A decade of change: television and society in Wales in the 1970s

Supervisors: Dr Jamie Medhurst and Dr Merris Griffiths

The 1970s was a period of immense social change in Wales; it was also a period during which the broadcast of television was in a state of flux and uncertainty, the causes and outcomes of which will be fully explored by this study. This project focuses specifically on audiences who would have been at school age during the 1970s. It examines the way in which programmes that were addressed to children in Wales during the period, including the earliest examples of what could be termed Teen Television (produced locally, by HTV), could have been used by such audiences to understand and make sense of the social changes that were taking place around them. This project relies to a large extent on ethnographic research in order to explore the intersection between television and memory, and how the audience’s memory of television programmes influences and interacts with their memory of contemporaneous historical events, creating a unique form of public, social history.  

Email: mac109@aber.ac.uk