Celluloid Television Culture The Specificity of Film on Television: the Action-adventure Text as an Example of a Production and Textual Strategy, 1955 – 1978.

Sexton, Max (2013) Celluloid Television Culture The Specificity of Film on Television: the Action-adventure Text as an Example of a Production and Textual Strategy, 1955 – 1978. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to re-examine the use of film on British television, 1955-78, in order to demonstrate that the production of drama on British television was more complex than in the existing supposition, that television drama was either shot ‘live’ or co-existed with the recording medium of film. Instead, the types of interaction will raise questions about the process of production and how the recording of programmes on film addressed the audience watching a domestic medium. The thesis attempts to answer these questions by examining a form and mode of popular entertainment on British television that existed on film. The shot-on-film television series was a form that had been imported from the United States in the 1950s, but had been modified in Britain. The type of modification is shown to reveal how notions of value and quality were assigned to a television programme when a public service ethos determined the cultural discourse set by British television. The development of an export market and the internationalisation of British television will raise questions about the exact appeal of these programmes. At the same time, indigenous modes of film production designed for the domestic consumption of television existed side-by-side with the professional ideologies associated with commercial film-making. These professional ideologies allowed for the development of television as an international commodity. However, they created a tension between separate modes of fictional television production. The thesis concludes that the creation of separate modalities in the British adventure series at various times interacted in the 1960s and 1970s, and led to it becoming a less stable object of analysis, which requires an exploration of the often contradictory ways in which a number of key programmes functioned.

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