Many successful British TV series of the 1960s “Golden Age” imitated US aesthetics and production methods, especially filmed television made for the Independent Television network. Distinctively British stylishness and quality made British TV exports attractive to US TV networks, but this attractiveness was, paradoxically, dependent on creating transatlantic hybrid forms rather than uniquely British ones. Production facilities and technologies for making filmed television in Britain were modelled on US studios. Many British series featured US actors, or were written, directed or produced by American émigrés. British distinctiveness was a successful strategy of differentiation, but it concealed transnational influence and exchange.
While the future of BBC Four is uncertain, it has played a significant role in reviving interest in vintage British television drama. As custodian of the BBC archive, not only has it screened repeats of the original episodes of A Ghost Story for Christmas (BBC1 1971-1978) but also revived the strand in the mid-2000s with new adaptations of the work of M.R. James. It also championed the work of Mark Gatiss, who established himself on the channel as an aficionado of British television horror. This article considers the way both BBC Four and the revival of the show can be seen to respond to nostalgia for the broadcasting culture of the 1970s. Particular attention is paid to the 2018 film “The Dead Room”, written and directed by Gatiss, and how it encapsulates what we call the “spirit of the archive”, BBC Four’s self-reflexive engagement with retro television.
This article examines George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022) as a cinematic adaptation of A.S. Byatt’s metatextual novella “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” (1994), exploring the transformative effects of medium on narrative, character, and theme. It analyses four key points: the contrasting narrative focus between Byatt’s novella and Miller’s film adaptation; the ways in which female power and agency are represented or diminished; how stories, narrative structures, and intertextual play are transformed in the adaptation; and how the change of medium, from text to screen, alters character, thematic emphasis, and narrative complexity. While Byatt’s novella foregrounds the intellectual and imaginative power of its female protagonist, Miller’s adaptation centres the narrative on the djinn, reshaping the gendered and narrative dynamics. This article argues that the adaptation illuminates the challenges of preserving narrative complexity and thematic subtlety across radically different media.
Ted Lasso is a series rooted in Anglophone culture clash: Jason Sudeikis originated the titular character as the feckless protagonist of a series of ads, where an American football coach finds himself the new coach for an English football/soccer club. Ted Lasso’s focus on its fish-out-of-water hero and his experience of Britishness allowed Apple TV+ to broaden its focus to a more international audience, a sort of gateway to more varied affiliations, highlighting not just the interactions between the American and British characters, but the array of international players (among them Wales, the source of the question asked in our title). In so doing, the series arguably echoes American audiences’ own experience of international fictions. However, it also insists on Britain as a cosmopolitan society distinct from monolithic cultural stereotypes, contrasting the cozy Englishness of heritage site Paved Court, Richmond, with a population that reflects the varied nature of British identity, and where the focus is on cultural inclusion. It is this tension (between American and British, between English and British, between heritage and multiculturalism) that this article seeks to examine.
This paper examines National Treasure (Channel 4, 2016), a four-part mini-series directed by Marc Munden, as a fictionalized reflection on the cultural and emotional aftermath of Operation Yewtree, the 2012 UK police investigation into sexual abuse allegations involving high-profile media figures, most notably Jimmy Savile. The series centers on Paul Finchley, a once-celebrated comedian accused of rape decades after his peak fame in the 1980s and 1990s. While National Treasure echoes key elements of the Savile case, it deliberately diverges from historical fact to construct a layered, ambiguous narrative, thus adopting a “mixed style” that was critically hypothesized as a specifically British take on cultural representations. The general social discourse underlying the script adds to this ambiguity by deconstructing stereotypes yet suggesting that no truth is to be reached behind the characters’ public identity. Through its aesthetic choices—regarding scale of shot, depth of field and the treatment of sound—the series also questions the role and function of images in relation to the protagonists’ interiority.
This case study purports to compare the two British miniseries The Buddha of Suburbia (BBC2, 1993) and This Town (BBC2, 2024) to show how they feature a conception of Britishness as inherently relational, foregrounding the ideal of an integrative multiculturalism rather than an assimilative or separatist multiculturalism. As the two shows focus on mixed-raced plots unfolding respectively in 1970s Greater London and in 1981 Birmingham/Coventry, contextualisation of the stories and of the shows’ production as well as narrative and aesthetic analyses will characterise their approaches of Britishness as relational “in-betweenness” by examining the specific examples of the suburb, mixed ethnic backgrounds, and eccentricity.
