Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies

Series Editors: Andrew Hoskins and John Sutton

The nascent field of Memory Studies emerges from contemporary trends that
include a shift from concern with historical knowledge of events to that of mem-
ory, from ‘what we know’ to ‘how we remember it’; changes in generational
memory; the rapid advance of technologies of memory; panics over declining
powers of memory, which mirror our fascination with the possibilities of mem-
ory enhancement; and the development of trauma narratives in reshaping the
past.
These factors have contributed to an intensification of public discourses on our
past over the last thirty years. Technological, political, interpersonal, social and
cultural shifts affect what, how and why people and societies remember and
forget. This groundbreaking series tackles questions such as: What is ‘memory’
under these conditions? What are its prospects, and also the prospects for its
interdisciplinary and systematic study? What are the conceptual, theoretical and
methodological tools for its investigation and illumination?

Titles include:
Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad (editors)
MEMORY IN A GLOBAL AGE
Discourses, Practices and Trajectories
Aleida Assmann and Linda Shortt
MEMORY AND POLITICAL CHANGE
Brian Conway
COMMEMORATION AND BLOODY SUNDAY
Pathways of Memory
Richard Crownshaw
THE AFTERLIFE OF HOLOCAUST MEMORY IN CONTEMPORARY
LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Astrid Erll
MEMORY IN CULTURE
Anne Fuchs
AFTER THE DRESDEN BOMBING
Pathways of Memory 1945 to the Present
Yifat Gutman, Adam D. Brown and Amy Sodaro (editors)
MEMORY AND THE FUTURE
Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society
Amy Holdsworth
TELEVISION, MEMORY AND NOSTALGIA
Mikyoung Kim and Barry Schwartz (editors)
NORTHEAST ASIA’S DIFFICULT PAST
Essays in Collective Memory
Erica Lehrer, Cynthia E. Milton and Monica Eileen Patterson (editors)
CURATING DIFFICULT KNOWLEDGE
Violent Pasts in Public Places
Motti Neiger, Oren Meyers and Eyal Zandberg (editors)
ON MEDIA MEMORY
Collective Memory in a New Media Age
Evelyn B. Tribble and Nicholas Keene
COGNITIVE ECOLOGIES AND THE HISTORY OF REMEMBERING
Religion, Education and Memory in Early Modern England

Forthcoming titles:

Anne Fuchs
ICON DRESDEN
A Cultural Impact Study from 1945 to the Present
Owain Jones and Joanne Garde-Hansen (editors)
GEOGRAPHY AND MEMORY
Exploring Identity, Place and Becoming
Emily Keightley and Michael Pickering
CREATIVE MEMORY
J. Olaf Kleist and Irial Glynn (editors)
HISTORY, MEMORY AND MIGRATION
Perceptions of the Past and the Politics of Incorporation

Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies

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Television, Memory and
Nostalgia
Amy Holdsworth
© Amy Holdsworth 2011
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ISBN 978-1-349-31923-7 ISBN 978-0-230-34797-7 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/9780230347977
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Holdsworth, Amy, 1979–
Television, memory and nostalgia / Amy Holdsworth.
p. cm. — (Palgrave Macmillan memory studies)
Based on the author’s thesis (doctoral)—University of Warwick.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Memory on television. 2. Nostalgia on television. 3. Identity

(Psychology) on television. 4. Television—Psychological aspects.
I. Title.
PN1992.M45H65 2011
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20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11
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For Alice. In Loving Memory
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

List of Figures viii

Acknowledgements xi

Introduction 1

1 Half the World Away: Television, Space, Time and Memory 7

2 Haunting the Memory: Moments of Return in Television

Drama 32

3 Who Do You Think You Are? Memory and Identity in the

Family History Documentary 65

4 Safe Returns: Nostalgia and Television 96

5 Television’s Afterlife: Memory, the Museum and Material

Culture 127

Notes 149

Bibliography 159

Index 169

vii
List of Figures

1.1 Split-screen memory in Oldboy (dir. Park Chan-Wook,

prod. Egg Films/Show East, South Korea, 2003) 10
1.2 Remembering watching television news (BBC promo,
2008) 12
1.3 Television’s mise-en-abyme – a series of reflections
looking into and out from the screen. The Royle Family
title sequence (Granada for BBC, 1998–) 18
1.4 Garry Shandling and Bill Haverchuck share an
after-school drink in ‘Dead Dogs and Gym Teachers’,
episode 14, Freaks and Geeks (dir. Judd Apatow, prod.
Apatow Productions/DreamWorks SKG, 1999) 23
1.5 Imprisoned by television. Jane Wyman in All That Heaven
Allows (dir. Douglas Sirk, prod. Universal, US, 1955) 27
1.6 Television as the site of horror and haunting: Ringu (dir.
Hideo Nakata, Japan, 1998) 28
1.7 David Baddiel’s television altar (WDYTYA, series 1,
episode 7, Wall to Wall for BBC, 2004) 30
1.8 Nana takes pride of place on the Royle Family’s television
altar. ‘The Queen of Sheba’ (dir. Mark Mylod, prod.
Granada for BBC, 2006) 31
2.1 Six Feet Under, ‘Everyone’s Waiting’, season 5, episode 12
(dir. Alan Ball, prod. HBO/The Greenblatt Janollari
Studio/Actual Size Productions, US, 2005) 33
2.2 Alice, present (Perfect Strangers, dir. Stephen Poliakoff,
prod. Talkback for BBC, 2001) 41
2.3 Richard, past (Perfect Strangers, dir. Stephen Poliakoff,
prod. Talkback for BBC, 2001) 42
2.4 Alice, past (Perfect Strangers, dir. Stephen Poliakoff, prod.
Talkback for BBC, 2001) 43
2.5 Mark Greene, ‘Heal Thyself’, ER, season 15, episode 7 (dir.
David Zabel, prod. Constant c Productions/Amblin
Television/Warner Bros.Television, US, 2008) 50
2.6 Izzie Stevens, ‘Losing my Religion’, Grey’s Anatomy,
season 2, episode 27 (dir. Mark Tinker, prod. Mark

viii
 List of Figures ix

Gordon Productions/ShondaLand/Touchstone Television,

US, 2006) 56
2.7 Izzie Stevens, ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me, pt 2’, Grey’s
Anatomy, season 5, episode 2 (dir. Ron Corn, prod.
ShondaLand/The Mark Gordon Company/ABC Studios,
US, 2008) 57
2.8 Izzie Stevens, ‘Now or Never’, Grey’s Anatomy, season 5,
episode 24 (dir. Ron Corn, prod. ShondaLand/The Mark
Gordon Company/ABC Studios, US, 2009) 58
2.9 Nick Sobotka, ‘Port in a Storm’, The Wire, season 2,
episode 12 (dir. Robert F. Colesberry, prod. Blown
Deadline Productions/ HBO, US, 2003) 62
2.10 Frank Sobotka, ‘Bad Dreams’, The Wire, season 2, episode
11 (dir. Ernest R. Dickerson, prod. Blown Deadline
Productions/HBO, US, 2003) 63
3.1 Then and now: The battle grave (WDYTYA, series 1,
episode 5, Wall to Wall for BBC, 2004) 81
3.2 Jeremy Clarkson surveys the former site of the Kilner
factory (WDYTYA, series 1, episode 4, Wall to Wall for
BBC, 2004) 82
3.3 Peering through time: Fry and his mother retrace old
steps (WDYTYA, series 2, episode 3, Wall to Wall for BBC,
2006) 83
3.4 WDYTYA’s original brand image (Wall to Wall for BBC,
2004–) 89
4.1 Sean Lock and Johnny Vaughan in series 1, episode 3, TV
Heaven, Telly Hell (dir. Lissa Evans, prod. Objective
Productions for Channel 4, 2006) 100
4.2 Un-regeneration, Manchester in 1973, series 1, episode 1,
Life on Mars (dir. Bharat Nalluri, prod. Kudos Film and
Television/Red Planet Pictures for BBC, 2006) 106
4.3 Disruptive restoration, New York in 1973, ‘Out Here in
the Fields’, episode 1, Life on Mars (dir. Gary Fleder, prod.
Kudos Film and Television/20th Century Fox/ABC
Studios, 2008) 107
4.4 Sam leaves hospital, series 2, episode 8, Life on Mars (dir.
S. J. Clarkson, prod. Kudos Film and Television for BBC,
2007) 109
4.5 Alone in a crowd, series 2, episode 8, Life on Mars (dir. S. J.
Clarkson, prod. Kudos Film and Television for BBC, 2007) 109
4.6 Trailer for second series of Life on Mars (BBC, 2007) 111
x List of Figures

4.7 Chris Dunkley and Mark Lawson review Steptoe and Son in
episode 2 of TV on Trial (dir. Amanda Crayden, prod.
BBC, 2005) 122
4.8 Studio set of You Have Been Watching (dir. Richard
Valentine, prod. Zeppotron for Channel 4, 2009) 124
4.9 Fern Britton presents That’s What I Call Television (dir.
Simon Staffurth, prod. Unique Television for ITV, 2007) 125
5.1 The Doctor and Rose in the museum. ‘Dalek’, series 1,
episode 6 of the new Doctor Who (dir. Joe Ahearne, prod.
BBC Wales, 2005) 128
5.2 William Hartnell hides inside the Dalek exhibit in ‘The
Space Museum’, series 2, serial 15 (dir. Mervyn Pinfield,
BBC, 1965) 129
5.3 A Dalek in TV Heaven (courtesy of the National Media
Museum/Science and Society Picture Library) 130
5.4 The renovated museum, with glass atrium, was reopened
in 1999. It was renamed as the National Media Museum
in 2006 (courtesy of the National Media Museum/Science
and Society Picture Library) 133
5.5 Linear histories of television technology (courtesy of the
National Media Museum/Science and Society Picture
Library) 138
5.6 The Gallery of Televisions (courtesy of the National
Media Museum/Science and Society Picture Library) 140
5.7 A television set as an obsolete object (image: author’s
own) 141
5.8 Domestic viewing as an exhibit in the 1986 television
gallery at the NMPFT, Television Comes to Bradford (dir.
Simon Willis, BBC, 1986) 143
Acknowledgements

This project began its life as a PhD thesis completed in the Depart-
ment of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick and
funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). I am
especially grateful to Charlotte Brunsdon, who supervised the early
stages of this work, for her excellent guidance and support. Elsewhere
at Warwick, for their continuing friendship, I would like to thank
Tracey McVey, Rachel Moseley, Helen Wheatley, and, although we’ve
all moved on, James Bennett, Malini Guha, Iris Kleinecke-Bates, Chris
Meir, Laura Ortiz-Garrett and Sarah Thomas for the fun and distrac-
tions as well as the reassurance and solidarity. Special thanks to Faye
Woods, who has been a constant source of encouragement across the
duration of this project, sharing with me both ideas and research
materials.
It is at the University of Glasgow that I have developed this earlier
work into a book. I would like to thank all my colleagues in Film and
TV at Glasgow for the space and time to complete this project and for
providing such a welcoming and supportive atmosphere. In particular,
I must thank Dimitris Eleftheriotis for reading and discussing with me
drafts of Chapter 3, Michael McCann for his technical wizardry and for
keeping me laughing, and Karen Lury for her continuous and much-
appreciated insight, inspiration, generosity and guidance. Elsewhere at
Glasgow I am indebted to those students who took my honours options
on ‘Contemporary Television Drama’ and ‘Television, Memory and the
Archive’ in 2009/10. The energy and enthusiasm I met with in these
teaching experiences helped me to reignite this research.
Thanks to all those who have listened to, commented on, shared ideas
and materials, and supported this research. I am particularly grateful to
the members of the Midlands Television Research Group, the Northern
Television Studies Research Group, Jerome de Groot, Ann Gray, Erin Bell,
Jonny Roberts, Lisa Taylor, Emily Marshall, Melanie Hoyes, Kerr Castle
and Andrew Hoskins. For both their openness and their insights I am
indebted to Iain Logie Baird, Kathryn Blacker, Kate Dunn, Claire Thomas
and Sheena Vigors at the National Media Museum in Bradford. I must
also extend my gratitude to Catherine Mitchell at Palgrave Macmillan
for her expert help and guidance in completing this manuscript.

xi
xii Acknowledgements

Finally, for their love and seemingly endless patience, I would like
to thank my friends and family, especially the C.C., John Holdsworth
and Briony Farr, Janet and John Andelin, Matt and Sam Hayball and
my sister, Jessica, who, most importantly, grew up with me watching
television and continues to watch what I tell her to.
Extracts from the Introduction and Chapter 5 first published as the
article ‘ “Television resurrections”: Television and memory’, by Amy
Holdsworth, in Cinema Journal. 47.3, pp. 137–144. Copyright 2008 by
the University of Texas Press. All rights reserved.
An earlier version of Chapter 3 first appeared as ‘Who do you think
you are? family history and memory on British television’ in E. Bell and
A. Gray (eds.) Televising History (2010, Palgrave Macmillan). Reproduced
with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
Introduction

Television has often been characterised by its ‘transience’, ‘ephemerality’,

‘forgetability’ and even more seriously, it is seen as an ‘amnesiac’,
responsible for the ‘undermining of memory’. Television is not only
the bad critical object in the academy, but is a bad memory object as
well. In her account of the shifts in theories and concerns with mem-
ory from modernity to late modernity, Susannah Radstone observes that
‘whereas in the nineteenth century, it was the felt break with tradition
and the long durée which constituted the temporal aspect of the mem-
ory crisis, in the late twentieth century, that crisis is inflected, rather, by
the experiences of immediacy, instantaneity and simultaneity’ (2000,
p. 7). Radstone goes on to reiterate, through Sobchack, that the devel-
opment of new electronic technologies that ‘collapse the distance that
previously separated an event from its representation’ is in part respon-
sible for the ‘deepening’ of the memory crisis (ibid.). Andreas Huyssen’s
Present Pasts explores how a contemporary fascination with memory
might be viewed as a response to the ‘spread of amnesia’ in Western
society. For Huyssen, ‘intense public panic of oblivion’ is met by the
‘contemporary public obsession with memory’ (2003, p. 17). This book
offers a way of rethinking television’s role at the heart of the memory
crisis and its paradoxical memory boom by examining the function of
memory and nostalgia on a medium and for a medium that is often seen
as a metaphor for forgetting.
Television itself is marked by and generates our obsession with com-
memoration and anniversaries, through its repetition and continual
re-narrativisation of grand historical narratives, for example, of world
wars and world cups.1 It is within these ‘new electronic technologies’,

1
2 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

such as television, that a contemporary fascination with memory

becomes evident. As Huyssen writes:

The turn toward memory and the past comes with a great paradox.
Ever more frequently, critics accuse this very contemporary memory
culture of amnesia, anesthesia, or numbing. They chide the inability
and unwillingness to remember, and they lament the loss of histor-
ical consciousness. The amnesia reproach is invariably couched in a
critique of the media, while it is precisely these media – from print
to television to CD-ROMs and the Internet – that make ever more
memory available to us day by day.
(2003, pp. 16–17)

Whilst Huyssen’s argument moves on to discuss the relationship

between remembering and forgetting and the need to make a distinc-
tion, among the excesses of a memory and information culture, between
‘usable pasts and disposable data’ (2003, p. 18), we might also respond
to the need to pay specific attention to media forms and the opera-
tions of a contemporary memory culture. Radstone’s own assertion that
‘ “memory” means different things at different times’ (2000, p. 3) and
her suggestion that we need to pay more attention to the ‘specifici-
ties of contemporary preoccupations with memory’ (2000, p. 6) must
open up medium-specific interrogations of memory. There are two pri-
mary concerns that are raised by the relationship between television and
memory. The first, illuminated by Huyssen’s work, is the role of televi-
sion within the constitution of contemporary memory cultures, and the
second, arguably a more neglected area of investigation, is the role of
memory in the operation of specific television cultures. Huyssen states
that ‘we cannot discuss personal, generational, or public memory sepa-
rately from the enormous influence of the new media as carriers of all
forms of memory’ (2003, p. 18). If this is so, then it is essential that we
re-evaluate the relationship between memory and television not only as
an attempt to understand how memory works but also, in Karen Lury’s
words, as an ‘attempt to understand how television works’ (2001, p. 25).
What is needed is a re-evaluation that remains respectful of both the
specificity and the diversity of television’s forms and practices.
David Morley reminds us that ‘if television is a visual medium, it is
also one with a physical materiality all of its own and a wide range of
symbolic functions’ (2007, p. 282). This is an understanding that runs
across the investigations within this book and is central to the opening
chapter. From British sitcom The Royle Family (BBC, 1998–) to Japanese
 Introduction 3

horror film Ringu (dir. Hideo Nakata, 1998), through a series of examples
drawn from television and beyond I consider how television’s multi-
ple relationships to memory have been and can be thought through.
It is this interplay between television as a visual medium and a mate-
rial object that is at the centre of my analysis. It is an understanding of
television as a domestic object watched within the space of the home
that underpins this discussion, and I employ the metaphor of the ‘black
mirror’ to consider multiple forms of reflection inside and outside the
home and between the television and its viewer. Contrary to the notion
of television as an amnesiac and moving on from the privileging of the
news and media event in discussions of television memory, here, televi-
sion is understood as part of both a material network of memory and a
system of everyday memory-making within and in relation to the home
and the family.
Chapter 2 seeks further to understand the workings of different
forms of television in relation to memory through the investigation
of ‘moments of return’ in television drama and representations of
remembering and reflection. At the heart of this chapter is the initial
provocation that ignited this project – Fredric Jameson’s statement that
‘memory seems to play no role in television, commercial or otherwise
[ . . . ] nothing here haunts the mind or leaves its afterimages in the
manner of the great moments of film’ (1991, pp. 70–71). Contrary to
this statement I consider the patterns of haunting, the play with ‘after-
images’ and the forms and pleasures of repetition within the dramas
I discuss – Perfect Strangers (BBC, 2001), ER (NBC, 1994–2009), Grey’s
Anatomy (ABC, 2005–) and The Wire (HBO, 2002–8) – as evidence of
the central role of memory within television’s dramatic forms. Here
the ‘moment’ also emerges as a way of approaching and writing about
the lengthy and complex narratives of serial drama. Whilst the ‘black
mirror’ allows us to consider a form of reflection which ‘brings forth’,
the notion of reflection employed in Chapter 2 is primarily understood
as a looking and a referencing back. It is this backwards and forwards
movement, patterns of return and retreat, and the ‘ebb and flow’ of tele-
vision that is central to my understanding of the medium and which
characterises many of the programmes discussed within this book.2
This characteristic is drawn from, in part, television’s own explo-
rations of the relationships between past and present. In Chapter 3
I discuss the hugely successful family history documentary format of
Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC, 2004–), where celebrity investigators
explore their own family trees. It is a format that places individual sto-
ries in relation to wider social histories, the investigations of which are
4 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

enabled by forms of post-memory and memory work. The part/whole

relations characteristic of serial narrative are explored in Chapter 3 in
terms of the relationship between the individual and the collective. Who
Do You Think You Are? produces an affirmative vision of historical con-
nectivity whereby the individual is seen as part of a wider picture, not
as a passive subject but as an active historical agent. These affirmations
are understood in relation to the work of memory in the series as, in
Alessandro Portelli’s terms, a ‘permanent labour of connecting’,3 realised
through the trope of the journey and the emphasis on discovery. This
is promoted as the affirmative discovery of both national identity and
self-identity, where memory emerges as a form of emotional connection
with the past that is explored and exploited by the format. The work on
this particular series functions as a case study of television’s ability to
simultaneously open up and close down the potentials of memory and
the investigation of history; what is reaffirmed is its role in the produc-
tion and reinforcement of patterns of remembering and forgetting.
The dynamics of remembering and forgetting are clearly apparent in
the descriptions of the paradoxical ‘memory boom’. Whilst television is
often viewed as central to this ‘postmodern condition’ that produces an
abundance of memory in response to the fear of forgetting, we might
see how television itself is struck by a similar affliction. This is arguably
intensified by the acknowledgement of its own immateriality and tran-
sience and heightened at a time of dramatic technological change and
uncertainty over the future of the medium. Lynn Spigel’s observation in
Television After TV that ‘television – once the most familiar of everyday
objects – is now transforming at such rapid speeds that we no longer
really know what “TV” is at all’ (2004, p. 6) illuminates the intensified
instability of both television and television studies. Fear that television,
the professed medium par excellence for the production of vanish-
ing acts, will itself inevitably disappear might be seen to lead towards
an increased obsession with television memory and the nostalgia for
television past. Anxieties about television and even television studies,
therefore, might be seen to run parallel to present anxieties regarding
history and memory in general.
Using the UK example of ITV’s celebrations of its fiftieth anniver-
sary in 2005, Stephen Lacey writes that ‘television history is in the air
and on the screen. It is ironic, perhaps that the broadcasters should be
looking back at the point at which the medium is engaged in a pro-
cess of profound technological and cultural change’ (2006, p. 10). This
is not necessarily ironic but is a phenomenon that fits into the ‘logic’
of discussions of contemporary memory culture and points towards
 Introduction 5

