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- Volume 4, Issue 2, 2016
Journal of Popular Television, The - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2016
Volume 4, Issue 2, 2016
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Media Inc.: Consolidated Television, Tele-King and investment diversification by organized crime
More LessAbstractThis article documents the involvement of leading members of American organized crime, specifically the East Coast Syndicate lead by Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello, with some US media industries in the 1940s and 1950s. It does so by tracing the creation, ownership and business history of two television-manufacturing companies, Consolidated Television Incorporated and the Tele-King Corporation, which it has been alleged were controlled by Syndicate interests. It uses various forms of primary and secondary sources to do this, such as FBI files, witness testimony and published accounts. It also examines the types of media products that these companies manufactured, why Syndicate members ventured into this investment sector, and how Syndicate control was initially exerted, maintained, and then exposed.
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Documentary incursions into New Zealand’s multiculturalism: The case of Here to Stay
More LessAbstractThis article examines the New Zealand television documentary series Here to Stay (2007–2008) and its construction of Pacific, Chinese and Indian identities in the context of New Zealand’s multiculturalism. It argues that the series introduces new ways of looking at the country’s multicultural make-up, which appear to suggest a shift from previous documentary productions, but eventually makes a number of slippages in its presentation of such communities that continue to reinforce similar notions of national identity. I consider three aspects in particular: the contradictions between the celebratory and the critical contents of the narrative; the simultaneous construction of Chinese, Pacific or Indian identities as both diverse and homogeneous; and the tensions between the series’ superficial construction of multiculturalism and the narrative’s explicit or implicit critique of such constructions. Whereas these ambivalences seem to reflect official approaches to the management of multiculturalism, revealing the unresolved tensions between the requirements of commercial television and the role of documentary in the formation of national identity, I argue that they can nevertheless serve to engage viewers in a critical revision of superficial constructions of the multicultural.
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Lesley Sharp and the alternative geographies of Northern English Stardom
Authors: David Forrest and Beth JohnsonAbstractHistorically, ‘North’ (of England) is a byword for narratives of economic depression, post-industrialism and bleak and claustrophobic representations of space and landscape. These impulses often manifest themselves in aesthetic or structural frameworks, which in turn speak to gendered authorial discourses in film, literature and television: the so-called ‘angry young man’ tradition, for example, and the British New Wave. This article seeks to destabilize this male construction of Northern English visual and narrative iconography by suggesting that female stardom offers an alternative means of encountering regional television drama. Female Northern performers function intertextually across multiple narratives to assert specific thematic qualities that both pertain to a radical regionality and enable a sense of agency, which disrupts hitherto dominant constructions of regional and gendered space. Analysing the work of Lesley Sharp as a case study, this article suggests that Sharp, a British actress who has almost always performed in Northern dramas, valorizes and occupies a powerful feminine and feminist space. Disrupting the authority of Northern masculinity, Sharp’s many performances as a range of complex female characters have, we argue, mobilized a shift in the location of a spatial identity and authority away from the realm of the masculine. Alongside other powerful Northern female performers, Sharp provides an alternative cartography that articulates the Northern landscape afresh and as such provides a more honest and inclusive view of the bodies through which it is performed.
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‘A Revolutionary Voice’: Analysing Maxine Peake’s Northern stardom in Silk and Room at the Top
Authors: Kristyn Gorton and Alison PeirseAbstractThis article explores how Maxine Peake’s explicit and directly articulated social conscience – specifically in terms of class, gender and Northernness – can be explored in television drama, and what this might say about her ‘Northern Stardom’ in our contemporary cultural climate. Our central case studies are the series Silk (2011–2014) and mini-series Room at the Top (2012), both chosen as recent productions that explicitly engage with politics but in quite different ways. In the case of Silk this is foregrounded as a courtroom drama, while Room at the Top’s 1950s’ setting demonstrates the way working-class men and women were able to break free of expectations around their gender and social standing – but at a cost. Peake is presented in popular culture as a rarity, a socially aware, politically active Northern actor who is able to break free of a Northern stereotype; at the same time, we will argue, as an actor she brings an honesty/emotion to the roles she plays that both chime with audience expectations of the ‘strong’ Northern woman and yet allow her to expose the fragility and anxiety inherent to this persona.
