Module Information

(10 x 3 hour lectures)

This module is likely to contain the following content:

1. Introduction
This session will lay out the field, emphasizing the growth in factual programming on television during the 1990s and 2000s. Inter-generic hybridity will also be emphasised, drawing on the work of John Corner and various competing explanations for such changes - technology, economics, politics - will be outlined.

2. Arts Programming: The Great, The Good and The Obscure
Arts programming has been respresented as both the pinnacle of programming quality, and a trough in terms of the indulgence of a small elite of programme makers. Due to this dual identity, it has been fought over fiercely since the Peacock committee in 1986, but has managed to survive despite multiple reports of its death. This lecture will look at its varying forms, and its production history.

3. Science, and the Decline of 'Serious Programming'
The one main factual television genre to decline seriously since the 1980s, science programming was always contentious in how it made scientific discourse accessible, but was also held to account by strong bonds between broadcasters and academia. Why did science decline on television so drastically? This lecture looks into the forms which brought science to the screen, and asks why they became unpopular.

4. Wildlife Documentaries: Technology and Teleology
A seemingly protected area of broadcasting, under the personal aegis of David Attenborough at the BBC, and boasting a proud tradition at the old ITV franchise Anglia, Wildlife programming has taken on the technological revolution in cameras as much as any other factual form. But what kind of natural history is produced by television? In these days of environmental angst, the lecture looks at the forms and hidden messages of natural history programmes.

5. Leisure Programming: Gardens, Kitchens and Garages
A booming genre during the 1990s, leisure programming has been criticised for everything from devaluing the quality of factual programmes on television to acting as the vanguard of rapaciouss materialsim. But can the audience be wrong? This lecture looks at the broadcasting strategies and forms that made this the most successful factual form of recent decades.

6. The Mockumentary: People Like Us?
As the conventional codes of factual television discourse are dispered through many genres, the central authority of such codes are eroded, and a new televisual sub-genre develops, the Mockumentary. From the 'What If' drama-documentaries of the 1960s to 'The Office', this lecture charts the developing use of documentary codes to subvert the very idea of objective factuality.

7. Current Affairs: Accessibility and Democratic Debate
Once the jewel in the crown of British television, and especially independent television, the decline of current affairs programming in the 1990s is often blamed on the commercialisation of the media in the wake of Thatcherism and the Peacock committee. But how democratic were classic series such as 'World in Action', 'This Week' and 'TV Eye' and what were the pressures that brought about their demise?

8. Reality TV
As the predominant new factual form of the last decade, Reality Television has re-written the rules of aesthetic and ethical acceptability in television factual programmes. How did this form develop, how does this new form relate to its documentary forbears and how has the relationship of audience and factual text been altered?

9. Co-production and The Victory of the History Documentary
Once the bookish preserve of Oxbridge-trained BBC classicists on one hand and left-wing independent firebrands on the other, history documentary was once deeply unfashionable. Yet by 2004 history documentary had overtaken contemporary documentary in terms of volume and viewership. How did this occur? What was it about the form which made it successful in the multi-channel environment of the C21's first decade?

10. Elimination Shows: Competition and Choice?
Programmes such as 'The Dragon's Den', 'The Apprentice' and 'Property Ladder' , 'America's Next Top Model' and 'Project Catwalk' have reinvented the content of 'discourses of sobriety' as vehicles for entertainment. In addition, such shows have promoted the ideology of the market as arbiter in the realm of cultural production, an idea which was, during the early 1990s, anathema to a large section of TV output. Why have such programmes come to dominate the schedules and what is their effect on television discourse?

This module offers an industrial history of the development of hybrid factual TV forms, an opportunity for students to familiarize themselves with the construction of such programming, and to place their growing familiarity in the context of recent academic debate as to the cultural impact of such programmes.