television’s own memory boom; that the medium is now ‘lost in mem-
ory’. Examples of this increased memorialisation of past television
within the British context include: the reinvention and resurrection of
cult or canonical texts such as Doctor Who (BBC, 1963–89; 2005–) or
Life on Mars (BBC, 2006–7), the popularity of nostalgia programming
(i.e. the clip show or list TV) and the scheduling of retrospective sea-
sons (on BBC Four, for example),4 the phenomenal growth of the TV
DVD market and the development of online television archives. These
examples of the resurrection of archive television for public consump-
tion also clearly mark the currency of television memory and nostalgia
as enabling what Michael Grade, British broadcast executive, has called
the exploitation of ‘sleeping assets’ (in O’Sullivan 1998, p. 202).
The influence of memory studies and the notion of the ‘memory
boom’ prompt a concern with how, why and to what effect memory and
nostalgia arise within the televisual landscape and we might read the
proliferation of television memory and nostalgia as symptomatic of the
current state of television and a response to changes in the medium.
However, whilst we lament what has been lost, to employ and rephrase
Huyssen’s argument, it is precisely these changes – digitisation, DVD,
online archives – that make ever more television memory available to
us day by day.
It is here that we must call to attention the different national contexts
of television memory and nostalgia. Whilst the recirculation of past tele-
vision has noticeably increased with the emergence of multi-channel
and digital television within Britain, the case is entirely different for the
North American broadcasting system, where the practice of syndication
and the rerun have a long tradition. Derek Kompare’s research on the
historical development of the rerun on American television examines
what he refers to as the ‘regime of repetition’ – the constant recirculation
of the nation’s cultural and individual pasts in the present through the
ubiquity of past television (2002, p. 19). The revelations of Kompare’s
study necessitate an examination of what is called upon and when; to
consider the historical and national specificity of television memory
and nostalgia. Whilst it is not the intention of this book to translate
Kompare’s work into a comparative British study, by paying attention
to the way in which past television is re-contextualised, through tex-
tual, generic, personal and institutional practices, we might begin to
investigate the construction of television’s own memory cultures and
our engagement with them.
It is these forms of re-encounter and re-contextualisation that form
the centre of my analysis in Chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 4 investigates
6 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

textual forms of encounter with past television through a study of the

relationship between television and nostalgia – a term that is often
evoked in relation to television but which has seen little sustained
attention to the significance of its meanings for understanding of the
medium. At the centre of this discussion is ‘television about television’ –
the list show, the UK and US versions of Life on Mars and forms of insti-
tutional nostalgia. Self-conscious, playful and paradoxical – nostalgia is
explored as a way of approaching television’s relationship to and memo-
ries of itself, which in turn reveal more about the medium’s construction
of broader social and cultural memories. Whilst ‘television about televi-
sion’ must be seen within a commercial and institutional context, it also
reveals much about the potency of generational relationships to televi-
sion as well as operating within specifically nostalgic forms of longing
and reflection.
Chapter 5 returns us to the material cultures of television and exam-
ines the re-encounter with the archive through an analysis of the
television exhibitions at the UK’s National Media Museum (NMM).
This particular gallery serves as a case study through which to exam-
ine both the potentials and limitations of exhibiting television and as a
way of interrogating the long-neglected significance of the medium’s
materiality, explored in relation to theorisations of the material and
memorial cultures of museum practice. As a form of resurrection, cura-
torial practices and exhibition design reveal much about the ways in
which television histories and heritages are constructed but also the
ways in which television matters within individual and collective lives
through the resonances of memory and nostalgia. The work of cura-
tors at the NMM also highlights the real and imaginary material and
immaterial cultures of both analogue and digital television – it is this
transition between the two that is central to the exploration of a recur-
ring anxiety regarding the end of television. However, as the afterlife
of television in the museum illuminates, whilst some might herald
the death of television, its past constantly surrounds us, as television’s
own ‘memory boom’ expands with the proliferation of television mem-
ory technologies and practices. Television is not dead but re-circulates
within contemporary culture through a variety of textual, generic,
personal and institutional practices. Fredric Jameson once wrote that
memory plays ‘no role in television’ but in the contemporary televisual
landscape, memory and nostalgia lie at the very heart.
1
Half the World Away: Television,
Space, Time and Memory

This chapter is constructed around a series of examples drawn from

cinema, contemporary art and television itself that reveal much about
the place of television within the popular imagination. More specifi-
cally, each represents a different way in which television’s role in the
construction of collective and individual memory can be articulated,
explored and imagined. It is not an exhaustive compendium of televi-
sion’s multiple relationships with memory – there is still much to be
discovered – but an introduction to existing thought and a rethink-
ing of the phenomenological aspects of this relationship; a relation-
ship which finds fruitful lines of inquiry by considering the symbolic
functions taken on by television as a visual medium and a material
object.
As two ways of approaching television it is this interplay between
the visual medium and the material object, between the television text
and the context of viewing, that I have found to be a productive way
of engaging with and writing about television memories. The major-
ity of the examples I employ are representations of television viewing
and each exhibits strong elements of a self-reflexivity which highlights
aspects of this interplay. Forms of reflection, central to many parts of this
book, emerge as a useful way of exploring television memory in relation
to the self, the family, domestic space and the world outside. Character-
ising the television screen as a form of ‘black mirror’ produces evocative
comparisons between this magical device and the ordinary and over-
looked aspects of television as a material object. Television is understood
not as a box in the corner of a room but embedded within the sensual
aspects of the domestic environment, producing memories which are
forged from a network of sense impressions and allowing television to
be seen within a network of memories.

7
8 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

Understandings of both space and time have been and continue to be

central to conceptualisations of the relationship between television and
memory, though it is perhaps the latter which has received the most
attention. My first two examples, then, offer different versions of televi-
sion’s temporality and I use them here, at the beginning of this chapter,
to respond to what is currently the most extensive area of academic work
on television memory.

Marking time: memory and the media event

The various temporalities of television have been somewhat overshad-

owed by an understanding of ‘liveness’ as the defining characteris-
tic of the medium, and whilst television’s relationship to the ritual
and the routine has been much remarked upon there has been lit-
tle sustained attention to the role of memory within this experience.
Digital evolutions in the ways we watch and experience television,
inevitably impacting on the ways we remember television, necessitate
the re-conceptualisation of increasingly complex relationships between
television, time, space and memory. The relationship between ana-
logue and digital experiences and memories of television requires greater
investigation both within and beyond the scope of this particular
project. I do not wish to draw a line between the two but to suggest that,
whilst these digital revolutions intensify the necessity of rethinking
understandings of time and memory in relation to television, we might
be bolder and challenge, in Mimi White’s terms, the ‘foundational
assumptions’ of television theory (2004, p. 76).
The representational modes of the media event (in particular the
catastrophic media event), as both breaking news and archive footage,
have received much worthy attention.1 Yet they have come to domi-
nate commentary on television’s relationship to memory, producing, as
Jerome Bourdon has observed, ‘two contradictory models of television
memories: a destructive model, and a hyper-integrative model based on
a single program type’ (2003, p. 6).
The examples I want to employ to consider these two models are both
representations of the viewing of media events and both are framed by
memory. I use them here to reveal the attitudes towards and the ways
in which the relationship between television and time and its affect on
memory and experience has been and can be thought through. The first
is a sequence from the South Korean film Oldboy (dir. Park Chan-Wook,
2003) which highlights postmodern anxieties about television and the
impoverishment of experience. The second is a 2008 promo for the
 Television, Space, Time and Memory 9

BBC’s mobile news service which represents an understanding of tele-

vision memory in relation to a Western model of linear time and the
sequential plotting of history. Memory, here, is also a promotional tool
for the BBC, setting up lines of continuity and tradition.

Lost time: Oldboy

For Fredric Jameson, television is perceived as being both a bad memory
object and a bad critical object. He writes in Postmodernism that ‘the
blockage of fresh thinking before this solid little window against which
we strike our heads’ is ‘not unrelated to precisely that whole or total flow
we observe through it’ (1991, p. 70). Models of television textuality have
long been dominated by Raymond Williams’ concept of ‘flow’ (1974)
and it is through this concept that Jameson and others have envisaged
television as the producer of lost images and lost time. It is the notion
of lost time that is illuminated by the representation of television in the
opening scenes of Oldboy.
Standing at the edge of the roof of a high building a man in a black
suit and with a shock of black hair holds another, leaning off the edge,
by his tie. Accompanied by a classic-electro score, so the film begins,
powering its way onto the screen. ‘I want to tell you my story’ the
first man proclaims and it is from this point, through flashback, that
the events leading to this point are revealed. The man is Oh Dae-Su
(Choi Min-Sik), abducted by an unknown kidnapper, for 15 years he
has been held captive in a cell that is reminiscent of a cheap hotel
room and fed through a hatch in the door, and for 15 years Oh Dae-
Su’s only companion is the television. This, however, is a hostile and
cruel companionship. Powerless and confused, Oh Dae-Su despairingly
watches as the television reports his own abduction, his wife’s murder
and his daughter’s disappearance (at the hands of his own captor he
must presume). He is teased by the television as his desire for physical
connection increases – reaching out to touch the screen, he masturbates
to the performance of a female pop star only for the song to end and the
programme to cut away before he is satisfied. A false point of connec-
tion, television becomes for Oh Dae-Su a way of passing time, and in a
montage sequence towards the end of his imprisonment it also becomes
a way of marking time for both the director and the audience.
Scratching at the walls with a chopstick, Oh Dae-Su begins an attempt
to tunnel out of his cell. As he investigates the potential escape route,
the director evokes a sense of the length of time of Oh Dae-Su’s impris-
onment through the use of a televisual montage and a split screen
10 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

Figure 1.1 Split-screen memory in Oldboy (dir. Park Chan-Wook, prod. Egg
Films/Show East, South Korea, 2003).

(see Figure 1.1). On the left is the dark cinematic image of Oh Dae-Su
scraping through and investigating the cavity between the walls then
physically preparing himself for freedom. On the right is a televisual
montage of key news events occurring in South Korea between 1995
and 2003.2 The sequence is framed, not by the use of voice-over, as with
the rest of the flashback, but by an ambient electronic soundtrack with
a steady driving beat.
The sequence sets up a series of tensions and differences through the
use of the split screen and by preceding and closing imagery. Repre-
sentations of television within film often illuminate attitudes towards
the former in the popular imagination and by film-makers who often
consider it to be an ‘inferior’ medium. Whilst the split screen might be
seen to underline perceived differences between film and television, the
treatment of television in the film evokes particular postmodern anx-
ieties regarding the impoverishment of memory and experience. For
Geoffrey Hartman, television, and the relentlessness of its flow, pro-
duces an ‘unreality effect’ (2001, p. 113), and it is this derealisation of
experience that Oh Dae-Su is seen to battle against.
Within Oldboy there is an insistent emphasis on the visceral and the
body. Oh Dae-Su’s ordeal is worn by his body; his tattooing of his
years in captivity upon the back of his hand is contrasted with the use
of television to ‘mark time’. The real, the authentic and bodily forms
of memory (the scars from several suicide attempts and his blistered
knuckles from punching the walls) are positioned against the simulated,
mediated and artificial. For example, a televised boxing match at the
opening of the montage is contrasted with Oh Dae-Su’s visceral punch
 Television, Space, Time and Memory 11

into the camera at its end. Television is emphasised as an unsatisfactory

substitute for ‘lived’ experience and absent of such sensual forms of
memory. In Figure 1.1, the coldly lit and dark image of Oh Dae-Su,
glistening with sweat as he prepares his assault, is contrasted with the
one-dimensional artifice of the graphics of television news. There is also
an added violence to the sequence, symbolised by the television, in that
it depicts not just time that has passed, but time that is stolen from
Oh Dae-Su by his captor.
However, the relationship between television and memory functions
in an additional way. The sequence works as a marker of time passing
not just through the conventions of the news montage but precisely
because it relies upon a collective memory of the news events included
in the montage. Writing on what he refers to as the ‘mediatisation of
memory’, Andrew Hoskins considers how ‘in the conflict-laden field of
television news and documentary, highly selected ghosts (e.g. D-Day,
the Tet offensive and 9/11) haunt our television screens’ (2009, p. 38).
Whilst the sequence from Oldboy illuminates the national specificity
of these ‘ghosts’, it also highlights the construction of media memory
canons as a form of collective television memory. However, the privi-
leging of television news, and specifically the traumatic media event,
in critical inquiries on television memory has led to both a polarised
commentary, which reproduces models of trauma and therapy, and to
the neglect of television’s diversity and the various televisual forms, uses
and experiences of both memory and nostalgia.3
In line with Bourdon’s observation on the split commentary of
media events, this second example constructs the experience of the
media event in a different way, emphasising time as a cumulative
experience rather than a vanishing act, and inscribing memories of tele-
vision within an institutional discourse. Yet it also points towards the
re-imagining of the space and place of television within discussions of
memory.

The march of time: BBC news promo

In a 1960s living room a crying mother is comforted by her son as she
watches news footage of President Kennedy’s assassination. In a sunny
1970s caravan park, whilst a young boy plays swingball outside, inside
the caravan a young girl, her chin rested on her hands, is absorbed
by coverage of Elvis Presley’s death on a portable television set (see
Figure 1.2). The Berlin Wall is falling and three office colleagues gather
around the security guard’s television set to watch the celebrations.
12 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

Figure 1.2 Remembering watching television news (BBC promo, 2008).

Whilst attending to a patient’s intravenous drip a black female doctor

watches the release of Nelson Mandela on the television set in a hospi-
tal ward lounge. Among the trees and chirping birds a man flicks open
his mobile phone, alerted to a new event by the BBC’s mobile news ser-
vice. Where were you when you heard the news? Where will you be next time?
the strapline asks.
The promo clearly depicts breaking news events as ‘moments which
can be isolated from the fragmented flow of information, moments with
an impact which disrupts the ordinary routine’ (Doane 1990, p. 228).
It is in the interruption of the routine that these moments have been
 Television, Space, Time and Memory 13

seen to construct memory rather than disappearing with the rest of tele-
vision’s amnesiac flow. Yet it is a longer view of television that is taken,
with the promo presenting a cumulative series of events. Here, the
sequential nature of both television and historical time can be empha-
sised, where televisual flow is characterised by, rather than rupture, a
forwards momentum that is mapped onto the march of progress.
Continuity is emphasised by a pattern of shots, and each vignette
is constructed through a combination of establishing shot, a medium
close-up of the viewer and a close-up of the television set and the news
broadcast. These vignettes of viewing are also sutured through the use
of sound and music. The merging audio of the archival news reports
presents a through-line of voices, each characterised by the received pro-
nunciation of male BBC journalists (Brian Hanrahan and Michael Buerk
are seen within the footage) and closing with the voice-over of Mark
Strong advertising the service. This is layered with the repetitive and
atmospheric refrain of a guitar composition.4
For the purposes of the promotion, a highly selective series of ‘mem-
orable moments’ are chosen, mapping social and political progress (the
fall of the Berlin Wall, the release of Mandela) onto the rhetoric of tech-
nological liberation; a rhetoric of choice, empowerment and freedom
which has been employed across the digital television industry to pro-
mote changing services and new forms of viewing. There are clearly
symbolic implications to this rhetoric and particularly within this spe-
cific promo. For example, we might remark upon the implicit gendering
of technology within the sequence, whereby it is the female viewer that
is associated with the static analogue set (in the office trio it is the
woman with blonde hair, red lipstick and a red suit who stands out
within the dark frame) and a male ‘viewser’ who takes advantage of the
freedom associated with the digital era. Whilst I address forms of insti-
tutional nostalgia, particularly in relation to the BBC in Chapter 4, we
must also remain attentive to the institutional discourses of television
memory at work here, as this promo works to stress lines of continuity in
the BBC’s provision of news and its impact on and address to the viewer
as citizen. There is an emphasis upon tradition and continuity in the
BBC’s news service which soothes rather than aggravates the perceived
rupture of digital practices.
Whilst the BBC pats itself on the back for at least half a century of
exceptional television news coverage, both impacting upon and weaved
into the lives of its viewers, in this example the BBC chooses to employ
perhaps one of the most popular and prevalent discourses of television
memory which emphasises the role of television as, in Tim O’Sullivan’s
14 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

words, a powerful point of ‘symbolic, autobiographical and generational

reference’ (1998, p. 202) – ‘where were you when . . . ?’ or perhaps more
specifically ‘where were you when you watched . . . ?’ It is a question
which emphasises the significance of place and the context of viewing
in memories of television and one which returns us to the importance
of the everyday, the domestic, the ritual and the routine in rethinking
the complexities of both television and memory and their relationships
to the multiple registers of time. It is not my intention to reproduce a
familiar binary of linear ‘v’ cyclical time (see Felski in Radstone 2007,
p. 11) but to draw attention to forms of television experience, which,
whilst widely remarked upon have produced little conceptual thought
in terms of memory. It is the ‘where’ of the question that I want to open
with and then move on to consider television’s relationship to domestic
space by investigating the various and evocative interplays between text
and context through the motif of the mirror and the reflection.

Reflections: memory, the everyday and the domestic

In his short story Music for Chameleons, Truman Capote describes how
the narrator’s gaze is captivated by the magnetic pull of a black mir-
ror: ‘My eyes distractedly consult it – are drawn to it against my will,
as they sometimes are by the senseless flickerings of an unregulated
television set. It has that kind of frivolous power’ (2000 [1980], p. 7).
Arnaud Maillet (2004) charts the history of the black mirror, its use by
artists, magicians and scientists, and its place within Western thought
and culture.5 Here the mirror is an anxious source of suspicion, fear
and fascination, in its power to capture and distort the gaze, but also
in the possibilities that arise in its reflections – the visions, shadows
and phantoms that come forth. More recently, a series of photographs,
within artist and academic Svetlana Boym’s project ‘Nostalgic Technol-
ogy’, employs the reflective surfaces of digital devices – the laptop, the
BlackBerry – as ‘melancholic black mirrors’.6 Her evocative description
of the interplay of shadows and reflections in her BlackBerry screen, as
she travels by train, conjures up a series of tensions and relationships
between past and present, virtual and real, modern and off -modern.7
The inactive black screen reflects a decaying post-industrial landscape
from the train window, she writes – ‘no longer a seductive digital
fruit, my blackberry reveals its second life as a melancholic black mir-
ror that brings into sharp focus the decaying non-virtual world that is
passing us by’.
 Television, Space, Time and Memory 15

It is Capote’s connection between the black mirror and the television

that I want to return to. Whilst Capote likens the form of autohypno-
sis produced by the mirror to the electric flickerings of an untuned set,
it is the reflective surface of the television screen, both then and now,
that I want to draw attention to. Whilst television has been thought of
as a ‘window on the world’ or likened to a mirror, held up to society
or reflecting the lives of its audience, it is the idea of the ‘black mirror’
that I have found particularly evocative. It recalls the shiny smoke-grey
glass of the cathode ray television set, and the black lustre of LCD and
plasma screens. The former, with its curved and convex screen emitting
a distorted and dark reflection of its viewer and setting, and the lat-
ter, though less reflective, producing a play of shadows absorbed by the
surface.8
Unlike the newness and mobility of the ‘seductive digital fruit’ of
Boym’s media art, the television is an older, more familiar and common-
place technology. It is also in itself, as object, practice and cultural form,
a deeply nostalgic technology. In its most immediate sense and drawn
from the etymology of the word, nostalgia is primarily connected to the
notion of home. Though I investigate the relationship between nostal-
gia and television in more detail in Chapter 4, it is this sense of the
word that I draw upon here. Wendy Wheeler (1994) has written of nos-
talgia as a desire for ‘being-in-place’ and it is this desire that resonates
with television’s embeddedness in domestic space, the role that televi-
sion and television memories play in our personal histories, and the
way our personal histories are reflected in television. It is these reflec-
tions that I want to use to consider television and its relationship to
memory as an experience formed over time within the patterns of the
everyday. Here, television is remembered and felt as a significant expe-
rience that can illuminate histories and memories of the self and the
family. The reflections that take place in the black mirror and the televi-
sion cannot escape the residues of memory – they both bring forth and
they look back.
In the mirror the self is held at a distance; it is at once both famil-
iar and strange, close yet half the world away. Boym writes that the
black mirror ‘sharpens perspective, not framing realistic illusions but
estranging perception itself [ . . . ] The black mirror offers a different kind
of mimesis and an uncanny and anti-narcissistic form of self-reflection.’
The reflection is not entirely strange or unfamiliar, but has the poten-
tial, as Joe Moran writes of certain kinds of memory, to ‘denaturalise
the everyday and render it visible’ (Moran 2004, p. 57). Like the experi-
ence of involuntary memory, catching one’s reflection in the television
16 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

screen produces a form of resonance; the flicker of reflection, the snag

of recognition which illuminates that oscillating pattern of the televi-
sion experience as an ‘escape and return to the everyday’ (Lury 2007,
p. 373).
It is with this in mind that I want to move on to consider a series
of examples which might be characterised as reflections, highlighting
the relationship between text and context through the motif of the
mirror reflection. Each is a self-reflexive representation of the relation-
ship between television and its audience, each presenting a memory of
television viewing. The examples are the credit sequence for British sit-
com The Royle Family (BBC, 1998–), British artist Gillian Wearing’s 2006
installation Family History and a brief scene from US teen drama Freaks
and Geeks (NBC, 1999). All are examples that make visible television as
an everyday memory-making medium.