This article seeks to analyse the risky and innovative concept at work in the BBC series Dickensian (2015-2016). Though Dickens is a favourite for TV adaptations, Tony Jordan’s project defies the conventions of the BBC tradition of the classic serial as he selects famous characters from various Dickens novels to “mash them up” in a Victorian street reconstructed in a studio set. This paper shows how the specifically British context of production of Dickensian—which is not an international co-production, very uncommonly for post-2010 period dramas—influences the narrative structure as well as the aesthetics of the series while bringing to the fore nationally specific cultural references. Tony Jordan, credited as one of the main writers of Eastenders (BBC, 1985-), resorts to the codes of the British soap opera genre but Dickensian also pays homage to the visual culture of the Victorian era by multiplying references to other arts and media thereby blurring the boundaries between so-called ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ culture.
This article examines the British sitcom Coupling (BBC, 2000-2004) as a case study in transatlantic comedic differences, particularly in relation to the American sitcom Friends (NBC, 1994-2004). While superficially similar, Coupling employs a distinctly British comedic style, characterized by irony, sarcasm, explicit sexuality, and metafictional techniques, to offer a critique of American sitcom conventions. The article analyses Coupling’s narrative structure, character dynamics, and use of humour, arguing that it establishes a “metafictional superiority” over Friends. The failure of the US remake of Coupling further underscores the challenges of translating culturally specific humour. The article also considers Episodes (Showtime, 2011-2017) as a contrasting example of metafictional commentary on the transatlantic divide.
First broadcast on BBC Two in April and May 2019, the six-part mini-series Don’t Forget the Driver created by playwright Tim Crouch and actor Toby Jones was hailed by London-based magazine The Jackal, “the Brexit show we need right now.” Although the original idea for the show dated back to 2015, its actual writing was conceived after the referendum, with a deliberate concern to engage with the questions that underpinned the debate, most specifically as regards what has been called “the migrant” or “refugee crisis.” Truly enough, the series readily indulges in clichés and many common places cultivating and celebrating Britain’s insularity. However, the show also imparts a message of inclusivity and tolerance that could seem simplistic and bromidic were it not for the restrained film making and the self-derision that the series adopts, two characteristics that are allegedly also very British. In this regard, Don’t Forget the Driver corroborates Andy Medhurst’s contention that it is possible to “uncouple the national from the nationalistic.”
Early Modern England is traditionally viewed as a patriarchal society: Hélène Cixous (Sorties, 1975) even describes it as phallogo-centric. Thus, Shakespearean studies regularly focus on fathers, as recently seen with Fred Tromly (2010) and Tom MacFaul (2012). It is important, however, to look beyond historical clichés and restrictive framework of biological fatherhood, in order to include legal subrogation as well as elective and symbolic substitution. Despite their historical and cultural relevance, these alternative forms of paternity are too often neglected, even within New Historicist and psychoanalytical frameworks. An examination of these overlooked father figures offers valuable insight into the ambivalent characters of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and the relational ambiguities that unite them — or tear them apart.
This article examines the cultural function of the female astronaut in contemporary Hollywood by discussing two exemplary case studies, Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster Interstellar (2014) and the lesser-known Netflix series AWAY (2020). It combines a mobility studies and affect studies approach, arguing that female astronauts’ mobility is visually and narratively displaced by affective movement through the employment of sentimentalism as a form of public intimacy, following Lauren Berlant’s terminology. In this, the ‘final frontier’ operates, symbolically, similarly to the western frontier of the nineteenth century, with women embodying what Amy Kaplan famously termed “manifest domesticity.” Especially female astronaut-mothers are cast to stand for the future survival of the traditional U.S.-American family and thus the nation itself.
This article attempts a theoretical disruption of the coloniality of outer space by suggesting that Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of “Nepantla” can be used to rethink and open up non-extractivist ways of thinking about and being in the universe.