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‘No-nonsense-two-up-two-down-by-gum-you-daft-ha’poth-Northerness’: Jane Horrocks, Gracie Fields and performing generic Northernness
More LessAbstractWhen Jane Horrocks starred as Gracie Fields in the BBC Four single drama Gracie! (2009), most reviewers agreed that this casting was almost too perfect. They were thinking of the geographical connection between the two women – Horrocks grew up in Rawtenstall, Lancashire, only a few miles from Fields’s famed home town of Rochdale. Like Fields, Horrocks’s star image has been built around the ambivalent performance and exploitation of a Lancashire identity. From Bubble in Absolutely Fabulous (1992–2012), to a middle-class mother turned political candidate in The Amazing Mrs Pritchard (2006) or deputy supermarket manager in Trollied (2011–) Horrocks’ strong regional accent has rendered her a recognizable presence on British television for two decades. Her persona is of down-to-earth, no-nonsense, seemingly authentic Northernness. This article analyses Horrocks’ performance of Gracie Fields in relation to the rest of her career. It compares common themes of Lancashire identity associated with these stars of different eras, with particular attention to the changing sociocultural milieu in which workingclass Northern characters are found in their work – the mill/factory in the 1930s and the supermarket in the twenty-first century. It also considers the critical reception of Gracie! and the critical tendency to conflate actor with character. It explores how the embodied performance of known biographical personalities works in tension with the performance of generic ‘Northernness’.
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Sharper, better, faster, stronger: Performing Northern masculinity and the legacy of Sean Bean’s Sharpe
By Siân HarrisAbstractThis article examines the career of Sheffield-born actor Sean Bean through an analysis of his starring role in the ITV historical drama Sharpe (1993–2008). I chart the ways in which the adaptation capitalizes on Bean’s public identity as a Northern English, working-class actor, as well as providing a specific emphasis on regionality through a focus on how the characterization speaks to a popular understanding of Yorkshire, and a consideration of how Bean’s subsequent roles have engaged with Sharpe’s legacy. I posit that this performance catalyses Bean’s star persona, and offers a revealing insight into the preconceptions about Northern English identity and culture on-screen.
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‘The Bake Off beefcake with the best buns in the business’: Sex, pies and Paul Hollywood
More LessAbstractAs one of the judges on the hugely successful BBC series The Great British Bake Off (2010–), Paul Hollywood has become a food icon in the United Kingdom. Like other celebrity chefs, he has augmented an appreciation for careful food preparation and enhanced taste experiences, resisting the widespread consumer desire for easily accessible convenience food. This article explores Hollywood’s persona and the extent to which personality attributions associated with a ‘Northern’ identity paradigm are an intrinsic part of his appeal. I argue that Hollywood is selling more than cakes, pies, pastries and fancy bread through his various endeavours both on-and off-screen: he is selling an idea of the North as a place which values hard work, frugality and resourcefulness. For all the posturing about ‘food porn’ in the press, Hollywood’s work often celebrates the simplicity of comfort food, or the staples that define the routines of home cooking where repetition and familiarity are key aspects of the experience. Despite his success in the United Kingdom, Hollywood failed to emulate that success in the United States when he co-hosted The American Baking Competition (2013). This begs the question: what is it about a television star like Hollywood that makes his commodity value appeal and resonate in one market but ultimately sink without trace in the international market? Might we consider Hollywood as a case study in the limits of the transnational celebrity?
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Reviews
Authors: Eleanor Huntington, Dan Hassler-Forest, Stephanie Jones and Julie Anne TaddeoAbstractTribal Television: Viewing Native People in Sitcoms, Dustin Tahmahkera (2014) Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 262 pp., ISBN: 9781469618685, p/bk, $27.95
Saturday Night Live and American TV, Nick Marx, Matt Sienkiewicz and Ron Becker (eds) (2013) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 294 pp., ISBN: 9780253010827, p/bk, $25; ISBN: 9780253010773, cloth, $70; ISBN: 9780253010902, e-book, $21.99
Masculinity in Contemporary Quality Television, Michael Mario Albrecht (2015) Farnham: Ashgate, 133 pp., ISBN: 9781409469728, p/bk, £60.00
Edwardians on Screen: From Downton Abb ey to Parade’s End, Katherine Byrne (2015) Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 173 pp., ISBN: 1137467886, h/bk, £60.00
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