Half the world away: The Royle Family

Though Anna McCarthy’s work on television in public spaces (2003) and
an interest in the mobile screens of the digital era (see Dawson 2007)
offer an important accompaniment to television’s history as a domes-
tic object, television is primarily understood as a domestic medium.
Through cultural historical work (see O’Sullivan 1991, Spigel 1992b,
Sconce 2000), theoretical investigation (see Silverstone 1994) and quali-
tative audience studies (see Morley 1986, Gauntlett and Hill 1999, Wood
2009), including the study of soap opera audiences (see Hobson 1982,
Ang 1985), television’s relationship to the domestic and the routines
of the everyday has been extensively researched and theorised. Whilst
debates surrounding and accounts of this work are offered elsewhere I do
want to call attention to a body of work which considers television’s rep-
resentations of the domestic and builds upon the interplay between the
television setting and the television text.
In Lynn Spigel’s work on early American family sitcoms, such as The
Burns and Allen Show (CBS, 1950–8) and I Love Lucy (CBS, 1951–7),
and their self-reflexive representations of domesticity, she situates these
programmes within the public discourses on the relationship between
television, the home and the family that accompanied television’s
arrival in domestic space. Like the distorted reflection of the black mir-
ror, these programmes, according to Spigel, did not present a mimetic
representation of the audience’s home life, but acted as a continuation
of the spatial arrangement of the television within a ‘home theater’,
presenting the home as ‘a theatrical stage and thus depict[ing] highly
abstract versions of family identity’ (1992a, p. 19). Within other genres
 Television, Space, Time and Memory 17

of television, the relationship between text and context is imaginatively

explored, for example, in the work of Iris Kleinecke-Bates on domestic
detail in The Forsyte Saga (BBC2, 1967; ITV, 2002) and Helen Wheatley
on Gothic television. In reference to Susan Stewart’s conceptualisation
of the dollhouse, Kleinecke-Bates writes that ‘watching period drama on
television is an exercise in interiority: Viewed in the privacy of the own
home is a miniature of another home’ (2006, p. 155). Wheatley’s anal-
ysis is framed by the understanding of the self-referential connection
between the text and reception context of Gothic television, where the
viewer is ‘constantly reminded that this is terror/horror television which
takes place, and is viewed, within a domestic milieu’ (2006, p. 7).
Arguably, this representational relationship between text and context
becomes a marker of the televisual and is evoked in accounts of televi-
sion’s medium specificity. Here the characteristics of domestic viewing,
closeness and intimacy are explored in relation to the television image,
for example, in Glen Creeber’s analysis of serial drama (2004) or Alexia
Smit’s discussion of plastic surgery television (2010). This is work in
which reflection and self-reflexivity is a founding concept.
Jane Root, co-founder of independent production company Wall to
Wall and former controller of BBC Two, has written that ‘television’s
forte is in the minutiae of human relationships, the ups and downs
of domestic life. In particular, it is skilled at reflecting the detail of
our everyday life back at us’ (Root 1990, p. 47). The Royle Family,
written by and starring Craig Cash and Caroline Aherne, is seem-
ingly a perfect example of Root’s argument. The critically acclaimed
and much-loved series broke the conventions of British situation com-
edy in the late 1990s. Set in a Manchester living room, the mundane
reality of this ordinary working-class family was captured by the obser-
vational style of the comedy. The action rarely left the space of the
living room, though it occasionally ventured to the kitchen, and at
the heart of the family was the television.9 The dynamics of this fam-
ily’s life, including its gendered and generational networks of power,
were played out in the space of viewing; where youngest son Anthony
Ralf Little was always forced to make the tea and father Jim Ricky
Tomlinson battled with Nana Liz Smith for the remote control. One
might argue that a central concern of the series was the relationship
between family and television,10 and this is revealed in the opening title
sequence that remained unchanged across the three original series and
the now four special episodes. The sequence begins with the switching
on of the television as the flash of electricity conjures up the image
of Jim Royle as he heads back to his armchair. The rest of the fam-
ily is introduced through a series of their television viewing moments;
18 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

Jim and Anthony erupt into laughter at what they’re watching, Denise
(Caroline Aherne) and Barbara (Sue Johnston) smoke and flick through
a catalogue. The family is viewed from a vantage point inside the tele-
vision, with the cold blue filter and flickering reception signalling the
boundary of the screen. What the sequence sets up is a complex series
of reflections, where both the viewer and the Royles look into and out
from the television screen; the final image of the sequence constructing
a portrait of a family frozen in the twilight of the screen’s reflection, lost
in its magnetic pull (see Figure 1.3).
This play with subject positions illuminates the programme’s forms
of televisual identification and engagement. Arguably, it was in its audi-
ence’s identification with the everydayness of the Royles and the role of
television viewing that the programme found its biggest draw. The Royle
Family managed to situate television not just as part of daily life but as
part of a system of everyday memory-making; the family’s squabbles,
laughter, banalities, celebrations and tragedies all caught in the act of
viewing.
On its return in 2006 for the broadcast of the special episode ‘The
Royle Family: The Queen of Sheba’, Stuart Maconie wrote in the Radio
Times that ‘this is their [Aherne and Cash’s] childhood on screen – for
many of us our childhood. So much so that, as Peter Kay has remarked,
you thought they must have tapes of your own family evenings’ (2006,

Figure 1.3 Television’s mise-en-abyme – a series of reflections looking into and

out from the screen. The Royle Family title sequence (Granada for BBC, 1998–).
 Television, Space, Time and Memory 19

p. 18). The series evoked for many the memory of their own family
dynamics and viewing practices, but the 2006 special also brought with
it the memory of viewing the original series. The British televisual land-
scape had changed for all, including the Royles; the family now watches
on a giant plasma screen and Denise’s tale of Sky+ viewing is met
with wide eyes and wonder. Despite these new technologies and prac-
tices, television is for the Royles, as Helen Wood and Lisa Taylor have
argued in opposition to the technologically deterministic accounts of
new media, as ‘durably and consistently located in the fabric of every-
day life as it ever was’ (2008, p. 14). The family’s constant and discordant
chirping of the theme music to the BBC’s early evening magazine pro-
gramme The One Show (2006–) in the episode ‘The Golden Egg cup’
represents the affectionate hold that television still has on the family.
The Royle Family has also always been about change and transition,
with the constancy of family and television anchoring its members.
Whilst some things change, others remain the same, and each time we
still return to the preserved portrait of the family in the title sequence.
The curve of the pre-LCD glass television screen, represented by the fade
to black at the edge of the image, and the flickering of analogue recep-
tion evokes a sense of ‘pastness’. The reflection here becomes a looking
back, not only at the way we were, but also at the way we once watched.

Home from home: Family History

A simulated home from home is employed across a variety of television
programmes and genres; from the ‘fully rounded sensual experience’
(Lury 2005, p. 161) of the Royle’s family home to the Ikea-furnished sets
of daytime television studios. It is this relationship between television’s
representations of the domestic and its setting within the domestic that
is explored in Gillian Wearing’s 2006 installation Family History.11
Writing on the work of Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell, artists
working in the context of 1960s America, John G. Hanhardt argues
that their work offers a ‘profound insight into television, not as a
found object to be recontextualised as art, but as an icon to be bro-
ken of its authority’ (1990, p. 113). These artists provide early examples
of the attempt to decontextualise and defamiliarise the television set
whilst offering a commentary on and critique of commercial televi-
sion. Following Hanhardt, David Morley considers how these works of
deconstruction provide the academic with a way of viewing television
differently (2007, p. 282) – an alternative way, like the black mirror, of
‘estranging perception’.
20 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

Family History might be seen to sit in relation to this early work.

It is similarly involved in defamiliarising television but it does this
by investigating an autobiographical connection to television through
the artist’s memories of the pioneering 1970s reality television series
The Family (BBC, 1974).12 Family History is a multi-layered and ambi-
tious project that continues Wearing’s interest in reality television
and confessional cultures (exhibited in celebrated works such as Con-
fess All On Video. Don’t Worry, You Will Be In Disguise. Intrigued? Call
Gillian . . . (1994)) and a preoccupation with family and history (see
her photographic series Album (2003) in which Wearing recreates pho-
tos/portraits of six family members with Wearing posing, using detailed
prosthetic masks, in place of each relative).
Rather than being exhibited in a traditional gallery space, Family His-
tory was installed in two ‘show homes’ in Reading and Birmingham; the
significance of the locations part of the piece itself and its ‘revisiting’ of
its own ‘points of origin’ (Bode, Walwin and Watkins, 2007). Wearing
grew up in 1970s Birmingham and The Family featured the Wilkins fam-
ily of Reading. The show home setting is also chosen as a deliberate
contrast with the 1970s milieu of the Wearing’s living room and the
Wilkins’ home. The cold (literally) and antiseptic spaces of the show
home – neutral palettes and minimalist design – draw the audience’s
attention to the change in ideas of home and domestic design; from
the cluttered and colourful suburban homes of the Wearings and the
Wilkins to the aspirational living of the city-centre apartment.
The installation itself features two screens in different rooms in the
empty apartment. In the first room, on a small LCD screen hung at eye
level on the wall, is the film of a young girl with long dark brown hair
and wearing a red 1970s dress, watching an episode of The Family. The
girl is a stand-in for the adult Wearing. She is dressed in a replica of
the artist’s childhood clothes and is watching television in a detailed
mock-up of the artist’s old family living room. With a toy truck, a glass
bowl and two photographs of Wearing and her sister arranged on the
1970s wood-panelled television set, a bowl of fruit and an ashtray sitting
on top of a nest of tables in front of glossy salmon pink curtains, the
‘authenticity’ of the replica room and costume is verified by original
Wearing family photographs published in the project book. Back to the
screen, we see the girl absorbed in her viewing of The Family, then later
she turns to the camera to offer her own thoughts on the programme.
On the second, much larger, screen is a long interview with Heather
Wilkins, teenage member of the Wilkins family, now grown up with
children of her own. In a brightly lit television studio she is interviewed
 Television, Space, Time and Memory 21

by veteran talk show host Trisha Goddard. The interview is conventional

in style, with the professional Goddard and a much more media-savvy
Heather. She talks about her experience of filming The Family, the public
reception of the series and her life after it, and the interview is intercut
with scenes from the original series to which Heather is also prompted
to look back and respond.
At the end of the interview Wearing orchestrates her own ‘reveal’. The
camera pulls back from the comfy television studio to reveal not only
the ‘constructedness’ of the set, the lighting rig and flimsy MDF walls,
but also that, in fact, the installation’s two components, its two living
rooms, are built side-by-side. The revelation of this proximity is much
more than a Brechtian stunt and works to illuminate, to make visible,
television’s dynamics of closeness and intimacy.
In the accompanying book to the installation Steven Bode, of the Film
and Video Umbrella, writes of Wearing’s project as:

a portrait of one child of television by another; a woman who, to a

significant extent grew up on television rendered, affectionately and
acutely, by an artist who grew up with television. Blending biography
and autobiography, it is a piece that uses the language of television,
not in a spirit of appropriation or the service of reconstruction or
deconstruction, but as a shared vernacular language with which both
artist and subject are familiar; a language, indeed, with which we are
all familiar; a language which, even more now than in the 1970s, is
real to us – a language of the everyday.
(2007)

The ‘language’ of reality television and the talk show are the televisual
forms that Wearing predominantly employs within her piece, and in
particular, it offers a commentary on and responds to the artist’s own
fascination with reality television (the discussion of which is central to
the interviews Wearing conducted as publicity for the installation). But
it is how memories of television emerge as a ‘shared venacular language’
and a ‘language of the everyday’ that is of interest here. The revealed
structure of the set, like the title sequence of The Royle Family, high-
lights a pattern of reflections; through the simulated past/present of the
adjoining ‘sets’, one a reconstruction and the other a retrospective, the
project interrogates the making of memory within television’s various
living rooms.
Whilst the cultural historical work of Lynn Spigel and Tim O’Sullivan
examines the post-war arrival of television in the home as a
22 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

technological novelty and a signifier of modernity, later generations, like

Wearing’s, have grown up with television. For the child of analogue tele-
vision, television was a familiar object and a regulator of daily life. These
generational differences in attitudes towards television are extremely
significant and largely unexplored (though Karen Lury’s study British
Youth Television (2001) is a welcome and evocative exception). We must
also remain alert to the presence of the television programme-maker,
critic and academic within these generational audiences.

Growing up with television: Freaks and Geeks

There is a moment early on in the episode ‘Dead Dogs and Gym Teach-
ers’ in the celebrated American teen series Freaks and Geeks, where, after
a humiliating experience in gym class, Bill Haverchuck (Martin Starr),
the loveable, lanky and bespectacled geek, returns home, makes him-
self a grilled-cheese sandwich and sits down in front of the television.
Framed by and scored to the non-diegetic soundtrack of ‘I’m One’ by
The Who, we watch Bill watching Garry Shandling tell jokes on Dinah
Shore’s talk show (Dinah! CBS, 1974–80) in what feels like an intensely
private and intimate scene. The sequence, cut in time to the music and
building across the chorus, cuts back and forth between Bill and the
television image, progressively pulling closer to both the image of Bill
in fits of laughter and the analogue-quality image of Shandling smiling
back. A sense of the character’s interaction with the television is created
by this movement to close-up and the mirroring of the shots – as Garry
raises his glass to the studio audience, Bill raises his glass of milk to Garry
(see Figure 1.4).
The sequence is evocative of the character’s private relationship with
television as part of an after-school routine. Where television is the
cruel mistress in Oldboy, in Freaks and Geeks the relationship is a warm
camaraderie, a safe and comforting place away from the hostilities of
growing up. In a touching movement within Starr’s performance he sig-
nals his closeness and identification with Garry by subtly gesturing with
his hands towards the screen then back at himself as if to say ‘me too!’
Framed within a series about the trials of adolescence, the role of
television within a body of cultural references which bond the friend-
ships of the characters (the freaks bond primarily through music,
the geeks through film, television and comedy) is highlighted. Whilst
the references are generationally specific, the experience of their use
within everyday life and conversation is arguably cross-generational.
The sequence operates nostalgically as part of the programme-makers’
 Television, Space, Time and Memory 23

Figure 1.4 Garry Shandling and Bill Haverchuck share an after-school drink in
‘Dead Dogs and Gym Teachers’, episode 14, Freaks and Geeks (dir. Judd Apatow,
prod. Apatow Productions/DreamWorks SKG, 1999).

memory of television; the series is set in a high school in the suburbs

of Detroit in the early 1980s and is based on the teenage experiences of
the writers, the show’s creator, Paul Feig, and co-producer, Judd Apatow.
In an interview, Apatow refers to this sequence, commenting that ‘that’s
what I did every afternoon for years when I was a kid’ (in Goodwin
2007), and the intimacy of the moment is arguably reflective of the
recognition of Bill’s relationship with television as a potentially shared
experience. What is primarily of interest within this moment is the
24 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

representation of an experience of television and how that is filtered

through the lens of memory. It is a memory of living with and growing
up with television, the memory of a routine and a ritual as much as it is
a memory of Garry Shandling telling jokes on TV.

Seasons, light, memory and magic

Writing on the BBC’s embeddedness within twentieth-century British

society and culture, David Cardiff and Paddy Scannell argue that ‘noth-
ing so well illustrates the unobtrusive way in which the BBC came to
establish itself as an agent of the national culture as [the] calendrical
role of broadcasting, [the] cyclical reproduction, year in, year out, of
an orderly and regular progression of festivities, rituals and celebrations
which marked out the unfolding of the year’ (Cardiff and Scannell 1987,
p. 160). The broadcast of such events ‘are marked up not only on the
public calendar of “history” but also on the private calendar of people’s
lives’ (Scannell 1996, p. 91). Commemorations and anniversaries are key
rituals within the unfolding of the year and the calendar is arguably a
determining factor in the commissioning and production of, to quote
Tobias Ebbrecht, ‘historical event television’ (2007a, 2007b). However,
attempting to move away from the dominance of media events within
the understandings of television memories, it is the ‘private calendar of
people’s lives’ which interests me here. What I want to think through
is how the unfolding and dynamic processes of television within the
context of everyday, domestic space allow for a different and additional
conceptualisation of television memories.
In Jerome Bourdon’s study of audience memories of television in
France he describes the category of ‘wallpaper memories’ as memories of
habits and routines.13 Whilst a useful categorisation, the significance of
the television in both the construction of the routine and the memory
of it is somewhat elided by the idea of the medium as simply provid-
ing ‘wallpaper’ to the remembered scene. For me, for my memories,
television is an integral part of that scene and a network of senses
and impressions that constitute an experience of living within domestic
space and within a particular society. Television, for me, is remembered
as a sensual experience, and in particular is characterised by the memo-
ries of light. It is television’s complex and powerful relationship between
interior and exterior, and the layering of forms and patterns of light,
that we might use to characterise the formation of memory within this
sensual experience.
 Television, Space, Time and Memory 25

The varied arrangements of light in the space of viewing, both nat-

ural and artificial, in some senses become emblematic of the different
forms of engagement on offer by different forms of television. The clos-
ing of curtains and the turning out of lights might be seen as attempts
to recreate the conditions of cinema viewing at home in order to view
films or to concentrate on the narrative demands of a series such as
The Wire (HBO, 2002–8) or the spectacle of natural history in Planet
Earth (BBC, 2006). Though perhaps clichéd, these conditions of view-
ing are evocative of forms of engagement. Ellis’ early notion of glance
theory (1982) is based upon the condition of viewing among the hustle
and bustle of daily domestic life and work. The conditions of viewing
also produce sensual environments and moods in which memories of
television are framed. The sense of indulgence and guilt of watching
television inside on a sunny day, with the windows open, the curtains
closed and the sounds of summer competing with the programme, the
annoyance of shafts of light falling on the screen via ill-fitting cur-
tains; viewing on dark nights with the curtains open, the heating on
and condensation misting up the windows, drawing attention to the
cold outside. These are environments from which my own memories
are drawn. I recall as a child lying in front of the television on a deep-
pile green carpet watching music videos. I remember the warmth I felt
from a patch of sunshine falling through the patio windows correlating
with the song I was seeing and hearing (a-ha’s ‘The Sun Always Shines
on TV’). Early evening in winter, the dark outside, the misted windows,
still wearing a crumpled school uniform and the fantastical sounds and
colours of Star Trek (NBC, 1966–9), broadcast at teatime on BBC Two,
radiating throughout the room. These are not memories of the detail of
the programmes (though I’ve seen the music video many times since,
I’ve never really watched Star Trek), neither are they purely memories of
the context, but they are an interplay between the two and the sense
impressions left by the play of light, texture, colour, sound and temper-
ature. As memories they are not fully formed; they are fragments, not
the ‘flashbulbs’ seen to characterise the experience of viewing media
events but more like the flickers of the old analogue signal. These ‘flick-
ers’ are not momentous, life-changing or memorialised (though they are
undeniably tinged with nostalgia) but they are both informed by and
provide a sense of the experiences and memories of viewing throughout
the year and the changing pattern of seasons and light which provide
both ever-changing and routine environments of viewing.14
The domestic environment, though certainly not unique in this char-
acteristic, can produce a system and layering of space and reflection,
26 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

both inside and out, in which the television screen is incorporated.

These are most apparent at night. On a dark evening the domestic scene
can be bounced back by the windows, layering the inside onto the night
outside. From the outside, travelling through suburban areas on jour-
neys to and from home, television sets appear as luminous squares of
light beaming out from a parade of homes, and when viewed from a
bus or car window are layered behind the reflections of the self inside
the vehicle.15 These layers of reflection and vision call attention to
the relationship between the home and the world outside, but they
don’t necessarily produce a binary division between the two, where the
home offers safety and shelter from a threatening and hostile world.
Instead they illuminate a long history of ambivalence in relation to this
dynamic, where forms of alienation, fear and anxiety infiltrate and are
exposed.

Behind the mirror: closeness and distance

In Douglas Sirk’s family melodrama All That Heaven Allows (1955), Cary
(Jane Wyman) gives up her lover and gardener Ron (Rock Hudson)
for the sake of her children, though when her children subsequently
announce they are moving on themselves, so as not to leave their
mother alone, they offer her the gift of a television set (though she
has previously refused to get one). The set appears as an enforced and
meagre substitute for the companionship of both Ron and her chil-
dren and the enthusiastic patter of the salesman is made ironic by the
representation of the set.

All you have to do is turn that dial and you have all the company
you want, right there on the screen. Drama, comedy, life’s parade at
your fingertips.

This promotional promise is undermined by a mournful score and the

slow zoom into the television screen that frames Cary’s anxious and
melancholy reflection. Her hands clasped together and brow knotted,
with a sense of horror she stares back at herself imprisoned in the
screen (see Figure 1.5). As opposed to the excessive colour of Sirk’s
melodrama and the bright-red ribbon which adorns the set, within the
borders of the television screen, a frame within a (cinema) frame, the
image remains sharp but the palette is muted and drained. Made strange
and estranging by the effect of the screen as a black mirror, the image
reflected is haunting and uncanny. A warning from film on the dangers
 Television, Space, Time and Memory 27

Figure 1.5 Imprisoned by television. Jane Wyman in All That Heaven Allows (dir.
Douglas Sirk, prod. Universal, US, 1955).

of television, the new medium, in this instance, traps its viewer in a

ghostly existence.
Where the etymology of nostalgia draws us to the significance of the
home, so does an understanding of the uncanny. From the German
‘unheimlich’, translated as ‘unhomely’, Freud describes the uncanny
as ‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of
old and long familiar’ (1990 (1919), p. 340). The concept highlights a
series of additional responses to television’s place in a domestic envi-
ronment. It is evocative of the potential threat posed by the merging
of the private and the public, interior and exterior, and expressive of a
dynamic of closeness and distance, which includes the recognition of,
and estrangement from, the self.
The work of Jeffrey Sconce explores the uncanny rendering of domes-
tic space by considering television as a ‘haunted apparatus’. He observes
that – ‘there remains the disturbing thought that, just as we can poten-
tially peer into other worlds through the television, these other worlds
may be peering back into our own living room’ (2000, p. 144). What
emerges across his work is not only the potential intrusions brought
into the home by the television signal but also a notion of the televi-
sion screen as a magic surface and a conduit between worlds – private
and public, the home and the supernatural. To return to and continue
the alignment between television and the ‘black mirror’, this imagin-
ing of television is suggestive of the potential space behind the mirror
28 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

and recalls the ‘terror aroused by the black mirror [ . . . ] for if one calls
on the demons often enough, they are sure to come’ (Maillet, 2004,
p. 51). In the Japanese horror film Ringu (dir. Hideo Nakata, Japan, 1998),
remade as The Ring (dir. Gore Verbinski, US, 2002), the television, fol-
lowing such films and programmes as Poltergeist (dir. Tobe Hooper, US,
1982) and Ghostwatch (BBC, 1992), is once again the site of horror. The
fear of invasion is materialised in the unnatural movement of the venge-
ful spirit of Sadako/Samara, from the grainy and flickering video image
and through the screen to inflict a terrifying death upon the haunted
viewer of a cursed VHS tape (see Figure 1.6).
Clearly offering a self-reflexive form of terror, television and video
technology and its intimate place within the domestic setting, the home
and the family are played upon by horror fiction, but it is a playful-
ness that doesn’t lose sight of these spaces as potential sites of violence
and trauma as well as receivers of images of violence and trauma. Whilst
an analysis of this would take me down a different line of inquiry,
the notion of the domestic as a haunted space, one which reverberates
with loss, longing and the potentially more benign phantoms of absent
family and friends, is explored in more detail in the following chapter

Figure 1.6 Television as the site of horror and haunting: Ringu (dir. Hideo Nakata,
Japan, 1998).
 Television, Space, Time and Memory 29

and in relation to the patterns of reflection and return within televi-

sion drama. The reverberations of memory, imagined here as a form of
haunting, allow us to rethink television as part of an everyday system
of memory-making and, by paying attention to the set and the screen,
television emerges not as a postmodern icon of an ‘electronic nowhere’
(Sconce 2000, p. 17), but remembered and experienced as both living
and lived with.

