small farmers, in the era of 'free market' globalised capitalism.
This article analyses the Culture Media and Sport (CMS) select committee's report on British Film and High-End Television (HETV), published on 10 April 2025. It argues that, given 20 years of historic failure to engage politically in support of our indigenous film culture, the report is a welcome initiative. Referencing the report and other sources, the article charts the disastrous decline of the independent sector in recent years. Accordingly, it strongly endorses the report's recommendation that the Government should increase support for all elements of the film and HETV production ecosystem, from enhancing tax relief for the distribution of low-budget films and for certain budgets in HETV, through to requiring companies investing in the UK, particularly the streamers, to increase support for culturally distinct British content. It welcomes the fact that the report signals that tax credits are not the only answers to the independent sector's problems and recognises that incentivising investment in production without support for the institutions on which the skills and talent base depend will not address the causes of the decline of the sector. The most recent of these is the escalation in production costs in studio and streamer production, whose knock-on effects are making lowbudget film and drama increasingly unsustainable. The report is also highly critical of the streamers' practice of taking all IP rights and thus depriving production companies of developing an asset base to offset subsistence costs. The report presents a highly critical account of many of the other problems facing the independent sector - such as the decreasing level of support by state organisations and the public service broadcasters, the failure to rejoin Creative Europe, and the poor performance of the BFI with regard to training. However, the article argues that one of the most significant of the report's many recommendations is that streaming platforms should be required contribute to the publicly funded infrastructures from which they benefit, through a 5 per cent levy on their UK subscriber revenue in order to support levels of domestic HETV production.
The canal is a fascinating site of contradictions, on UK television and beyond. It is both urban and rural, a man-made structure in Britain that changed our landscape forever and a wildlife haven where flora and fauna have thrived, shot for its spectacular beauty as well as its dingy confinement and dilapidation, a site of both leisure and industry, at once a symbol of modernity and also the location of traditional ways of living out of step with contemporary life. This article explores television's long-standing relationship with the UK canal network. From the first BBC canal-side outside broadcast to contemporary docuseries and TV travelogues (for example, Channel 4's Great Canal Journeys (2014-21) and Narrow Escapes (2024-) and the BBC Four's Canal Boat Diaries [2019-]), it explores the pleasures and contradictions of the canal narrative on TV. The article firstly maps the history of canal representation on British television, crossing a range of genres (travel and leisure series, children's and schools television, crime drama and, most prominently, documentaries and current affairs programming) to make the case that the introduction of television in the mid-twentieth century coincided with a period of reimagining the canal and its past, present and future. This programming also begins to establish the picturesque representation of narrowboat travel and its connection to both rural idyll and what Richard Mabey (2010) calls the 'unofficial countryside' of more urban settings. Secondly, I expand my focus to look at contemporary canal-based programming, extending arguments I made in my earlier writing (2011; 2016) about the spectacular aesthetics of the television landscape. I examine the deployment of drone photography in contemporary landscape television, and argue that the canal is presented on UK TV as part of the fantasy of mythic rural England.
'Whydunit? Narrative Perspective in Adolescence' explores how the Netflix miniseries uses narrative perspective to shape viewers' understanding and emotional engagement. Departing from the traditional 'whodunit' format, the series centres not on uncovering the perpetrator of a murder - revealed early on as thirteen-year-old Jamie - but on exploring his motivation, revealing a deep generational divide in interpreting teenage behaviour and digital communication. The article analyses how shifting narrative alignments with key characters - Jamie's father, the lead investigator and a psychologist - gradually guide the audience from empathy to confrontation with uncomfortable truths. It also highlights the series' formal innovation - its single-take episodes and mobile camera work - as a tool for immersive storytelling that emphasises subjective access and emotional resonance. Ultimately, Adolescence is praised for resisting reductive moral judgements and instead prompting critical reflection on parental awareness, digital culture and the limits of adult understanding in the face of adolescent radicalisation.
The 1972 BBC Horizon programme, The Making of the English Landscape, is based on the work of the eminent scholar, W. G. Hoskins. Hoskins's book of that name, first published in 1955, is acknowledged as a pioneering study of the historical evolution of the English landscape. The Horizon programme is the first foray into the filming of Hoskins's ideas and was followed by two well-received series, Landscapes of England (1976, 1978). Hoskins's view is a long one, and his emphasis throughout these programmes is that 'everything is older than we think', but that 'Nature is always waiting to take over again when man abandons his handiwork'. Hoskins as presenter has his own evocations of the past, but, watched 40 years later, the programmes themselves testify to both ways of making television programmes, and landscapes of England, long gone. This article returns to these programmes to ask why and how Hoskins might be of interest in the twenty-first century at a time when there has been an expansion of landscape programming and nature writing and the countryside has become the site of controversy. Using material from the BBC Written Archives, the article analyses to programmes through their mobilisation of expertise, their presentation of landscape and their use of television form. It concludes with broader reflections on the place of Hoskins's arguments and tone in a time of climate crisis.
This article discusses John Boorman's Catch Us if You Can (1965) as a relative rarity, namely a British road movie. One of the distinctive features of films in this genre is the representation of the landscapes through which their characters move-in this case from London to Burgh Island in Devon. What is particularly notable about the landscapes, rural and urban, on this journey is that they are not glamorised or represented in the terms of what later would be come to be called the heritage industry. The fact that the film was made in the depths of winter is obviously a factor here-just as it was in Radio On (1979)-but, for example, the scenes set in the abandoned village of Imber on Salisbury plain are bleak by any standard, and determinedly anti-pastoral. The article does discuss other aspects too of Catch Us If You Can, and in particular the context of its production, in order to understand how the first-time feature film-maker John Boorman had the opportunity to make such an unusual and distinctive 'youth movie'.
