Books in the Oxford Television Studies series

This book provides a general and accessible critical survey of writing, research, and debates about television, and explains how they have been researched and debated. It also looks at some of the earliest thinking and ideas about the medium. The author has organized the book into ten cross-referenced chapters covering both the humanities and the social science approaches.

This study attempts to give a broad overview of British television by examining both the institutional framework and the programmes that it has produced, using reprinted writings from the work of acknowledged experts and commissioned essays on key topics.

Why is talk about television forbidden at some schools? Why does a mother feel guilty about watching Star Trek in front of her four-year-old child? Why would retired men turn to daytime soap operas for entertainment? Through case studies, Ellen Seiter explains what audience research tells us about gender, class, and the significance of television and computers at home and in the workplace.

Offers an account of the ways in which successive media of electronic communication have been anticipated, debated, and taken up in the twentieth-century United States. Illuminating both the continuities and disjunctions between old media and new, this book offers insights into the relationship between technological change and cultural form.

This book delivers the uncertainties and excitements of 1955-65 by looking at women's television programmes, current affairs, and popular drama. Though women were central to this audience their images were often demeaning, in line with fifties paternalism.

In its examination of television programmes such as "The Word" and "The Big Breakfast", this text reflects on the way in which the contemporary youth audience - "Generation X" - were being addressed between 1987 and 1995.

An account of British television drama from its pre-war origins in live studio drama to its convergence with an emerging British art cinema in the 1990s. The text focuses on debates about politics and form, centred around issues of immediacy and naturalism, realism and modernism in public culture.

This is a history of the feminist engagement with soap opera which uses a wide range of sources including fascinating interviews with key soap opera scholars. It is the story of why feminists were interested in soap opera, and who they thought watched it.

This book, the first academic study of its kind, uncovers a history of the child television audience. Looking in detail at children's television and its audience in Britain in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the book shows how an audience literally came into being, how it was given substance, and how it became the site of intervention.

This book challenges the idea that early television drama consisted of static plays relayed from the theatre. It draws on new archival evidence, including an analysis of the groundbreaking BBC production of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954). The book demonstrates that television drama pioneers produced a diverse and innovative range of plays.