The television altar

In Ondina Fachel Leal’s discussion of the place and space of televi-
sion within the Brazilian home she offers an analysis of the television
entourage or altar on display in one particular domestic arrangement.
Here the items of the entourage, including plastic flowers, a religious
picture, a false gold vase and family photographs, act as ‘interconnected
pieces of one coherent set’ (1990, p. 21); a symbolic system which
reveals dimensions of class, taste and identity. The symbolic power of
the television set anchors the display – it is an object of pride and cul-
tural capital, positioned to be visible from the street. Leal argues that
‘the TV object here is a fetish in the sense that it is infused with an ethe-
real magical meaning [ . . . ] even when it is turned off and when no one
is watching it’ (1990, p. 24). I want to conclude with two moments from
two of the programmes analysed in this book. They are examples that
offer a vision of the television altar in two television homes and which
reveal aspects of both its symbolic power and its memorial function.
In the opening of David Baddiel’s episode from the first series of Who
Do You Think You Are?,16 the comedian, inviting the cameras into his
home, introduces the producer/audience to two pictures of his maternal
grandfather, Ernst Fabian. The first is an image of Baddiel and his broth-
ers as schoolboys being read a story by their grandfather. The second
is of Ernst and his wife Otti, a ‘happy’ image taken in the early 1930s
before Baddiel’s Jewish grandparents fled from Germany in 1939. They
are both framed photographs which sit upon the marble mantelpiece
in the centre of the living room and are 2 images within a display of
approximately 11 framed family photos. Hung on the wall, just above
the mantle, is a small flat-screen television (see Figure 1.7).
This arrangement of domestic space and personal objects, including
the television set, is not entirely unfamiliar. In many cases the televi-
sion sits among or even provides a mantelpiece for photographs and
mementos (in my home it sits among driftwood collected with my
father, a small plastic penguin belonging to my nephew and a framed
30 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

Figure 1.7 David Baddiel’s television altar (WDYTYA, series 1, episode 7, Wall to
Wall for BBC, 2004).

photobooth image of myself and my sister). This can also be extended

to the digital interfaces of multiplatform viewing, where the window of
the iPlayer, for example, sits upon or is juxtaposed against digital albums
and desktop photographs. In Baddiel’s home, the television is part of a
network of images and a spatial arrangement covered with personal his-
tory and memory. These two images commence the investigative trail
and establish Baddiel’s ‘strong emotional connection’ to the memory of
his grandfather, and the use of the family archive operates as a point
of access for the viewers, interjecting them into the practices of his-
tory and memory-making explored in the family history documentary.
But the scene also testifies to the domestic and intimate nature of tele-
vision’s setting within the home and reveals potential consequences for
the viewing experience of television programmes about personal history
and memory viewed within a domestic memory network.
To return to The Royle Family, both this interplay and the significance
of the television as altar are illuminated in the 2006 special episode
‘The Queen of Sheba’. At the wake following the death of Nana, the
urn containing her ashes is put – ‘pride of place in the Royle Family
household’. As Jim Royle places the urn ‘somewhere where we’ll always
be reminded of her’ – on top of the television – the family bursts into
rapturous applause (see Figure 1.8). Nana is accompanied by the ashes
of neighbour Mary (Doreen Keogh) in the 2010 Christmas special ‘Joe’s
Crackers’ and in a short montage sequence of Christmas family snaps,
 Television, Space, Time and Memory 31

Figure 1.8 Nana takes pride of place on the Royle Family’s television altar. ‘The
Queen of Sheba’ (dir. Mark Mylod, prod. Granada for BBC, 2006).

the family and their loved ones have their pictures taken in front of
the television and in various poses with Nana and Mary. For the Royles
and for many of us, the television forms part of a material network of
memory; it is both a reminder of, and a member of, the family.
2
Haunting the Memory: Moments
of Return in Television Drama

‘Everything. Everyone. Everywhere. Ends’ was the tag line for the fifth
and final season of the critically acclaimed series Six Feet Under (HBO,
2001–5) – a dark comic drama centred on the lives of the Fisher family
and their family-run funeral home in Los Angeles. In the final episode
(‘Everyone’s Waiting’, season 5, episode 12), following the death of her
oldest brother Nate (Peter Krause), the youngest sibling Claire (Lauren
Ambrose) leaves the family and Los Angeles. With no job lined up but
an ambition to become a photographer, she pulls away from the family
home and drives into an uncertain future. What follows is a remarkable
six-minute sequence, framed by the track ‘Breathe’ by the female singer-
songwriter Sia, in which Claire literally drives into that future. The
sequence intercuts shots of Claire driving, the back projection speeded
up to heighten the ‘fantastical’ feel of the scene, with a montage of the
weddings, celebrations, deaths and funerals in the remaining lives of the
Fisher family – a six-minute sequence which spans 80 years.1 Here the
future is foretold but its possibilities are asserted by the long road dis-
appearing into the horizon, where the series ends and where we leave
Claire driving.
The sequence is both an ending and a beginning. Whilst there is the
space for the viewer to imagine the drama in between, the character’s
storylines are taken to their final moments. There is an insistence on the
inevitability of the ending but the cyclical patterns of life are also reaf-
firmed. To quote Umberto Eco’s thoughts on serial narratives – ‘what
becomes celebrated here is a sort of victory of life over art, with the
paradoxical result that the era of electronics, instead of emphasizing the
phenomena of shock, interruption, novelty, and frustration of expec-
tations, would produce a return to the continuum, the Cyclical, the
Periodical, the Regular’ (1990, p. 96).

32
 Moments of Return in Television Drama 33

Six Feet Under reverses the logic of the ‘reflective coda’, projecting
forward rather than reflecting back. This is not to argue that the final
montage insists upon a forward momentum; it also sets up a pattern
of return well established throughout the series via a succession of
‘hauntings’. The members of the Fisher family, and Nate in particular,
are regularly ‘haunted’ by their father, killed in the pilot episode after a
collision with a bus. At the opening of the coda it is the ‘ghost’ of her
brother Nate that motivates Claire to go when she wants to stay, and
as she pulls away from the family home she glances in the wing mirror
of her car. Framed in the mirror is the image of Nate, jogging behind
the car (see Figure 2.1). Overlapping briefly, the two lines of vision and
movement inevitably separate and the image slowly drops out of the
reflection as the car speeds up and travels on. It is this moment that
haunts me. Whilst it returns us to the familiar image of Nate running,
it returns us only to a reflection that poignantly drops out of view. The
return is accompanied by a retreat, capturing a pattern of haunting and
a recharged sense of loss.
Writing on what he perceives to be the ghostly movement of nar-
rative, Julian Wolfreys argues that ‘the movement of the return is not
simply that, for that which is spectral is only ever perceived indi-
rectly by the traces it has left. It has in returning, already begun to
retreat’ (2002, p. 3). For me, this captures a wider characteristic of

Figure 2.1 Six Feet Under, ‘Everyone’s Waiting’, season 5, episode 12 (dir. Alan
Ball, prod. HBO/The Greenblatt Janollari Studio/Actual Size Productions, US,
2005).
34 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

television understood as an ‘ebb and flow’. It is a characteristic that

I want to explore further in relation to the representations of remem-
bering and reflection in television drama and to offer some thoughts
on the function of memory in the narrative design of serial drama.
It is these moments of return that I am particularly interested in,
specifically their self-conscious play with ideas of haunting, the res-
onance of ‘afterimages’ and the forms, functions and pleasures of
repetition.
The moment can be momentary, fleeting, an instant in the move-
ment of time. The moment can also be momentous, have moving power
and be of consequence or importance.2 Within the term itself there
is a strange tension between movement and stasis. These ‘moments’
should also be considered in relation to the understandings of television
as a sequential medium and its characteristics of flow and segmenta-
tion; television as, to quote Richard Dyer, the ‘apotheosis of seriality’
(2000, p. 146) and its characteristics of flow and regularity or repetition.
As Stephen Heath and Gillian Skirrow argued in 1977:

The central fact of television experience is much less flow than flow
and regularity; the anachronistic succession is also a constant repe-
tition and these terms of movement and stasis can be found as well
within the single programme as within the evening’s viewing.
(My emphasis, 1977, p. 15)

The rhythm of movement and stasis, the cyclicality and endlessness of

the television text, emerges most clearly in writing on the soap opera
(see, for example, Geraghty 1981), and recurs again in recent work on
‘quality’ serial television drama. Heath and Skirrow’s argument corre-
lates with Michael Newman’s work on the structure of storytelling in
the prime-time serial and his analysis of the ‘beats’ and ‘arcs’, the story
structures and patterns dictated by production contexts and commercial
imperatives that run across scenes, episodes and seasons (2006).
Considering these part/whole relations and looking at the patterns
and repetitions that are visible in serial drama reveals some of their cen-
tral pleasures. They also work to generate forms of resonance, associative
possibilities and allusive meanings that can reveal the significance of
thinking through the relationship between television and memory. Cen-
tral to this relationship is the idea of the television viewing experience
as one of accumulation, where viewing experiences and references are
built up over time, and the memory of ‘afterimages’ and ‘moments’ is
accumulated over a life lived across television.
 Moments of Return in Television Drama 35

In Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending (1967), a historical and

philosophical discussion of ‘endings’ in literature, he quotes the poem
‘Reference Back’ by Philip Larkin:

Truly, though our element is time,

We are not suited to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives.
They link us to our losses:

Television has the potential to offer this ‘long perspective’ and the ways
in which it references back are complex and varied and are investi-
gated across this book. Remembering and reflection become central to
television’s defining characteristic of repetition. ‘Adorno’s reproach’ is
often invoked to critique this characteristic (see Caughie 1991) – one
which is also at the heart of the discourses of trauma and therapy that
circulate in relation to both television and memory studies. Here, tele-
vision’s ‘compulsion to repeat’, its performance of a ‘ghost dance of the
undead’, generates a psychoanalytic resonance for many commentators
(Elsaesser 1999). Within television’s serial forms, though, this ‘compul-
sion to repeat effectively becomes a fundamental principle of narrative
construction’ informed by a commercial imperative (Davies 2007, p. 28).
Matt Hills’ work on the construction of moments in the new Doc-
tor Who (BBC, 2005–) opens up some additional lines of inquiry into
the idea of the ‘moment’, particularly in the way in which moments
within the series are constructed to be ‘memorable’ but also in the
way they increase the dispersibility of the text – moments which can
be extracted for publicity materials (2008). The idea of the ‘memo-
rable moment’ is central for forms of nostalgia programming and the
repackaging and repurposing of the text – which I shall return to in
Chapter 4 – but they are often ‘memorable moments’ in that they are
moments of or about memory. This is certainly the case in relation to
the programmes I have chosen to discuss in this chapter on television
drama.
My first example is Perfect Strangers (BBC, 2001), a three-part drama by
the high-profile British writer and director Stephen Poliakoff. Described
as ‘a laureate of memory’ (Freedland 2004) much of Poliakoff’s work,
within the last ten years at least, has been preoccupied with the themes
of history, memory and nostalgia. Within the context of this chapter his
work opens up a discussion of the ways in which memory and remem-
bering are represented by television’s dramatic forms. Though Perfect
Strangers is only a three-part series, paying attention to its own moments
36 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

of repetition and return reveals much about how allusive meanings

and serial patterns can be generated. Here I will shift my attention to
consider the longer forms of serial drama, in this case, three contempo-
rary and high-profile American shows – ER, Grey’s Anatomy and The Wire.
Faced with a familiar problem for the television scholar of thinking and
writing about serial television, with approximately 400 hours of drama
to consider, the very length of the programmes can lead to a series of
observations about time and memory. The study of ‘moments’ allows a
way of approaching the breadth and complexity of the material, and to
define the object of study further, I want to think specifically about end-
ings and beginnings as privileged spaces for reflection and remembering,
where patterns are initiated and revealed.
Beyond the ‘endlessness’ of the soap opera (see Geraghty 1981 and
Allen 1985) or the ‘non-ending’ of The Sopranos (HBO, 1999–2007) (see
Polan 2009) there has been little discussion of endings in television
drama or across television’s many generic forms. Endings or ‘mile-
stone moments’ often function as reflective and self-reflexive spaces
within serial drama that ‘reference back’ on their own long perspec-
tives. The cumulative narratives of serial drama demand and reward
certain levels of audience investment in character and diegesis, often
over hundreds of hours of programming. For Jonathan Gray television
is an ‘expansive art’ that has the ‘power to tell enduring, deeply involv-
ing, and complex stories over significant time’ (2008, p. 27). Whilst
memory in these examples might be viewed as a basic imperative of
televisual forms of storytelling, where ‘previously on’ sequences operate
as an aide-memoire, its significance is explicitly revealed through reflec-
tive moments, often occurring in anniversary episodes or moments of
character/narrative upheaval or closure.3
The endings of television’s serial forms, from ER and The Wire to sit-
coms such as Friends (NBC, 1994–2004) and Frasier (NBC, 1993–2004),
are often produced to generate specific feelings of finality (though the
premature or unmarked endings of cancelled series will offer different
forms of resonance). They reflect upon the life of the series but also
invite the viewer to reflect upon their own investment in that series.
This is clearly exemplified by Frasier’s final words on KACL radio, where
the distinction between character and actor (Kelsey Grammer), fictional
radio and real television audience collapses within the performance,
marking the ‘end of an era’ – ‘I have loved every minute with my KACL
family and all of you. For 11 years you’ve heard me say “I’m listen-
ing”, well you were listening too – and for that I’m eternally grateful.
Goodnight Seattle.’
 Moments of Return in Television Drama 37

These reflective moments are not unique to serial drama and are
organised by a series of genres and forms, from the concluding reflec-
tive montages at the end of major news and sporting events, to the ‘best
bits’ of departing contestants in reality entertainment formats such as
Big Brother (Channel 4, 2000–10) and The X Factor (ITV, 2004–). Kermode
writes that ‘when we survive, we make little images of moments which
have seemed like ends’ (1967, p. 7), and these montages similarly oper-
ate as textual processes of marking and memorialising. Within serial
drama, in such instances, memories of television are written into serial
narratives through practices of self-citation and self-referentiality. Oper-
ating as a reflective device for character, narrative and audience, these
moments in the life of a programme reveal how television is meaningful
in many instances because of the way that it interacts with mem-
ory. Such instances can illuminate the qualities of serial television but
also provide a commentary on the comparative function of television
memory and nostalgia.
The purpose of this chapter is neither to retrieve a sense of ‘monu-
mentality’ (Caughie 2000, p. 13) nor to argue directly for the place of
the examples I discuss within a canon of great moments, episodes or
shows, but to investigate some of the ways in which memory, perhaps
more specifically remembering, is represented within some of televi-
sion’s dramatic forms and how a focus on memory might reveal more
about the ways in which television works. Memory has also emerged
as a key narrative and thematic concern across the history of televi-
sion drama and points towards the central role of television in the
construction of cultural memories, identities and histories. Historic,
national and generic contexts inevitably influence the different stories
being told and the different ways in which memory is employed and
represented. Within a history of British television drama, for example,
from Dennis Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills (BBC1, 1979) and The Singing
Detective (BBC1, 1986) to recent successes Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes
(BBC1, 2008–10), the creative, imaginative and comparative ways in
which memory and nostalgia are evoked through dramatic forms would
provide the scope for further research and analysis.
This might take the form of considering the work of specific drama-
tists. Stephen Poliakoff’s work has a clear authorial style (see Nelson
2006). Privileged with an unusual level of creative control, Poliakoff is
often perceived as a rarity, a leftover from an earlier age of British tele-
vision drama. I will return to the nostalgic figure of Poliakoff in my
discussion of ‘Golden Ages’ in Chapter 4. However, I have decided not
to frame my analysis in this chapter through the work and influence of
38 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

the ‘author’, ‘creator’ or even ‘show runner’, but to consider the stories
that are told and how memory is evoked and utilised. I am interested
in the hauntings of and by characters, the traces that return and retreat
and the ways in which, for television drama ‘to tell a story is always to
invoke ghosts, to open a space through which something other returns’
(Wolfreys 2002, p. 3).

Perfect Strangers (BBC, 2001)

A wealthy patriarch from a grand London family throws a three-day

family reunion. From the sleepy suburbs of London, Daniel (Matthew
Macfadyen), his mother Esther (Jill Baker) and his irascible father
Raymond (Michael Gambon) form the ‘Hillingdon contingent’ of the
family tree. On arriving at the luxurious hotel in the centre of London,
Daniel is confronted by both glamorous and eccentric members of the
family he’s never met before, including Alice (Lindsay Duncan), the cap-
tivating first lady of the family; Charles (Toby Stephens) and Rebecca
(Claire Skinner), the alluring and secretive brother and sister; strange
and spivvy Irving (Timothy Spall) and the family’s fastidious ‘archive
man’, Stephen (Anton Lesser). As the reunion progresses over a series of
functions, Daniel searches for his place in the family and all the fam-
ily members are confronted by memories of the past as the secrets and
stories behind the family tree are revealed.
Poliakoff asserts in interview that ‘there are at least three great stories
in every family’.4 In Perfect Strangers there are four principal secrets that
make up the narrative. Stephen’s secret tells the story of his mother, a
young German–Jewish girl, and her escape from the fate of the rest of
her family. A Second World War story also lies behind the three elderly
sisters: the eldest sister’s bereavement when her fiancé is killed in battle,
and from which she never recovers, and how the two younger siblings
run away from home and live as feral children during the course of
the war.
The other two stories are framed as mysteries that motivate the nar-
rative across the three parts, and which prompt the anxiety and the
investigations of both Daniel and Raymond. Having been presented at
the reunion with unremembered but enigmatic photographs of their
childhoods, they begin to search for their significance. The photographs
are eventually discovered to be part of the story of Raymond’s father’s
secret life and love affair revealed at the end of the drama – a secret
which reconnects father, son and grandson. The reason behind the
estrangement between Alice and Rebecca and Charles is the other
 Moments of Return in Television Drama 39

driving force of the narrative. Daniel’s discovery of Richard’s (JJ Feild)

story, the brother of Rebecca and Charles who is ‘accidentally’ missed
off the family tree, explains the rupture between the siblings and the
woman who raised them as her own. Richard’s mental illness led to his
exclusion from the family, and his subsequent suicide left Alice, Rebecca
and Charles dealing with the complexities of their own guilt and blame.
Poliakoff weaves a complex web of desire and bereavement as the sib-
lings seduce the unknowing Daniel into taking the place of Richard, and
as Daniel seeks to find his own place in the family he attempts to heal
the rupture between Alice, Rebecca and Charles.
In part three, Daniel engineers a meeting between Rebecca, Charles
and Alice. This final confrontation takes place in a grand summer house
that sits in the grounds of the lavish country estate that once belonged
to ‘The family’. As Rebecca stares out of the window and across part
of the gardens, from her point of view we see the three old sisters in
the distance, walking down a garden path. Running behind, then over-
taking them, are the three young siblings that had just previously and
briefly interrupted the initial confrontation. In this one moment, three
generations of the family are presented in parallel. Though the narra-
tive remains focused on the story of Rebecca, Charles and Richard, the
appearance of two other groups of siblings suggests an echo in the drama
between the different family stories and secrets. This echo is further
emphasised by the sound of the children’s laughter as they run off to
play hide and seek, recalling the footage of the young Rebecca, Charles
and Richard enjoying similar childhood games. In this moment a sense
of the conflation of the past, present and future is evoked. Though the
content of the stories remains deeply personal and individual there is
the sense of a shared experience and the patterns that emerge in the
family. The tales of sibling love and parental rejection are emphasised.
The echoes and repetitions that exist at the level of both the nar-
rative and the image in Perfect Strangers are intricate and numerous.
Sarah Cardwell’s (2005) excellent close textual analysis of the sequence
that reveals the mystery behind the photographs of Daniel dressed as
the little prince and of Raymond’s father dancing identifies the rep-
etitions and patternings that dominate the drama and analyses how
they are elaborately woven into the text. Whilst Cardwell’s analysis
is bound to the sequence in question, the above moment illuminates
the significance of those echoes for the design of the narrative and
the construction of the characters that make up the family – a design
which relies upon the cyclicality of generational memory and sets up
a system of generational replacement that is in evidence in the other
40 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

examples discussed within this chapter. Echoes and repetitions also fea-
ture throughout the drama via the repeated irruption of images into the
text and the recurring flashes of character memory – moments which
evoke an experience of remembering.

Remembering Richard
Writing on the flashback in film, Maureen Turim argues that ‘flashbacks
often present images which are to be understood as memories. These
films portray their own versions of how memories are stored, how they
are repressed, how they return from the repressed [ . . . ] flashback films
make specific use of the theory of associative memory, the way an
event or sensation in the present brings forth a memory trace that was
since forgotten’ (1989, p. 19). Turim’s argument would seem to correlate
with Pam Cook’s discussion of the nostalgia film and how the elisions
between past and present might be seen to ‘reflect the activity of mem-
ory itself’ (2005, p. 16). In Perfect Strangers the devices of irruption and
repetition begin to characterise that activity. The characteristic of irrup-
tion refers to those flashes of memory that appear to us – those sense
impressions that pull us out of time and back to a former version of our-
selves – and recalls Proust’s conception of mémoire involontaire, where he
is transported back to the past via the taste of a madeleine.5 There is one
particular moment in Alice’s telling of Richard’s story, in part three of
the drama, where this characteristic of irruption is skilfully articulated.
Alice and Daniel sit opposite one another at a small kitchen table
in Alice’s London apartment. The positioning of the characters recalls
Lindsay Duncan’s performance as the storyteller in Shooting the Past
(BBC, 1999), though this time her character is telling the story from her
own memory and experience. Alice’s narration is accompanied by both
the narrative reconstruction of the events surrounding Richard’s illness
and the use of photographic montages, such as a series of black-and-
white and colour photographs that depict the troubled Richard, cloaked
in his black leather coat, walking barefoot through the streets of London
like a poet or flâneur left over from a previous era. However, the story
is also littered with inconsequential detail – images of Richard that do
not immediately correspond with Alice’s narration, which irrupt into
the frame as they flicker across the memory. The collage of images that
is seemingly extracted from Alice’s memory builds up an impression of
her private history, but also gives us a sense of Richard’s own charac-
ter filtered through Alice’s memory, the fragmented and sporadic nature
of which begins to reflect the characterisation of a young man falling
 Moments of Return in Television Drama 41

Figure 2.2 Alice, present (Perfect Strangers, dir. Stephen Poliakoff, prod. Talkback
for BBC, 2001).

apart. Through the collage of stories and images, memories and recon-
structions, Poliakoff creates a sense of what was loved and what has
been lost.
I want to draw attention to one moment in this tale that is comprised
of four shots. The first is a portrait shot of Alice as she narrates the tale
to Daniel (see Figure 2.2). Alice is more austere in appearance than we
have seen her before; wearing a plain grey shirt she is front lit from the
kitchen window, the light appears natural but cold, picking out Alice’s
pale skin and gold hair from the gloomy kitchen behind her. Two long
shelves of the kitchen dresser lined with blue and white willow pattern
crockery run behind her in the frame. Through the sequence, Alice’s
narration and her image as its storyteller anchor the tale to the present
both spatially and temporally, supported by the camera positioning and
the logic of the shot construction. The camera is angled slightly to the
left, a position constructed as part of the shot/reverse shot sequence
with her listener, Daniel. This ‘anchoring’ is briefly disrupted by the
next series of shots which articulate the irruption of memory.
Alice explains to Daniel that the numerous doctors seen by Richard all
provided different and inconclusive diagnoses because ‘he could be so
charming when he wanted’. On making this statement in the shot just
described, three quick taps on the window can be heard, interrupting
the flow of the narration as a memory of the ‘charming’ Richard is called
into being. It is possible that the tapping noise which startles Alice’s
memory is stimulated via the similar noise made by the builders in the
upstairs apartment, referring to those sense impressions that stimulate
42 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

memory and transport one back to the past. From focusing on Daniel,
Alice’s eyes flicker to the right to investigate the noise. Poliakoff cuts
to the image of Richard rapping on the kitchen window pane. His sal-
low skin and the soft brown rings that encircle his blue eyes confirm
his illness, but the framing and warm lighting of the young man invest
his image with the charisma that Alice saw in him, and the sense of
spontaneity and energy of his character is articulated by his sudden
appearance at the window (see Figure 2.3). The collar of his iconic
leather coat is pulled up around his neck, and he smiles in through
the window. Poliakoff cuts back to a shot of Alice as she looks up to see
who is tapping. We have moved into the past and are presented with a
former version of Alice (see Figure 2.4); again she is seated at the kitchen
table and the same crockery lines the shelves of the dresser, emphasising
the sense of spatial continuity. However, a temporal shift is announced
primarily through the change in costume and hairstyle; she is wearing
lighter clothes, a soft beige V-necked jumper and her hair is longer and
softer, tucked back behind her ears. These aspects of the changed mise-
en-scène can certainly be read symbolically in terms of characterisation,
where Alice is presented literally in two different lights depicting the
character after and before her bereavement; firstly, in the gloomy aus-
tere light of a rainy afternoon and secondly, in the warm nostalgic glow
of memory. This second version of Alice corresponds with the memory
of Richard, emphasised again by a shift in camera angle from the left to
the right and the logic of the point-of-view shot as Poliakoff cuts back
again to the image of Richard smiling at the window.

Figure 2.3 Richard, past (Perfect Strangers, dir. Stephen Poliakoff, prod. Talkback
for BBC, 2001).
 Moments of Return in Television Drama 43

Figure 2.4 Alice, past (Perfect Strangers, dir. Stephen Poliakoff, prod. Talkback for
BBC, 2001).

Richard’s present absence from the main narrative heightens the sense
of haunting. The image of Richard in his long leather coat is littered
through the drama, lending his appearance a certain iconic status. He
exists in the space around Rebecca and Charles that Daniel senses but
cannot quite fill himself and in his visible exclusion from the family tree.
Daniel is unknowingly dressed up as Richard by Rebecca and Charles
during the first evening of the reunion and significantly admits that the
coat ‘doesn’t quite fit’. Even in the memory sequences, Richard’s ghostly
appearance, the sallow skin and ringed eyes, his leather cloak and unset-
tled demeanour, further compound his position as family spectre, and
the repetition of his image in the final montage of memories exemplifies
Alice’s own private haunting.
Concluding her speech at the final dinner, Alice proposes that they
drink ‘to those who are no longer with us . . . those who couldn’t be here’.
It is at this point that Poliakoff reinserts the image of Richard smiling
at the kitchen window. Its appearance is brief but extremely powerful,
producing a sense of disorientation which visibly shakes Alice. Though
the performance is extremely subtle, Alice/Duncan teeters back slightly
and looks down, lost in the memory, and then up again as if realigning
her perspective after being briefly jolted back to a different time and
space.
The repetition of the image of Richard is referred to visually by this
sequence but is also written into the dialogue after Daniel has engi-
neered the confrontation between Rebecca, Charles and Alice. Daniel
approaches Charles to apologise and as they both stand staring out over
44 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

the formal gardens of the estate, Charles articulates his own sense of
grief and guilt and explains how he is continually haunted by the image
of Richard.

Charles: Everyday I see him . . .

Daniel: Richard?
Charles: Yes . . . it doesn’t matter where I am . . . last year I walked into
a little supermarket in Mexico, and saw his face, suddenly by the
counter, it was incredible.

The sudden ‘reappearance’ of Richard is described as a disruptive and

powerful experience that mirrors the tremor experienced by Alice during
her speech. These two examples of the repetitive and irruptive quality
of memory operate as a powerful expression of its affective capacity.

Memory montages: ‘Previously on’ sequences and reflective codas

Through its use of montage and the employment of different still and
moving image styles associated with different technologies of memory
(e.g. domestic photography, home video), Perfect Strangers operates as an
example of one of the ‘many contemporary films, documentaries and
television series [that] reframe (actual or fictive) home movie footage
[ . . . ] either as a technique to create the illusion of intimacy and personal
authenticity, or as a meta-commentary on the intertwining of memory
and media’ (van Dijck 2008, p. 72). Whilst Perfect Strangers successfully
creates both this illusion and provides a similar form of commentary,
it also operates as an example of a ‘memory text’. Annette Kuhn writes
that the form of the ‘memory text’ is ‘characteristically collagist, frag-
mentary, timeless’ and can ‘call up, in words, or with the directness and
apparent purity of sounds and images, a sense of what remembering
feels like’ (2000, p. 189). Memory texts in this sense invite empathy
and identification, drawing upon our familiarity with the experience of
memory.
Poliakoff effectively developed his use of montage in Shooting the Past
(BBC, 1999) as a way of experimenting with photographic storytelling
and slowing down television in order to create a memorable television
experience (see Holdsworth 2006). What might be described as ‘mem-
ory montages’ in Perfect Strangers operate as part of the complex web
of secrets that make up the drama’s narrative but are also employed to
effectively conjure that sense of what remembering feels like. In this
analysis I shall refer in detail to two ‘memory montages’ from the last
 Moments of Return in Television Drama 45

episode of Perfect Strangers: the first opens the episode and the second
appears in the final scene of the series.
In Perfect Strangers, Poliakoff extends his use of memory technologies,
from the use of still photography in Shooting the Past, to incorporate
sections of film which are intended to be home movie footage. These
sections are signalled as such by the grainy texture of the film stock
(the use of video and Super 8). These ‘dated’ styles of photography
and film provide the viewer with a series of images that are repeated
throughout the drama, often irrupting into characters’ dreams and fan-
tasies. In the opening of the third episode a montage of memories from
the different family stories accompanies the credits. In a way it may
be read as a ‘previously on . . . ’ sequence, a practice familiar from serial
drama, reminding the viewer of the stories discovered so far. The con-
nections between the stories which are revealed at the end of the drama
are inferred at this point by placing the ‘memories’ together along with
an extract from the diagram of the Symon family tree. The relation-
ships between the characters and their stories are also emphasised by
the mirroring of shots. The camera pans up the film image of the young
Daniel dressed in his ‘little prince’ outfit, from the decorated slippers to
the wide-eyed face of the boy fidgeting with his ruffled collar. A similar
camera movement pans up the still photographic image of the young
Raymond and then up the figure of his father stood next to him, the
similarities between the father and son evidenced in their identical
posturing.
Characters are compelled to uncover the meaning behind certain
images and photographs as memory and fantasy combine in order to
reconstruct their histories. There is a simultaneous weaving and unrav-
elling of story, image and meaning in Perfect Strangers which is threaded
together by what Sarah Cardwell calls an ‘intermedia, cross-temporal
montage’ (2005, p. 185), but what we might refer to here, however, as
the ‘texture of memory’ as it corresponds with Kuhn’s idea of the col-
lagist and fragmentary nature of the memory text. The sequence pieces
together the fragments of memory, represented here by different styles
of film and photography, not only to create a sense of the texture of
memory but also in order to piece together elements of the narrative
puzzle.
If the above example operates as a ‘previously on’ sequence, the exam-
ple below is reminiscent of the reflective codas that are employed across
serial drama and other televisual forms. Here, the use of montage and
music is key to the orchestration of the moment.6 Having gathered at
the old family estate, now a conference centre and golf course, for the
46 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

final function of the reunion, and after Daniel’s failed attempt to rec-
oncile Alice and the siblings, and the revelation of Raymond’s father’s
secret life, the family sits down together at a long banquet table. Sitting
at the head of the table, Alice is invited to make a speech. After the usual
formalities, Alice’s words prompt a final memory montage, operating as
a summary of the drama’s key stories and characters.

Alice: Some of you will remember this house, some of you may
have been here as children . . . And also there are many of you here
who attended the reunion and who have come face to face with
memories . . . We will all have our own private list of course.

This memory sequence is once again characterised by the devices of

irruption and repetition that, as I have argued, simulate the activity or
rhythm of memory in the text and mark the continued elision between
the past and present. From the cut from Alice to Raymond remember-
ing, to the cut back from Rebecca’s memory of a younger Alice, the
montage sequence lasts 45 seconds and contains 22 shots. Similar to
montage sequences in Poliakoff’s earlier drama, Shooting the Past, the
pace of the scene is constructed through editing not camera work. Its
hypnotic effect is induced by the measured pace – each frame lasting
approximately two seconds – and heightened by the evocative score
featuring the repetitive refrain of the piano. The tide-like movement
between past and present, with each frame of memory anchored to its
character, supports the sense of privatisation, yet each character is shar-
ing the experience of remembering. Alice’s words themselves (‘we will
all have our own private list of course’) point towards the quality of the
sequence as an articulation of both private history/memory and collec-
tive experience, indicating the complexity of memory formation with
regards to television as both private viewing experience and cultural
form. At the close of Alice’s speech, nothing is articulated, but a series
of eye-line matches between Daniel and Alice, and Alice and the sib-
lings signal both appreciation and the possibility of reconciliation. This
is accompanied by the movement in the score, from the recurring and
repetitive theme of the drama, characterised by Cardwell as sustaining a
sense of ‘holding off’ (Cardwell 2005, p. 184), of crescendo without cli-
max, to a gentler and drifting piano accompaniment. As with Shooting
the Past, the drama achieves a sense of closure without completion, and
one might also argue that space is made for the viewer at the Symon fam-
ily reunion. As the family toasts to Alice’s speech, the camera is located
at the opposite end of the long banquet table. This position is taken up
 Moments of Return in Television Drama 47

again in the last shot of the drama. As Irving stands on a table to take
a photograph of the gathered family members, they all turn to face the
camera and the viewer. Whilst this shot might be signalled as Irving’s
point of view behind the camera, the direct-to-camera address calls the
viewer into being, situating them as part of the family, whilst leaving
open a space for the viewer to bring with them their own family ghosts
and memories.
What I wanted to consider in relation to the analysis of Perfect
Strangers as a memory text is how the depiction of acts of memory
and remembrance within the drama, the presentation of a texture and
activity of memory, based on the assumption that they are relatable
experiences, might evoke our own acts and practices of memory and
memorialisation. This argument is based on the understanding that tele-
vision operates as part of a system of everyday memory-making, drawn
from its role in daily life and the dynamics of the home. The space of
the home is also often filled with the fragments of memory. For exam-
ple, just as photographs littered the space of the archive in Shooting the
Past, the mise-en-scène of Perfect Strangers is saturated with family pho-
tographs which line the furniture in the characters’ homes. Television
often sits within this everyday memory network and this could indeed
have consequences for the viewing experience of, in this instance, fam-
ily dramas about personal history and memory viewed within a family
space covered with history and memory. The ghosts invoked by the
stories told might very well be our own.
Whilst Perfect Strangers might be described as an example of ‘art
television’,7 there are many features and moments within the three-part
drama that are reminiscent of or rework the characteristics of long-
running serial drama. As I move on to consider how moments of return
and retreat, of repetition and repetition with a difference work in rela-
tion to longer forms of serial drama, I am not unaware of the hierarchies
of value that exist in relation to the objects of study I have selected – art
‘v’ popular, melodrama ‘v’ realism. There are certainly formal common-
alities across all the examples which I attempt to emphasise, but perhaps
most importantly I want to write about these examples as television – to
consider the (medium) specific ways in which memory is employed and
evoked.

ER (NBC, 1994–2009)

Set in the emergency room of the fictional County General Hospi-

tal in Chicago, ER broke the mould of the hospital drama when it
48 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

launched in 1994. It delivered huge ratings and received much criti-

cal acclaim though the show noticeably tired and eventually ran its
course, bowing out at the end of its fifteenth season as the longest
running medical series on prime-time television in the US. There were
numerous ‘moments’ in the final season as the show became increas-
ingly self-conscious of its own memory. For example, a secret ‘memorial
wall’, in the basement of the hospital, was discovered by the characters
Abby (Maura Tierney) and Neela (Parminder Nagra) at the beginning
and end of the season respectively, bookmarking and emphasising the
finality of the programme.8 The final episode itself self-consciously mir-
rored the structure of the ‘pilot’, charting 24 hours in the life of the
emergency room. As an ending there was an insistence on the ‘every-
day’ time of the hospital as cyclical and repetitive, where life ends
and begins. This is particularly apparent in not only the births and
deaths within the emergency room, but also the explicit marking of
the serial drama’s system of generational replacement. Dr John Carter’s
(Noah Wyle) first day at County General, in the pilot, is mirrored by
Gilmore Girl Alexis Bledel introduced as the new intern Dr Julia Wise,
struggling through her own first day. The presence/absence of deceased
Dr Greene resonates through repeated imagery – the opening shot of
the pilot which introduced Greene is reproduced; only now it is Archie
Morris (Scott Grimes) who occupies the quiet and darkened treatment
room.9 Greene’s daughter Rachel (Hallee Hirsch), now 22, also arrives as
a prospective medical student. There were a series of returning charac-
ters and guest appearances in the finale and in other episodes across
the final season. The episode ‘Old Times’ saw the much-anticipated
return of Dr Doug Ross (George Clooney) and nurse Carol Hathaway
(Julianna Margulies).10 Even deceased characters such as Dr Mark Greene
(Anthony Edwards) and Dr Robert Romano (Paul McCrane) reappeared
through a series of flashback sequences attached to the storyline of a
new doctor Cate Banfield (Angela Bassett), who recalled her previous
experience of the emergency room as a mother whose son was brought
in and subsequently died. It is this episode that I want to look at in more
detail.
The original transmission of ‘Heal Thyself’ (season 15, episode 7, tx:
14 November 2008) was itself framed as a memorial space. Broadcast
the week after the death of series creator Michael Crichton, the episode
opens with a short eulogy read by original cast member Eriq La Salle
(Dr Peter Benton).11 The creation of a reflective mood, though uninten-
tional, complements the themes of the episode and its development of
character – opening as it does on an overhead close-up of Cate Banfield,
 Moments of Return in Television Drama 49

lying on her bed and lost in thought as her husband is heard calling
out to her. Banfield is brought in as the new ‘chief of the ER’ in episode
two of season 15. As a character she is initially depicted as cold, serious
and secretive, immediately ruffling the feathers of more established staff
members of the emergency room. ‘Heal Thyself’ is structured through a
series of flashbacks which are clearly presented as Cate’s memory. The
episode reveals a key event in the character’s history and acts as an expla-
nation for Cate’s dour and frosty demeanour – a demeanour which is
re-read in the light of memory as troubled by guilt and grief. In the
episode, Cate’s ‘present-day’ treatment of a near-drowned little girl and
her handling of the girl’s mother and grandfather is paralleled with her
previous experience of the emergency room, where her son is treated
by Dr Greene. In the flashback scenes we see Cate struggling with the
slippage between her own professional and personal roles as both doc-
tor and mother, and with the self-blame of not having spotted her son’s
condition sooner. In the present-day scenes we see Cate draw upon this
experience, and in particular the example set by Greene, to influence
her own treatment of the little girl and her family.
The shift between present day and flashback narratives are signalled
via a variety of devices. Fragments of dialogue and image matches (the
throwing of a football, a close-up of the mother’s hand gripping the
child’s), shifts in mood and tone (the urgency of the trauma room,
the mothers’ fear, the grandfather’s guilt) – all work to summon and
suture the elisions between past and present. Each flashback is also
specifically anchored to Cate as the episode presents us with her experi-
ence of ‘remembering’, but ‘Heal Thyself’ also summons and invokes an
additional form of remembering in the reappearance of Mark Greene.
The much-loved and respected former ‘chief of the ER’ died of a brain
tumour in a protracted and painful storyline in season eight of the series.
It is on the moment of Greene’s return that I want to focus here.
As the girl’s treatment progresses in the present and as the son’s con-
dition becomes more serious in the past, the flashbacks begin to appear
more frequently. Midway through the episode Cate and her son speed
to the hospital in an ambulance. Framed in a medium close-up shot,
Cate anxiously watches her son and clutches his hand. After the off-
screen paramedic announces their arrival at County General, we hear
the ambulance doors opening, and as Cate looks up the white sun lights
up the frame accompanied by a subtle shift in musical tone from minor
to major. There is a cut here to Cate’s point of view. Looking down at
Cate, his arms outstretched as he pulls back the doors, a flare of sun-
light from left of frame gives the familiar figure of Mark Greene an
50 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

ethereal glow as he announces – ‘Welcome to County General. I’m Doc-

tor Greene.’ There is a sense in which the shift in musical tone and
lighting of the scene at this moment anticipate Greene’s return and
there is certainly a self-consciousness to the presentation of the return-
ing tragic hero, with lighting and positioning giving the character a
messianic quality (see Figure 2.5).12
As the episode progresses it becomes clear how Cate’s memory
instructs her own action in the present day. In one significant shot,
whilst breaking the ‘realism’ of the show, Greene’s role within the
episode as both ghost and guide, existing in both past and present, is
evoked. Following Greene’s reappearance and back in the present day
Cate performs a thoracotomy on the young girl. As her mother cries,
‘why isn’t anything working?’ there is a cut to a close-up of Cate. As she
looks to her left the camera moves with her glance, and behind her
in long shot, bathed in a pool of light in the darkened recesses of the
room, Dr Greene stands, putting on surgical gloves. Speaking to Cate
in the past and for Cate in the present, he remarks – ‘we’re just getting
started here’ – and the flashback narrative resumes.
It is here that the episode begins to cross-cut more rapidly between
past and present as the two trauma cases, though in different temporal
zones, run parallel in adjoining hospital treatment rooms. Whilst the
cross-cutting between patients/storylines is a common structural device
within serial drama (see Newman 2006), here it is also cross-temporal

Figure 2.5 Mark Greene, ‘Heal Thyself’, ER, season 15, episode 7 (dir. David
Zabel, prod. Constant c Productions/Amblin Television/Warner Bros.Television,
US, 2008).
 Moments of Return in Television Drama 51

as the past and present are rhymed and aligned via movement (a nurse
walks from one room to the next), action (medical kits are ripped open)
and dialogue (the listing of medications). Whilst the move between past
and present is facilitated by action and sound (the beeping of machines
and a quiet emotive score underlining the scene), the past and the
present are also distinguished as separate events, principally through
Cate’s different hairstyles (long with a fringe in the past, and a short
crop in the present) and the different coloured tiles of the two trauma
rooms (yellow in the past and green in the present).
Cate’s interactions and treatment in the present are paralleled and
informed by her memory of her own interactions with Dr Greene. For
example, Greene asks if it is possible her son ingested something and
the memory of this question sparks Cate to reconsider the little girl’s
case as she questions her team – ‘Maybe it’s an ingestion?’ Whilst Cate’s
son dies and the girl lives, Cate’s memory is an instructive one and
she affirms her earlier rationalisation to a despondent junior doctor –
‘There’s no way to be ready for something like this, but in the end
it’ll make you better – you can’t be a great doctor until you’ve killed a
patient.’
There are a number of associative possibilities generated across this
episode for characterisation and storytelling. The memory structure
works to insert the new character of Cate with the resonance of a longer
series history, and there is a layering of pathos within her momentary
encounter with the dying Greene. Various moments in the episode sum-
mon a series memory of his condition: Greene winces and puts his
hand to his head, and a series of reaction shots become loaded with
the accumulated knowledge of his character’s history and future. But
here new meanings are also generated within old contexts, and new
characters, such as Cate Banfield, are lent the weight of history and
memory.
Both this particular episode and the other ‘memorial devices’ within
the final season – the encounters between past and present characters
and performers, the repetition of storylines and character types (the
‘chief’, the new intern, etc.) – can be seen to provoke a series of compar-
ative gestures. In terms of television memory and nostalgia, they offer
a commentary on ‘who we were and how we have changed’ but they
also illuminate the potential comparative function of serial storytelling.
Where we see roles filled by new actors and storylines repurposed, fea-
tures of seriality and repetition allow the viewer and critic to evaluate
aspects of performance, storytelling and characterisation across the life
of a series.
52 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

Grey’s Anatomy (ABC, 2005–)

Writing of the device of ‘thematic parallelism’ in the prime-time serial,

Newman comments that ‘it would seem an obvious one when dealing
with multiple storylines: have them inflect and play off each other,
revealing contrasts and similarities’ (2006, p. 21). Whilst ‘thematic
parallelism’ is a widespread storytelling device, Jason Jacobs’ work on
hospital drama reveals its specific function within this particular genre.
He employs the term ‘reflectors’ for patients who ‘operate as dramatic
“reflectors” for the medical staff by representing or articulating dimen-
sions of their predicament, identity or situation that is reflected back to
them in an acute form’ (2003, p. 14). For Jacobs, ‘ “reflectors” implies the
sense of return as to reflect means to cast back – where the main char-
acters are often provoked into introspection or a change of mind by the
actions, thoughts and feelings of their patients’ (2003, pp. 119–20).13
Another ensemble hospital drama but in a very different mode, Grey’s
Anatomy, currently in its seventh season, is set within the surgery unit
at the fictional Seattle Grace Hospital. Described by one of its charac-
ters as ‘High School with scalpels’,14 it is as indebted to teen drama as
it is the hospital drama and the interpersonal and romantic relation-
ships between the doctors are very much at the centre of the melodrama.
Whilst patients operate in the same way as the ‘reflectors’ of ER, the doc-
tors at Seattle Grace Hospital are often framed in doorways, watching,
listening, witnessing, on the periphery of their patients’ lives. The drama
of patients’ lives unfolding is often intercut with reaction shots of the
doctors to signpost their empathetic response and to signal moments of
reflection and identification for the central characters. But where Grey’s
Anatomy might seem to differ is in the multiple layering of these reflec-
tive relationships, where characters are continually prompted to reflect
upon their own tangled romances and friendships. This sets up a dis-
tinctive set of patterns and rhymes within the show that point towards
a manipulative, melodramatic and playful use of repetition and series
memory.
The idea of the ‘moment’ within Grey’s Anatomy is as self-conscious
as its construction in the memorial moments in the concluding sea-
son of ER. But here the term also takes on a promotional function;
a mid season three clip show is called ‘Every Moment Counts’ and
the DVD release of the fifth season promises to offer the viewer ‘more
moments’. As I discuss elsewhere the idea of the ‘memorable moment’ is
central to forms of nostalgia programming, and processes of memorial-
isation occur through DVD features and the repetitive forms of the clip
 Moments of Return in Television Drama 53

show. It is the repetitive forms of the patterns and rhymes that feature
across the text of Grey’s Anatomy that I want to move on to consider.
The construction of dialogue in Grey’s Anatomy is central to the tone
and character of the show. Significantly, and revealing the strong female
address of the show, the series is framed by the voice-over of its central
character, Dr Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo). The voice-overs themselves
operate within a reflective mode, deliberating on the trials of life, death
and love; a mode which is further emphasised by the common use of
speeches. These are highly charged moments which foreground perfor-
mance but are lent a dramatic intensity through the repetitive use of
language and the construction of a poetic rhythm.15 Designed not to
mimic the natural patterns of speech – they are not disruptive, break-
ing the narrative flow – but they are points of emotional emphasis and
revelation which often propel the narrative and character arc forward
and whilst they work to foreground an emotional point, they also res-
onate and draw parallels between these various arcs. At the centre of the
ensemble of characters and storylines is the on/off romance between
Meredith and Dr Derek Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey). When Derek’s
estranged wife unexpectedly arrives at Seattle Grace Hospital, at the end
of season one, Meredith throws her hat into the ring and asks Derek to –
‘Pick me. Choose me. Love me’.16 Whilst this ‘moment’ of vulnerability
reverberates across her character arc (Derek doesn’t choose her, initially)
we see her words returned to in Derek’s speech from the opening of
season three, where he admits he chose wrong. In Meredith’s kitchen
the characters face one another for the first time since they had sex at
the hospital prom at the end of season two (the night before in terms
of the plot),17 and Meredith repeats the question asked by Derek in the
previous episode – ‘So what does this mean?’

Derek: It means you have a choice. You have a choice to make, and
I don’t want to rush you into making a decision before you’re ready.
This morning I was gonna come over, I was gonna say, what I wanted
to say was . . . but now all I can say is that . . . I’m in love with you. I’ve
been in love with you for, I don’t know . . . I’m a little late, I know I’m
a little late to tell you that. I just, I just want you to take your time,
y’know, take all the time you need because you have a choice to make
and when I had a choice to make I chose wrong.
(My emphasis, ‘Time Has Come Today’, season 3, episode 1)

The pattern of the speech develops a distinct beat through the successive
repetitions of key words and phrases (‘love with you’, ‘little late’, ‘take
54 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

your time’). It is both circular, returning to the line ‘choice to make’,

and open-ended, leaving Meredith to make the decision which develops
the storyline. Derek’s declaration also resonates across the storyline of
Dr Isobel ‘Izzie’ Stevens (Katherine Heigl) and the heart patient with
whom she falls in love, Denny Duquette (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). In the
season two finale, after Izzie has risked her career and Denny’s life to
secure his place at the top of the heart transplant list, Denny makes a
similar declaration to the young doctor.

Denny: For five years I’ve had to live by the choices of my doctors.
The guys that cut me open decided my life. There wasn’t one choice
that was mine. And now I have this heart that beats and works. I get
to be like everybody else. I get to make my own decisions, have my
own life. Do whatever the damn hell I choose. Now here’s the good
part, so you listen close. What I choose is you. You’re who I want to
wake up with and go to bed with and do everything inbetween with.
I get a choice now. I get to choose. I choose you, Izzie Stevens.
(My emphasis, ‘Losing my Religion’, season 2, episode 27)

The context and the style of each speech are similar. The finale and the
premiere were both written by show creator Shonda Rhimes, and they
are certainly not the only occasions when a repetitive use of language
is employed. Work on soap opera reminds us how repetition and reca-
pitulation operate as a way to remind viewers of narrative events. Here
these techniques work in similar and additional ways: they operate as a
bridge between the ending of season two and opening of season three
but they are also part of the dense and self-conscious layering of reso-
nances and associations. As ‘moments’ of declaration they feel neat and
self-contained, melodramatically charged through the use of reaction
shots and the slow move to close-up. They often close on a reaction shot
of the addressee and prompt that character’s need for further reflection.
Beginnings and endings, premieres and finales are interesting spaces
within the life of a serial drama. The bridging of old and new storylines,
where endings are often beginnings, is arguably a key characteristic of
opening and closing episodes. Similar to the ER finale and across Grey’s
Anatomy, there is an insistence on cyclicality as a pattern of folding and
unfolding emerges. Seasons three and five in particular are bookended
by mirroring scenes which draw parallels, shape and interweave spe-
cific narrative and character arcs. In season five, a patient’s experience
of short-term memory loss in the two-part premiere is repeated in the
finale, only this time it is as Izzie, having been diagnosed with advanced
 Moments of Return in Television Drama 55

melanoma which has spread to her brain, awakens from surgery with
the same condition.
Season three opens with the aftermath of the hospital prom and Izzie
is catatonic on the floor of the bathroom following Denny’s sudden
death at the end of season two.18 She remains in her prom dress (dis-
tinctly reminiscent of a bridal gown) in this position for the duration of
the episode. It is not until the final musical coda that she pulls herself
off the floor and Meredith helps her out of her dress. This is mirrored
by a scene in the final episode of season three in which fiercely inde-
pendent Dr Cristina Yang (Sandra Oh), jilted at the altar by her partner
and fellow surgeon Dr Preston Burke (Isaiah Washington), returns with
Meredith to their apartment to find his treasured possessions gone.19
Realising he has gone for good, she stands in the middle of the room
and exhales – ‘He’s gone. I’m free. Damn it, damn it.’
She breaks down, the music swells on the soundtrack and she struggles
to rip off her corseted dress and choker. It is here that Meredith, once
again, helps her friend to shed the garment, this time with increased
urgency and the aid of a pair of scissors. The dress in both examples
has a clear symbolic significance and given that we see the characters
in scrubs for the majority of the time, the spectacle of witnessing the
characters ‘dressed up’ is arguably as significant as the narrative context
of the shift in costume. These moments do not, however, rest upon the
conventional pleasures of the transformation sequence, as the prom and
the wedding dress become associated with bereavement and loss.
Though writing in the context of serial killer films, Richard Dyer
comments that ‘seriality emphasises anticipation, suspense, what will
happen next? It also emphasises repetition, pattern, structure’ (2000
(1997), p. 146). Pattern and the anticipation of repetition become part
of the pleasures of seriality within Grey’s Anatomy. Repetition functions
not just to generate resonances and allusive meaning – those invokings
that prompt a ‘fresh charge of feeling’ for experienced viewers (Newman
2006, p. 19) – but they work to build anticipation and suspense; what
will happen next? How will the pattern fit together?
I return here to the night of the hospital prom, the moment of
Denny’s death and the appearance of Izzie in her prom dress. Alone
in his room and awaiting the arrival of Izzie, his new fiancée, Denny
suffers a fatal stroke. A close-up on the flatline of his heart monitor dis-
solves into a camera pan from left to right as the line of the monitor
merges with the tiles on the wall outside the hospital elevator. Continu-
ing to pan right the moving frame reveals Izzie in the elevator, wrapped
in a deep pink dress with bandeau top and full, floor-skimming skirt, her
56 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

Figure 2.6 Izzie Stevens, ‘Losing my Religion’, Grey’s Anatomy, season 2, episode
27 (dir. Mark Tinker, prod. Mark Gordon Productions/ShondaLand/Touchstone
Television, US, 2006).

blonde hair gathered up in loose chignon and small diamante droplets

in her ears. She leans forward to press the elevator button then gathers
up the trail of her dress, and with nervous anticipation she runs the fab-
ric through her hands as the door closes and the scene fades to black
(see Figure 2.6). Sutured by a graphic match, the continuing tone of
the flatline and the soft indie ballad on the soundtrack (‘Grace’ by Kate
Havnevik), Denny’s death and Izzie’s anticipation are cruelly juxtaposed
with the preceding sex scene between Meredith and Derek and the sense
of dramatic irony heightened by the use of the lyric ‘I just want to feel
your embrace’ over Izzie’s anticipation in the elevator.
In the musical coda at the end of ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me, pt
2’, the second episode of season five, Izzie steps out onto the corridor
outside her bedroom to see Alex Karev (Justin Chambers), her colleague,
roommate and on/off lover, flaunting his latest conquest. Accompanied
by a soft indie ballad that weaves together the multiple storylines across
the coda, the medium close-up of Izzie bleaches out and returns to the
scene on the night of the prom as she enters the elevator holding the
trail of her gown. As the camera tracks in she pushes the button and
the doors close. We cut to a close-up of Izzie inside the elevator. Here,
her expression is one of a relaxed excitement without the anxiety that
marked the earlier version of the scene (see Figure 2.7). As the doors
open, a point-of-view shot reveals a smiling Denny waiting for her.
As Izzie beams back she tells him – ‘See I told you I would show you my
dress’, to which he responds – ‘you look better than the bride’. Hand
in hand they walk down the corridor and into the light. Bleaching out
 Moments of Return in Television Drama 57

Figure 2.7 Izzie Stevens, ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me, pt 2’, Grey’s Anatomy,
season 5, episode 2 (dir. Ron Corn, prod. ShondaLand/The Mark Gordon
Company/ABC Studios, US, 2008).

the frame the scene dissolves back to Izzie outside her bedroom and as
Alex closes the door behind him, Meredith’s voice-over announces that
‘fairytales don’t come true. Reality is much stormier.’
Whilst clearly referencing back and relying on the resonance of the
earlier version of the scene and its significance for the character, its
reappearance also has a prophetic quality and points towards the new
season’s storylines; Denny does, in fact, return. In a device designed to
unsettle the audience and signal Izzie’s illness, Denny returns to Izzie as
a ghost/hallucination and competes with Alex for her affection.20 The
explanation for the scenario, which could be read as an excuse to cap-
italise on the popularity of the characters and the desire to see their
relationship consummated, is left open and leads towards the revela-
tion that Izzie has ‘terminal’ cancer; Denny either returns to warn Izzie
of her illness or is a manifestation of that illness.
It is within the context of this particular story arc that the elevator
scene is returned to for a third time in the musical coda at the close of
the season five finale which binds together two specific storylines. First,
Izzie, now married to Alex, awakens from brain surgery with short-term
memory loss. Despite the initial anxiety which recalls a patient from the
opening of the season, she appears to begin to recover. Secondly, a ‘John
Doe’ in a critical condition and with severe facial injuries is brought into
the hospital. He is revealed towards the end of the episode to be series
regular George O’Malley (TR Knight), Izzie’s best friend and former lover
who was leaving Seattle Grace Hospital to join the army. In the final
moments of the episode both characters become asystolic.21
58 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

The transmission of the season five finale was inevitably informed by

the publicity that one or both of the actors would be leaving the series,
effectively heightening the anticipation and tension as the episode con-
cludes with both characters’ lives hanging in the balance. The coda cuts
between the attempts to save Izzie and George and as the soundtrack
builds in intensity and volume, the speed of the cuts between the two
resuscitation teams is also intensified; sutured by both the music, the
electric tone of the flat-lining heart monitor and Meredith’s voice-over –
‘Did you say it? I love you. I don’t ever wanna live without you. You
changed my life. Did you say it? Make a plan, set a goal, work toward it.
But every now and then look around, drink it in . . . ’
An overhead, close-up of an unconscious Izzie bleaches out to white
and the dissolve returns us, once again, to the character in her iconic
deep pink gown as she enters the elevator. With a more washed out
colour palette, the tone of the image is slightly different to the earlier
versions of the scene, in particular the sunny second version of the scene
as a fantasy reunion with Denny.
In this version, Izzie’s expression is anxious and troubled as the
elevator becomes symbolic of a space in between life and death (see
Figure 2.8). Following the same pattern of shots as the second ver-
sion, the cut from Izzie to her point of view anticipates a final reunion
with Denny and the fulfilment of his prophecy – ‘I’m here for you
Izzie Stevens.’22 The emotional crescendo of the scene is revealed as
the soundtrack breaks for the chorus; the doors open and there stands
George, regenerated and transformed, pristine in his army uniform

Figure 2.8 Izzie Stevens, ‘Now or Never’, Grey’s Anatomy, season 5, episode 24
(dir. Ron Corn, prod. ShondaLand/The Mark Gordon Company/ABC Studios, US,
2009).
 Moments of Return in Television Drama 59

complete with buzz cut. There is no exchange of dialogue as editing,

music (the specially written ‘Off I Go’ by Greg Laswell) and performance
build the season cliffhanger. The shot-reverse shot between Izzie and
George is intercut with shots of them under resuscitation. The scene is
clearly framed as Izzie’s subconscious. As George warmly smiles at Izzie
and she tentatively smiles back, the noise of the defibrillator breaks
her concentration and she glances away. The choice between life and
death is clearly marked as hers and the coda concludes with a return to
the overhead close-up of Izzie as her head jolts back as electricity fires
through her body. The final cut to black is concluded by Meredith’s clos-
ing voice-over – ‘ . . . because, this is it. It might all be gone tomorrow.’
I have chosen to write about these scenes at length because they
reveal to me a different way of understanding the operation of mem-
ory, different to the repetition of key moments in the memory montage
or the representations of remembering. Here, the elaborate and self-
conscious layering of associations and resonances is captured by the
patterned return to and reversioning of a brief scene. The scene is recon-
structed and revised twice, wrong-footing the audience’s expectations
each time. The density of these repetitions and revisions also makes
the attempt to explain the narrative context of each moment a diffi-
cult project. Again the weight of character history is summoned by the
sequence – the death-defying relationship between Izzie and Denny, the
close relationship between Izzie and George – a relationship that inten-
sifies across season three by their shared experience of bereavement;
Izzie loses Denny and George loses his father. The resonance of the
dress and the dramatic use of costume are also central, becoming emo-
tional markers and identifying the scenes as moments of heightened
melodrama.
To return to Julian Wolfreys, writing on Victorian literature and
informed by Derrida’s work on the spectral, he argues that:

what returns is never simply a repetition that recalls an anterior ori-

gin or presence, but is always an iterable supplement: repetition with
a difference. There is, then, an apparently circular or, more precisely,
a folding and unfolding motion which in the act of appearing to
complete itself moves us somewhere else, so that what we come to
read on so many occasions is a figure, to borrow Tennyson’s words,
of the same, but not the same.
(2002, p. 19)

Whilst none of the dramas I discuss adopt this mode, there is the poten-
tial here for an uncanny rendering of the moment of return, where
60 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

the familiar becomes strange, of the same but not the same. Repetition
with a difference, though, is central to the function of these scenes.
Whilst looping back and emphasising the significance of the moment,
they push the narrative forward as the narrative pattern plays with the
(emotional) expectations it has established.

The Wire (HBO, 2002–8)

Continuing the discussion of the significance of endings and begin-

nings within these contemporary serial dramas, I want to conclude
this chapter with a final example from the home of American ‘quality
programming’, HBO.23 The much-celebrated drama The Wire has been
considered to be the closest thing on television to literature, applauded
by critics and referred to by its creators as a ‘visual novel’ (see Mittell
2008, p. 429). Here, commentary returns the serial storytelling of the
drama back to its roots in nineteenth-century culture and the serialised
novels of Dickens et al. It is not a narrative I wish to trace here. What
interests me is how the features of seriality and their relationship to time
and memory – the repetitions and cycles, the sense of endlessness – also
become thematic concerns within the five-season drama.
Throughout the series we witness the inability of characters to break
or escape the behavioural and environmental cycles that they are impris-
oned in. This becomes most apparent in the pattern of generational
replacement set up within the show, as the boys introduced in season
four become different chess pieces within the game – junkie, soldier,
cop, stick-up man. The players change but the game remains the same.
This, according to Marsha Kinder (2008) affords some kind of hope.
Long-term addict Bubbles (Andre Royo) eventually joins his sister at the
family table; one of the boys, Namond (Julito McCullum), is fostered
by ex-District Commander Bunny Colvin (Robert Wisdom) (though this
might be more a case of switching sides rather than escaping the game).
However, the disposability of the players and the replacement and rep-
etition of roles are evoked in a reflective speech from the treacherous
henchman Cheese (Method Man) in the series finale:

See that? See now that’s just the wrong way to look at it, coz Joe had
his time and Omar put an end to that. Then Marlo had his time, short
as it was, and the police put an end to that. And now motherfucker,
it’s our time. Mines and yours. But instead of kicking in, you gonna
stand there cryin’ that back in the day shit. There ain’t no back in the
 Moments of Return in Television Drama 61

day, nigger. Ain’t no nostalgia to this shit here. There’s just the street
and the game and what happen here today.
(‘-30-’, season 5, episode 10)

In full rhetorical flow Cheese is shot in the head at point-blank range as

payback for his betrayal of Proposition Joe (Robert F. Chew).24 Having
worked his way up the ranks he is killed and discarded, and as the col-
lective drive away, another corpse is left littering another patch of West
Baltimore wasteland.
Here the device of ‘generational replacement’, common across long-
running series and evident in ER and Grey’s Anatomy, carries a political
and sociological dimension as part of a portrait of a city and a study
of environmental determinism. Other serial storytelling devices are also
apparent: the reflective relationship between police and drug dealers,
the recurrence of key words and phrases that run across the show like a
musical refrain (see Kinder 2008, p. 57). For example, Detective Jimmy
McNulty’s (Dominic West) exclamation ‘what the fuck did I do?’ is
repeated across the first series and the resonance of West’s performance
of the line shifts from an arrogant absence of responsibility in the open-
ing episode, to a deep sense of guilt following the near-fatal shooting of
his colleague Kima (Sonja Sohn) in the penultimate instalment.
Whilst it was praised for its realism, The Wire presented a conclud-
ing montage at the end of each season which, whilst working to offer
some sense of closure to the individual series and its specific storylines,
pointed towards new and continuing narrative threads and was sug-
gestive of the ways in which ‘life goes on’.25 They were also moments
which foregrounded the ‘construction’ of the programme and illustrated
Jason Mittell’s observations on the narrative complexity and spectacle
of contemporary television drama in which he suggests ‘we watch these
shows not just to get swept away in a realistic narrative world [ . . . ] but
also to watch the gears at work, marvelling at the craft required to pull
off such narrative pyrotechnics’ (2006, p. 35). The self-consciousness of
these sequences is signalled here by the rare use of a non-diegetic sound-
track – the choice of music temporally framing the montage not entirely
dissimilar to the use of the musical coda at the end of a show such as
Grey’s Anatomy.
The season two and season five finales were interesting in that the
montage sequence was anchored to a specific character.26 Constructed
via the logic of the flashback, whilst creating the sense that ‘life goes
on’, the function of these sequences is to insist upon the sense of the
62 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

imprisonment and powerlessness of the individual against the corrup-

tion and criminality of American society and government – visually
enacting the themes of movement and stasis. It is the heavily symbolic
image of Nick Sobotka (Pablo Schreiber), nephew of the corrupted and
subsequently murdered Stevedore Union leader Frank Sobotka (Chris
Bauer), clinging to and framed behind a wire fence which anchors
season two’s concluding montage (see Figure 2.9).
The image intentionally mirrors an image of Frank in the pre-
vious episode, recalling Nick’s final encounter with his uncle (see
Figure 2.10).27 Season two’s focus on the Port of Baltimore, the decline
of industry and its effect on a male, white, working-class community is
entwined with notions of decay and loss, and this sequence, accompa-
nied by the country–rock track ‘I Feel Alright’ by Steve Earle, concludes
with an accelerating montage of images of the empty and derelict dock-
yards, before returning to the image of Nick. His uncle murdered and
his cousin in jail, Nick fails to escape the port through illegitimate or
legitimate means and the symbolic effect of Nick’s entrapment behind
the fence, overlooking the closed factories, is exaggerated by a return to
diegetic sound – the silence of the port and the quiet rain falling.
Discussing the image of Mark Greene in the first season of ER, Jacobs
argues ‘that final image is haunted by the possibilities of his future’
(2001, p. 437). Similarly, here, the final image of Nick is haunted by both
the past and a lost future. And this is not the last time we see Nick – the

Figure 2.9 Nick Sobotka, ‘Port in a Storm’, The Wire, season 2, episode 12 (dir.
Robert F. Colesberry, prod. Blown Deadline Productions/HBO, US, 2003).
 Moments of Return in Television Drama 63

Figure 2.10 Frank Sobotka, ‘Bad Dreams’, The Wire, season 2, episode 11 (dir.
Ernest R. Dickerson, prod. Blown Deadline Productions/HBO, US, 2003).

character very briefly reappears in season five, heckling Mayor Carcetti

(Aidan Gillen) at the opening of a new port regeneration project.28
In this appearance he is now a relic, a leftover from season two, but he
brings with him a set of character and narrative associations and reso-
nances. With an irony that belies the significance of this appearance for
the viewer, but equally a commentary on the character’s declining status
in the ‘real world’, Nick is escorted away by security as the Mayor turns
to his aide – ‘Who the hell’s that?’ – ‘it’s nobody Mr Mayor. Nobody
at all.’
We might consider the ways in which these fragments, the reappear-
ance of Nick, or the tattered campaign poster image of tragic union
leader Frank, become affective triggers. The latter is an image that is pur-
posefully, yet fleetingly focused upon in a short one-shot scene in the
concluding montage of season three. The camera pans over a billboard
stapled with the tattered re-election posters and then opens out to reveal
Omar (Michael K. Williams) throwing the gun that killed Stringer Bell
(Idris Elba) into the dockland waters. Layers of associations and mean-
ings can be generated in the meeting of storylines within this moment,
and the poster acts as a memory-trace weighted with meaning for the
committed viewer.
The moment of return can be commemorative, melodramatic or
poignantly fleeting, as in these examples from The Wire, or in the pass-
ing image of Nate’s reflection in Six Feet Under. Self-consciously brief and
underplayed they evoke, once again, Julian Wolfreys’ thoughts on the
64 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

ghostly movement of narrative; a folding and unfolding action which

is perhaps best characterised by the brevity of these momentary appear-
ances, the layering of traces, and the return and retreat that enacts a
rhythm of ebb and flow, which, to me, seems so central to television, its
pleasures and rewards. It is also, for me, a rhythm which still exists even
with the emergence of new forms of consumption, such as the DVD box
set. Whilst we have more control over the pattern of return, texts still
repeatedly come into and out of our lives. It is a phenomenon that has
made the forms, functions and pleasures of repetition even more fasci-
nating and which I shall continue to investigate in Chapters 4 and 5 of
this book. Whilst I have attempted to link the examples in this chapter
through the analysis of representations of reflection and remembering,
systems of generational replacement and the generation of patterns and
resonances, they are also all examples which offer us representations of
loss. For me, these moments of return have the potential to ‘link us to
our losses’, both within the text but also beyond it, to our lives lived as
a backdrop to the stories television tells.
3
Who Do You Think You Are?
Memory and Identity in the Family
History Documentary

The popularity of family history research as a national pastime has been

successfully adopted by British television over the last five years, with
Who Do You Think You Are? (WDYTYA), produced by Wall to Wall, pio-
neering the employment of family history and memory as a televisual
narrative strategy. The first series aired in autumn 2004 to popular and
critical acclaim, becoming one of the highest-rated shows on BBC Two.
It was promoted to BBC One in 2006 and is currently, at the time of
writing, in its seventh series, bringing the total number of episodes to
60. The success of the format, which follows the genealogical investiga-
tions of various television personalities as they track down the stories
behind their family trees, may indeed have convinced commission-
ers that, according to WDYTYA alumnus Ian Hislop, ‘family history
is not dull, but a surprisingly watchable commodity’ (in Rowan 2005,
p. 12). As Vanessa Thorpe commented in The Observer, ‘the British now
love family history research as much as they love gardening or DIY’
(Thorpe 2004). Certainly not only a British phenomenon though, the
format has found international success, selling to broadcasters across
Western Europe and beyond, with versions of the show appearing
on Canadian, Swedish, Polish, Irish, Australian and North American
television.
Within the boom in historical programming charted across Erin
Bell and Ann Gray’s edited collection, Televising History, WDYTYA is
acknowledged to be ‘extremely significant’ (Bell and Gray 2010, p. 8).
On British television it has been followed by a glut of programmes that
have used family history research as an investigative narrative structure.
These have included celebrity family history formats such as Disappear-
ing Britain (Five, 2006), a three-part series produced by Testimony Films,
in which a celebrity traces an aspect of social history intertwined with

65
66 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

personal significance; You Don’t Know You’re Born (ITV1, 2007), produced
by Wall to Wall, in which the personality experiences the lifestyle of
their ancestor; and Empire’s Children (Channel 4, 2007), also produced
by Wall to Wall, a series which traces the effects and legacy of the Empire
on six British celebrities.
There have also been reverse-celebrity family history formats:
My Famous Family (UKTV History, 2007), in which Bill Oddie reveals
some genealogical secrets to unsuspecting members of the public, and
So You Think You’re Royal? (Sky One, 2007–), a show which attempts
to ‘give British families, with claim to royal ancestry, the chance to
retrace their heritage’ (Thompson 2005). Non-celebrity family history
programmes have included Family Ties (BBC4, 2004–6), which origi-
nally accompanied the broadcast of WDYTYA; Not Forgotten (Channel 4,
2005), a four-part series and one-off special, produced by Wall to Wall,
which traced the descendants of First World War soldiers; 100% British
(Channel 4, 2006), another Wall to Wall production, a one-off documen-
tary focused on genetic analysis in order to challenge the (nationalist)
assumptions of its participants; and The Last Slave (Channel 4, 2007),
a documentary commissioned to commemorate the 200th anniversary
of Britain’s abolition of the slave trade. It followed a Londoner as he
traced back his family history to slave roots.1 Family history has also
arisen as a narrative and investigative form across daytime and lifestyle
formats such as History Mysteries (BBC2, 2006), Gene Detectives (BBC1,
2007), Heir Hunters (BBC1, 2007–), parenting series Never Did Me Any
Harm (Channel 4, 2007) and food show A Taste of My Life (BBC2, 2006).
Independent production company Wall to Wall was clearly able to
initially capitalise on the winning formula of WDYTYA with a series
of other related programmes, though none have enjoyed the sustained
and international success of the ‘original’ format. So what has made
WDYTYA such a significant and uniquely successful phenomenon?
Billed by its producer Alex West as a mix of ‘History Today and Heat’
(in Deans 2004), the series quickly came ‘to symbolise the kind of
programme the newly public service focused BBC should be doing:
serious-minded, but also accessible and popular’.2 Part of the pro-
gramme’s populist address lies in its use of celebrities, but can also
be found in its focus on the desire to experience history at a per-
sonal and affective level, on the part of both the investigator and the
audience. As such, WDYTYA clearly corresponds with recent trends in
historical programming, which have been described by British historian
and broadcaster Tristram Hunt as ‘reality history’.3 By placing the per-
sonal at the centre of understandings of public or social histories, the
 Memory and Identity in the Family History Documentary 67

series uses family history and memory as a conduit between the past
and present. Wall to Wall describes WDYTYA as a show which ‘fea-
tures famous names [ . . . ] as they venture on a journey of discovery
into their ancestors’ pasts to ultimately find out more about them-
selves, their family, and also our shared social history’ (Wall to Wall
press release, 2006). By remaining ‘serious minded’ and demanding per-
sonal stories which ‘dovetail with big themes – Caribbean immigration,
Indian Independence, World war, Industrial revolution’ (Brown 2004),
the programme-makers also weave the genealogical investigations of
their various personalities, clearly chosen to offer a more encompass-
ing vision of ‘Britishness’, into a potentially more inclusive history of
Britain and British national identity.
The generic blending at work in WDYTYA along with its stress upon
emotion and experience as modes of knowledge have been at the heart
of its success in terms of circulating BBC promotional discourses. How-
ever, we might also relate these characteristics to the emphasis on
memory within the series. Kerwin Klein writes that ‘we sometimes use
memory as a synonym for history to soften our prose, to humanize it,
and make it more accessible. Memory simply sounds less distant, and
perhaps for that reason, it often serves to help draw general readers into
a sense of the relevance of history for their own lives’ (2000, p. 129).
Memory narratives in formats like WDYTYA might be viewed as a way
of ‘softening’ social history documentary, employed as a populist strat-
egy and as part of the increasing centrality of emotion in contemporary
British television.
Whilst memory might be seen to allow a more emotional, ‘softer’ con-
nection with history, it is the fluidity of memory, memory as a process,
in a constant state of being made and unmade, that is significant for my
own reading of the family history documentary. Alessandro Portelli has
described memory as the ‘permanent labour of connecting’.4 The inves-
tigative narrative of WDYTYA foregrounds the labour of connecting
in the work of genealogy – establishing and emphasising connections
across the family tree. This form of labour also correlates with the acts
of transfer involved in post-memorial work (Hirsch 1997; 2008) and
the tracing of clues and fragments that characterise understandings of
memory work (Kuhn 1995); each appears to fit the activities on dis-
play in the series and is discussed in more detail below. The labour of
connecting also emphasises the role of construction, interpretation and
imaginative investment in the acts of memory-making – where meaning
is shaped by the needs and desires of the investigator, the programme-
maker and wider cultural frames of remembrance.5 However, the labour
68 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

of connecting is immediately complicated by the WDYTYA investiga-

tors’ tracing of a ready-made trail; this is, in a sense, memory work
without the work – memory work which is performed and dramatised.
By focusing my analysis on some of its textual and narrative con-
ventions, the trope of the ‘journey’ and the use of family photography,
I want to consider how acts of memory-making are represented by the
series. In the light of Myra Macdonald’s work on television documentary
conventions and how they can both enable and constrict memory work,
I argue that the format simultaneously opens up a vision of a multicul-
tural British heritage whilst closing down or ‘taming’ our relationships
to difficult and contested areas of history and identity by the stress on
an affirmative cultural citizenship. Here, the format reveals the ways
in which remembering and forgetting are knitted together. Whilst the
notion of the journey frames the formatted narrative, the international
circulation of the format reveals the memorial obsessions, patterns of
remembrance and televisual vernaculars of different television nations.

Emotional journeys

Helen Weinstein has spoken of how the ‘emotional hook’ provided by

human interest stories has become central to the motivational and cre-
ative decision-making of television history producers.6 It is important
to acknowledge that the stress on emotion and experience, the blur-
ring of ‘hard’ and soft’ generic forms and the merging of private and
public spheres form part of a wider trend in television programming
that has been much discussed in television scholarship on the talk show
(Shattuc 1997), factual programming (Bondebjerg 1996; Brunsdon et al.
2001) and reality television (Biressi and Nunn 2005), forms which have
all clearly influenced WDYTYA.
Whilst these features are not new to the presentation of history on
television, what is remarkable is the populist appeal of WDYTYA and
the emotionalism and sensationalism inherent in its presentation and
marketing. What these programmes exhibit is how, rather than view-
ing these categories as a marker of the ‘dumbing down’ of television,
the elicitation of emotion, at least within BBC discourses, became the
key to their value. It was the attention on the emotional revelations of
comedian and presenter Bill Oddie and TV journalist Jeremy Paxman’s
stories and personalities that offered a point of media focus and promo-
tion and opened the first and second series of WDYTYA respectively.7
Rather than reading the interruption of the personal and the emotional
and the incorporation of celebrities as, in Catherine Johnson’s summary
 Memory and Identity in the Family History Documentary 69

of the popular argument, part of the ‘decline of factual programming

and a concession to populism at the expense of the BBC’s public ser-
vice remit’ (in Brunsdon et al. 2001, p. 41), generic blending becomes a
point of renewal and success. In John Willis’ speech at the Factual Forum
on 18 March 2005, he remarked upon the qualities of WDYTYA among
other recent BBC Two documentaries:

Last month BBC2 had Auschwitz, Tribe, and The Lost World of Mitchell
and Kenyon, riding high simultaneously. They were all very differ-
ent, all attracted brilliant reviews and all surpassed expectation of
audience size significantly. These programmes – and others like last
autumn’s hit from Wall to Wall – Who Do You Think You Are? –
demonstrate that there is a clear audience appetite for traditional
documentary virtues like strong narrative and genuine insight but
illuminated in ways that feel modern and relevant, whether using
celebrities or dramatic reconstruction.
(Willis 2005)

Both celebrity and emotionality are central to the promotion of

WDYTYA and are seen to function as a sign of the BBC’s appeal to
a more popular market, delivering programmes that are both ‘serious’
(traditional documentary virtues) and ‘entertaining’ (use of celebrities).
The incorporation of both celebrities and ‘real people’, the position-
ing of the celebrity as a ‘real person’, viewed at home with their families,
and the programme’s reliance upon personal memory and emotional
revelation link the format with a series of recognisable television gen-
res outside of historical programming – the confessional talk show, the
celebrity talk show and, perhaps less obviously, the makeover show.
Charlotte Brunsdon writes that the emphasis of contemporary lifestyle
programmes is on ‘what producers call “the reveal” [ . . . ] when the trans-
formed person or place is shown to their nearest and dearest and the
audience’ (Brunsdon et al. 2001, p. 55). The moment of revelation is
almost always coded as ‘emotional’ and ‘melodramatic’ through the
use of the extreme close-up and the reaction shot. Paxman’s seemingly
uncharacteristic display of tears offers one particular example.8
Sitting alone in a plain room in a Bradford registry office, Paxman
removes his glasses and is silent in response to the details of the death
certificates of his ancestors. The camera quickly and jerkily zooms into
an extreme close-up of the obviously ‘choked-up’ Paxman, as if desper-
ate to record this glimpse of ‘real’ emotion. The moment of revelation is
sustained by Paxman’s repetition of the findings of the coroner’s reports
70 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

and a second display of emotionality where Paxman once again removes

his glasses, as if revealing unseen layers of his ‘personality’, but then
modestly partially covers his face with his hand from what feels like
the prying gaze of the camera. Marking the setting of a precedent and
the formulaic expectation of celebrity tears, the intrusive and lingering
close-up that accompanies Paxman’s ‘breakdown’ reveals its own strat-
egy of manipulation. At this point the show’s desperate attempts to elicit
an emotional response from both Paxman and the viewer undermine its
construction of that response as ‘authentic’. However, the analytic gaze
of the camera also highlights the role of the celebrity as both agent and
subject of the investigation.
In his book Cinematic Journeys, Dimitris Eleftheriotis traces differ-
ent types of movement and their relationship to a particular model
of subjectivity that emerges in the nineteenth century – one which
‘combines pleasure with the acquisition of knowledge, entertainment
with self-improvement’ (2010, p. 76). Investigating the representation
of movements and journeys of exploration, discovery and revelation
across a series of films, Eleftheriotis employs a conceptual dialectic of
activity/passivity where the traveller is both ‘an active observer and a
“parcel”, both explorer and explored’. He continues ‘journeys not only
lead to the discovery of startling new places and experiences but also
propel towards self-discovery, as the travelling reveals new worlds and
well-hidden emotions, memories or traumas, placing the traveller in a
position of control over movement while being subjected to it’ (2010,
p. 77). Whilst the explorations of WDYTYA are of time and history
as well as space, there is a corresponding view of the traveller as both
‘explorer and explored’.
Framed within an investigative narrative structure, the celebrity
embarks upon a physical and emotional journey. Whilst narratives of
transformation and improvement pervade lifestyle television, WDYTYA
attempts to encourage a reading of the journey to self-knowledge, both
historical and emotional, as a means to self-improvement, charting how
self-revelation leads to self-awareness.9 The show’s therapeutic aspects
in its employment of a form of post-memory work are beneficial for
some of its celebrity participants, as Bill Oddie states, ‘this isn’t curiosity,
this journey – it’s self-help’, whilst others, though spectacularly revealed
as an emotional being are more resistant to the prescribed reading: as
Jeremy Paxman comments – ‘What did I learn from the delving into my
family background? I got a strong impression that the producer wanted
me to say the experience had somehow changed my life. It didn’t’
(Paxman 2006, p. 19).
 Memory and Identity in the Family History Documentary 71

Mark Lawson commented in The Guardian that WDYTYA has ‘the feel
of a version of Great Railway Journeys in which the geography is per-
sonal’ (Lawson 2004). It is perhaps the trope of the journey that is the
most significant for the show. Whilst the format charts the mundane
aspects of the quests of its investigators – the physical journeying across
the country and even the globe in some episodes, the arrival at libraries
and archives, and the negotiation of the dusty corridors of history – the
journey in WDYTYA is also meant to be read as having a metaphorical
significance. It is meant to be read as an emotional journey of self-
discovery. As actress and novelist Meera Syal comments at the end of
her journey in India: ‘Even if you only go back one generation, you will
experience a lot just on the journey.’10
In the first episode of the first series of WDYTYA,11 Bill Oddie’s inves-
tigations into his family history focused on the story of his mother,
Lillian. Suffering from severe mental illness, Lillian was hospitalised dur-
ing Oddie’s childhood and remained in an institution for the majority
of her life. Knowing little of his mother’s history, and remembering less,
it is the family photograph which is presented as a source of anxiety
for Oddie, and prompts his search for personal meaning and memory.
It is significant that it is in the representation of journeying and the
beginning of Oddie’s investigations that the four images that Oddie has
of his mother are inserted into the documentary, where the view of a
grey Birmingham suburb from inside a moving car is interrupted by
the black-and-white image of the young Oddie with his mother, frag-
mented from its context so as to focus on this relationship and sliding
into the frame from right to left. The movement into the frame is accom-
panied by a familiar ‘rushing’ sound as when two cars pass each other.
Placed against the travelling shot, the movement of the image into the
frame and the accompanying noise give the impression that the image
forms another part of the landscape/cityscape viewed from the car; that
in this case the geography has literally become personal. This image is
followed by another three photographs of Oddie’s mother; the quality,
colouring and composition of the images clearly mark them as amateur
family photographs but also place them into a biographical timescale.
The family album is perhaps a practice of photographical collection and
exhibition that many of us recognise, and it attaches an image-narrative
to our personal memories. What is interesting in Oddie’s case, revealed
through both the dialogue and the presentation of these few images, is
that Oddie’s own sparse family album is seen to reflect his own lack of
memory or knowledge in relation to his mother and his mother’s story.
For Oddie, the lack of narrative meaning is a cause of anxiety, unrest
72 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

and the drive for meaning. Oddie’s own mental health problems are dis-
closed at the start of the programme, and Oddie himself speculates that
his relationship with his mother might lie at the root of his depression.
One might argue that this anxiety, the lack of and desire for understand-
ing or ‘closure’ is revealed in the presentation and movement of the
photographs in the sequence, allowing us to position the significance of
the images for Oddie and the documentary in relation to a therapeutic
discourse.
The effect of the zoom into the image accompanied by the switch
of image which pulls back each time to an increased length of the shot
scale gives the impression of an object that although one might be mov-
ing towards it is continually out of reach. This effect is heightened by
the alternating movement of the images, the first sliding into the frame
from the right to the left, a movement that reverses with each new
image, and the repetition of the piano riff on the soundtrack, which
emphasises the sense of continuity without climax or conclusion.
It is important to note that this sequence doesn’t stress Lillian’s
experience, locked within the images, but Oddie’s experience of these
photographs; what is revealed in the dialogue is how they become his
memory of the photographs rather than them being photographs of
a memory. As Oddie himself remarks: ‘When I look back at my child-
hood, I have about four images which involve my mother. They are like
a scene out of a movie, y’ know, they’re like here’s the best of . . . this is
the trailer as it were. But I never did see the film.’ The enigma photo-
graph, the image without a clear indexical link, is often central to the
investigative drive of WDYTYA. As a documentary format that functions
as both an investigation of aspects of our social history and as narratives
of self-discovery, the image of a national landscape is built up via the
personal and the emotional. This point is revealed in this sequence by
the interruption of a personal geography into the frame.

Dramatising the family archive

In the family history documentary the presentation of family pho-

tography is a key textual and narrative strategy. Family photographs
function as a conduit, allowing an intersection with wider historical
narratives and acting as an anchor, connecting the viewer to the sub-
ject of the investigations. In WDYTYA, family photographs offer the
first port of call in the celebrity’s journey, a journey which is struc-
tured, via their use, as both an investigative and an emotional one.
A visit to a parent or elderly relative often facilitates the introduction of
 Memory and Identity in the Family History Documentary 73

the images, which will recur throughout the programme, revealing the
celebrity’s connection to the subjects of investigation and any details
that remain within living memory. The photographs immediately begin
to take on two functions in the documentary: as a source of evidence
along with the presentation of other historical documents located in
various archives (letters, reports, birth/death certificates) validating oral
accounts of memory and history, and as a point of emotional connec-
tion between the investigator and the subject of his or her investigations
and where the viewer, via various presentational strategies, is pulled into
this connection.
Marianne Hirsch’s influential concept of ‘postmemory’ is useful, not
only in relation to the ‘intergenerational acts of transfer’ (2008, p. 106)
exhibited in a format such as WDYTYA, but also in the programme’s
reliance on family photography for its forms of storytelling. Hirsch
writes of postmemory’s connection to the past as being mediated via
‘imaginative investment, projection and creation’ rather than recall. It is
a connection that can be both familial and affiliative as she suggests how
post-memorial work

strives to reactivate and reembody more distant social/national and

archival/cultural memorial structures by reinvesting them with
resonant and individual and familial forms of mediation and aes-
thetic expression. Thus less-directly affected participants can become
engaged in the generation of postmemory, which can thus per-
sist even after all participants and even their familial descendants
are gone.
(Emphasis in original, 2008, p. 111)

The resonance of such familial images and narratives, pervasive in their

use within public memorial sites, is predicated upon the ‘power of the
idea of family’ and the ‘forms of mutual recognition that define fam-
ily images and narratives’ (emphasis in original, 2008, p. 113). Whilst
photographs open up a series of potential emotional engagements and
imaginative investments between the subject and the archive, these
forms of mutual recognition also point towards shared practices of
memory and remembrance that arguably interject the viewer into the
programme’s strategies of historical investigation and memory-making.
What interests me here are the various ways in which the archive,
in particular the family’s photographic archive, is animated or drama-
tised in the service of the investigator’s experiences, needs and desires,
and the storytelling strategies of the programme-makers.12 For example,
74 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

the presentation of what we might refer to as ‘enigma photographs’ is

often key to the investigations in WDYTYA where the absence of mem-
ory or knowledge in relation to an existing archive of images acts as a
narrative drive. This investigative strategy is employed, for example, in
actress Shelia Hancock’s episode in series two of WDYTYA as she seeks to
establish the identity of a charismatic and wealthy woman pictured in a
photograph from her family collection.13 Similar to the ‘magical value’
of the photograph famously written about by Walter Benjamin and his
encounter with a nineteenth-century image of a Newhaven fishwife pro-
ducing an ‘unruly desire to know what her name was, the women who
was alive then’ (1999, p. 510), Hancock articulates a lifelong desire to
find out the identity of the woman.
The narrative framing of photographic mysteries is inevitably height-
ened by the presentation of the photographs, their plotting within the
tale, the layering of voice and image and, as highlighted in the earlier
analysis of Oddie’s episode, the use of movement. Karen Lury has writ-
ten evocatively about the contemplative opportunities of the rostrum
camera effect and how ‘the frequent use of the rostrum camera mobilises
the still photographic image so that the point of view moves around the
image, ‘seeking out’ something – though what this is, exactly, may not
be entirely clear’ (2003, p. 103). This seems to respond to the illusion of
experience captured that photography evokes,14 where, to quote Marita
Sturken, ‘memory appears to reside within the photographic image, to
tell its story in response to our gaze’ (1997, p. 19). Whilst reacting to the
seeming need to present a moving image, the movement to close-up
articulates the desire to ‘seek-out’ the ‘truth’ of the image and a greater
knowledge of its subject. The plotting and repetition of particular images
across the investigative narrative dramatises that illusion of knowledge
sought and gained.
Episode ten of the sixth series of WDYTYA sees actress Kim Cattrall’s
investigation of her missing grandfather, George Baugh, who aban-
doned his wife and three daughters in 1949.15 Whilst the episode breaks
with the now well-established structure of the format to focus on one
particular story, its presentation of photographs illuminates their per-
formative function within the series. Visiting her mother and aunts in
Liverpool, Cattrall is presented with a tattered and yellowing photo-
graph of a wedding scene from 1934. In it, the family is arranged on
the pavement outside a double-fronted Victorian house. Pointed out by
her aunt, a cut to close-up reveals the mysterious George Baugh peering
out from behind a net curtain at the corner of the right bay window, and
the women speculate as to why he wouldn’t want to be photographed.
 Memory and Identity in the Family History Documentary 75

The image appears twice again, plotted at particular points in Cattrall’s

investigation. After her initial family visit she reflects on George’s char-
acter. The image is inserted into Cattrall’s reflections and the rostrum
camera’s move to a close-up of the young man peering out of the win-
dow accompanies her questioning of his actions: why he did what he
did and ‘what went through his head?’ The photograph is used for a
third time and presented in the same way following the revelation that
George had stowed away on a ship bound for America in 1948. Absent
for a month he eventually returned to his wife and fathered a third
daughter. Cattrall remarks: ‘I’m piecing together a man who doesn’t
have a tremendous amount of responsibility except to his own desires
and needs.’ The shady image of a man who is interpreted as refusing
to join the wedding party is employed on these occasions to signify, in
the first instance, the mysteriousness of George’s character and, in the
second, the increasing selfishness of his actions. The revelation of his
bigamous second marriage quickly follows.
Pictures remain at the forefront of Cattrall’s quest. Travelling to meet a
relative of George’s second wife Isabel, she comments: ‘I’m really hoping
for a picture. I’m hoping to find something in his face which is about
regret or remorse, because I would like to think leaving those three girls
behind – there was a consequence to that.’ Encountering a series of fam-
ily snaps instead – a sunny beach holiday, portraits of suburban afflu-
ence following the new Baugh family’s emigration to Australia – they
only serve to confirm Cattrall’s suspicions as to his heartless character:
‘this doesn’t look like a man who really spends any time thinking about
the past. He’s just living right in that moment and not looking back.’
The story of George Baugh and his character as a man are constructed
predominantly through the ‘reading’ of a series of photographs: the
sunny family snaps which cannot help but be read against the episode’s
opening use of a gloomy black-and-white photograph of Kim’s grand-
mother Marian stood in the yard of a back-to-back terrace, smiling in a
woolly hat, gloves and coat buttoned up to her neck. The latter image
is contextualised by the archive film of poverty and unemployment in
pre-Second World War Liverpool and the poignant memories of hard-
ship endured by Marian and her daughters. The contrast in lifestyles
only serves to reaffirm the anger felt by Cattrall, her mother and her
aunts.
The forms of ‘imaginative investment, projection and creation’ that
are at work in relation to the episode’s use of a family archive are ampli-
fied by tensions that exist within the format and its use of celebrities.
As with the Paxman example, WDYTYA, whilst seeking to uncover a
76 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

personality’s ‘authentic self’ (predominantly through displays of tearful

emotion), walks a fine line between a spontaneous response to the rev-
elations of the archive and the management of that response by both
the programme-makers, who lay the trail for the celebrity to follow,
and the status of the celebrity as a ‘professional performer’. The tension
inherent in the latter becomes most clear in the encounters between
the celebrity and the ‘ordinary’ person and has implications for the
forms of memory and remembering constructed by the programme.
For example, Cattrall is strikingly different from the Sex and the City
(HBO, 1998–2004) character she is famous for playing. Whilst Samantha
Jones is bold, brash and hyper-confident, Cattrall has a much softer
voice, she is poised and graceful, gentle and respectful. Internationally
successful, she is also much closer to a Hollywood level of fame than
the more parochial BBC television personalities that commonly feature
within the series. As a professional actress, her comfort in front of the
cameras is contrasted by the initial uneasiness of the family members
she meets. It allows her a certain authority which effectively manages
the memories and stories that are shared. The elderly Maisy and her
daughter Shelia, relations of Isabel Baugh, are in constant agreement
with the interpretations that Cattrall makes. Initially describing George
as a good family man, a ‘nice’ uncle, Cattrall’s bitter response to the
revelation of his emigration to Australia, which she interprets as yet
another ‘brazen’ act of selfishness, tearing his heartbroken second wife
from her family, is met by another series of agreements. From describing
George’s actions as shockingly against character, Maisy’s voice trembles
as she recalls the family’s tearful separation from Isabel, and George is re-
remembered in a different light, as selfishly breaking up her own family
as well.
I am not claiming here that Cattrall is consciously manipulating the
memories being shared but that the effect of her own authority as
celebrity and professional performer – Maisy remarks that it has been a
privilege to meet her and as the ‘interview’ ends she visibly relaxes and
sweetly offers her a cup of tea – and her understandably biased reading
of George’s character and life story inevitably impact on the processes of
remembering and the interpretation of the family archive. This is then
reproduced and reaffirmed in Cattrall’s repetition of George’s story on
her return to see her mother and aunts. Here Cattrall returns as fam-
ily curator, telling the story through the images she has collected. With
a conscious sense of timing and dramatic effect the photographs she
hands over are accompanied by a series of prefaces and pauses, allowing
her family the time to react to each one.
 Memory and Identity in the Family History Documentary 77

The performances on display in WDYTYA and the central role of fam-

ily photographs reveal much about the imaginative investments that
are made in the encounter with the family archive and the kinds of sto-
ries that are spun from it. In some ways Cattrall’s episode is unique in its
focus on one particular family mystery but the features of the tale illumi-
nate some of the strategies and tensions within the format with regards
to reality television’s ‘desire to dramatise’ (see Piper 2004, p. 274) – a
desire which might be seen to correlate with Martin Saar’s discussion
of genealogy as a rhetorical-narrative tool. Saar argues that genealogies
‘take their critical force from the dramatising gesture’, constructing sto-
ries around ‘paradigmatic moments’ and producing a vision of ‘broad
historical lines and developments’ (2002, p. 329).
Connecting the celebrity to these ‘broad historical lines’, the writ-
ten archival document is also both a source of evidence and a point of
emotional connection. The ‘official’ evidence of the written word itself
often prompts an emotional response. Paxman’s reading of his ances-
tor’s death certificate, Stephen Fry’s opening of a document detailing
the fates of his relations and the horror of the word ‘Auschwitz’,16 Moira
Stuart’s handling of the records of slave ownership and the listed names
of the enslaved17 – each is a moment which breaks the composure of
the celebrity. Similar to the rostrum camera’s ‘poring over’ of the photo-
graphic image, the evidence of names and dates uncovered in historical
documents is also often presented via a move to close-up. A different
form of imaginative investment is at work here – one which emphasises
the historical aura of the document and its evidentiary power – closer
to Derrida’s ‘archive fever’ than the ‘magical value’ of the photograph.
These emotional encounters with the archive illuminate the signifi-
cance, within the series, on the physical sites of memory, and point
towards other forms of encounter with the materials of memory.

Empty space and memory work

The investigative activities of the television personalities in WDYTYA,

the piecing together of the puzzles presented to them, might be seen to
correlate with Annette Kuhn’s delineation of ‘memory work’. She writes
in Family Secrets that:

The past is gone forever. We cannot return to it, nor can we reclaim
it now as it was. But that does not mean it is lost to us. The past is
like the scene of a crime: if the deed itself is irrecoverable, its traces
may still remain [ . . . ] Memory work has a great deal in common with
78 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

forms of inquiry which – like detective work and archaeology, say –

involve working backwards – searching for clues, deciphering signs
and traces, making deductions, patching together reconstructions out
of fragments of evidence.
(1995, p. 4)

The investigative strategies of ‘memory work’ are clearly reminiscent of

the practices of genealogy and the lines of inquiry the celebrities jour-
ney down. As part of this journeying the show places a great deal of
emphasis upon sites of memory that are significant for the investigators’
family narratives. It is an emphasis that illuminates the potential for the
interaction between place and memory within this particular television
documentary format.
In Myra Macdonald’s study of the ‘performance of memory’ in a series
of documentaries from the 1990s that focus on the 1960s, she analy-
ses how television documentary conventions both vivify and constrict
memory work. For Macdonald, drawing on Kuhn, the ‘specificity of
place’ has the potential to act as a ‘powerful stimulus of memory’ (2006,
p. 336). However, in Macdonald’s examples, ‘by routinely filming inter-
viewees against interior backdrops that lack precise indices of cultural or
geographical context’, the documentaries ‘miss opportunities to experi-
ment with the interactions between place and memory’ (2006, p. 336).
WDYTYA, however, places an emphasis on the idea of origin and belong-
ing, and stresses the attachment between place and memory, though
the memory workers of WDYTYA are often faced with the empty spaces
and weeds of memory and history. A desire for a sense of continuity
between past and present is often expressed by the celebrity investi-
gator and indeed by the family history documentary itself; a desire to
see, through ancestral connections, how we got to where we are today.
The history of the identity formation of both the self and the nation is
fundamental to the project of the family history documentary.
Developing an increased understanding of the self through an investi-
gation of personal memory and history invariably overlaps with various
therapeutic discourses, including practices of memory work and photo-
therapy. Meanwhile, the ‘re-imagining’ of the nation and the impor-
tance of understanding the historical continuity of national identity
overlaps with other accounts of British history and identity, illustrated
by Simon Schama’s A History of Britain (BBC, 2000–2) – ‘it’s only when
we know what we have been that we can begin to understand our place
in the scheme of things, to discover as a nation who we are’.18 We must
therefore understand the importance of the oscillation between the
 Memory and Identity in the Family History Documentary 79

personal and social in the family history documentary as accompanied

by a similar movement between the past and the present, but one which
is inhabited by a strong desire for a sense of continuity for historical
meaning to have contemporary significance.
This, however, is often complicated by the fact that, as Kuhn states,
‘the past is gone forever’ and there is often nothing to see. History, by
definition, has gone. What we are left with is the search for presence in
absence. Perhaps it is an aesthetic of absence that might more broadly
characterise history on television, as Simon Schama notes – ‘we are in
the business of representing something that is no longer there’ (cited
in Champion 2003, p. 116). For example, comedian David Baddiel’s
attempts to locate the site of his grandfather’s brick factory in Poland are
met by the encounter with a landscape which is, according to the come-
dian, ‘as bleak as it gets’.19 As he surveys two crumbling and graffitied
brick stacks on a grey, rain-beaten and flooded scrubland, he remarks
upon his disappointment that being on a programme which is about
getting in touch with the past, the past he encounters has been ‘blown
out of existence’.
The problem of the absences of history is partly resolved by what we
might refer to as an ‘iconography of memory’; graves, ruins, memorials,
weeds. TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson responds to the absence of history
at the site of his ancestors’ former glassworks that most of industrial his-
tory is now ‘just weeds’.20 Kerwin Klein writes that ‘such memorial tropes
have emerged as one of the common features of our new cultural his-
tory where in monograph after monograph, readers confront the abject
object: photographs are torn, mementos faded, toys broken’ (2000,
p. 136). Television, however, is left with the problem of filling this empty
space. There are various strategies, detailed by several of the contributors
to Roberts and Taylor’s collection The Historian, Television and Television
History (2001), to overcoming the dominance of this absence, through
the appeal of storytelling and to the imagination. However, I want to
suggest that this empty space is key to the representation of memory
and significant for the emotional pull of a programme like WDYTYA.
Significantly, for the programme, a photographic archive is no longer
enough in terms of evidence; this perhaps reflects a desire for unmedi-
ated experience which necessitates a return to the sites of memory and
the origin of the specific photograph. However, our investigators are
often met with absence, and the empty spaces they encounter often res-
onate with the knowledge that something was once there. This is often
achieved by the use of image matches, between the ‘then’ of the pho-
tograph and the ‘now’ of the investigations. This strategy, similar to the
80 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

photographic practice of ‘rephotography’, is employed to encourage a

direct comparison between the then and the now, to offer an examina-
tion of how things have changed, where empty space resonates with the
knowledge that something meaningful was once there, and to validate
the existence of that something meaningful.
In an example from Ian Hislop’s episode of WDYTYA,21 he visits the
site of a Boer War battle in which his grandfather fought. The events
of the battle, including the massive casualties sustained by the British
army, are related by the battle historian who accompanies Hislop. At this
point, a photograph depicting a trench of bodies, killed in the battle, is
matched against the image of the grave as it is today (see Figure 3.1).
The shot scale and camera position of the original image are repro-
duced so the content of the ‘then’ is transposed onto the image of the
‘now’, revealing what horrors lie in the quiet and sunny grave. In Jeremy
Clarkson’s episode, he returns to the town where his ancestors, the
Kilners, had their first glass factory. We cut from a long shot taken from
the hill overlooking a northern town, a square of houses outlining a
large field in the centre of the frame where the factory would have been,
to a nineteenth-century illustration of the factory, held in front of the
camera by Clarkson, who exclaims as the scene progresses, that such a
huge factory is ‘just sports pitches now’ (see Figure 3.2). By matching the
images of the ‘now’ and ‘then’ in the centre of the frame, through this
juxtaposition we are invited to read into the significance of the com-
parison as the ghosts of both Clarkson’s and Britain’s industrial heritage
echo in the space of the frame.
The fear of the loss of historical and personal significance is also illu-
minated by Bill Oddie as he returns to the psychiatric hospital where his
mother was treated, only to find it has been redeveloped as an executive
housing estate: ‘thus are memories totally obliterated’. Once again the
viewer is offered a comparison between the now and the then through
the use of an image match, reproducing shot scale and camera position,
as a photograph of the front of the hospital in the 1950s is juxtaposed
against an image of the site today.
Image matches are not always used to highlight the more disruptive
or erosive examples of historical change but to stress the sense of con-
tinuity, particularly in the relationship between the investigators and
their ancestors. The desire for a continuum is continually stressed by
the revisiting of significant ancestral sites and the retracing of ancestral
steps in the search for memory and historical significance.
The evidentiary quality of the photograph enables the investigator to
trace the site of memory and place themselves in the position of the
 Memory and Identity in the Family History Documentary 81

Figure 3.1 Then and now: The battle grave (WDYTYA, series 1, episode 5, Wall
to Wall for BBC, 2004).

subject of the photograph. For example, on her return to her great,

great-grandfather’s hometown in South Yorkshire, opera singer Lesley
Garrett seeks out the site where the photograph she has of him was
taken.22 The family’s butchers’ business is now a greengrocer, but the
crumbling yard wall, in front of which the photograph was taken, is still
there. Garrett holds the photograph up, comparing the image against its
remains in order to confirm the location. She then positions herself in
the place where her ancestor stood in the image (‘so me granddad would
82 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

Figure 3.2 Jeremy Clarkson surveys the former site of the Kilner factory
(WDYTYA, series 1, episode 4, Wall to Wall for BBC, 2004).

‘av been stood about ‘ere, looking out, that’s amazing!’). The medium-
long shot of Garrett standing in the empty yard, in the place of her
grandfather, then cuts to a close-up of Garrett’s hand holding the late
nineteenth-century photograph of the butcher stood in his yard. The
physical alignment of investigator and ancestor encourages the sense
of continuity, enabling the development of an empathetic connection
as well.
 Memory and Identity in the Family History Documentary 83

There are examples in WDYTYA where the recreation of the content of

the photographic image is used to forge a link between past and present,
immediate and ancestral family relations. In Stephen Fry’s episode, he
returns with his mother to her childhood home and the pair explore
the present-day garden, searching for the locations of the photographs
they have and then setting up lines of continuity rather than rupture
between the then and now. In one example, with the camera positioned
behind Fry and his mother, he holds up the black-and-white image of
her and her sisters as children positioned on the garden steps and sat
on a stone urn. The photograph is held up by Fry in the centre of the
frame and is matched against the lines of the steps and the edge of the
garden (see Figure 3.3). The lush green of the present-day garden almost
seamlessly merges into the black-and-white tones of the photograph,
and it is almost as if we are peering across time, through the centre of
the image and into the past. Rather than juxtaposing the images of past
and present, preferring to have them exist and blend in the same frame
establishes a strong sense of continuity.
As the scene progresses, Fry and his mother reproduce the subject
positions of another family image of her and her father stood in front
of the house (‘so you were standing just there and in fact if we go round
we could reproduce it’), with Fry taking the place of his grandfather
(which, he quips, is a ‘Freudian nightmare’) and his mother placed back
in her childhood position, standing in front of Fry. Fry then holds the

Figure 3.3 Peering through time: Fry and his mother retrace old steps (WDYTYA,
series 2, episode 3, Wall to Wall for BBC, 2006).
84 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

photograph in front of the pair to confirm the match for the cameras,
once again stressing continuity rather than juxtaposition by placing the
investigator where the ancestor was pictured. The attachment to a site
of memory arguably encourages a sense of belonging which reaffirms
the investigators’ search for their place in history.
Empty space does not always need photographic imagery in order to
create a sense of resonance; it is often filled with oral testimonies of
memory which can achieve a similar effect via the empathetic response
and imaginative investment of the viewer. For example, having returned
to his childhood home in the suburbs of Birmingham, Oddie wanders
around the space inside; he recalls his time spent there and observes how
the space has and hasn’t changed. Oddie moves up to the first floor and
reaches the bathroom at the top of the stairs; it is here that he recounts a
particular memory he has of his mother. As Oddie describes the memory
of walking in on his mother in the bath, how she was unfamiliar to him
and how unfazed she was by the interruption, he stares into the bath
and tugs his beard as he recalls the experience whilst focusing on the site
of his memory. We then cut to a shot that pans across the length of the
empty bath and lingers on the image as if a similar focus could recall the
experience on the part of the viewer. What we are being asked to do is to
imaginatively invest the story into the image, to appreciate this empty
yet ordinary space as the site of a profoundly personal experience, to
witness the resonance of memory.
Absences within the various official archives also generate forms of
resonance that are poignant reminders of official attempts at the making
and unmaking of memory. In the Holocaust narratives of Stephen Fry
and David Baddiel, whereas the fates of Fry’s relatives are revealed by the
historical records, the fate of Baddiel’s great uncle Arno, assumed to have
perished in the Warsaw Ghetto, remains uncorroborated by the absence
of his name in any records. Moira Stuart’s journey to Dominica leads
her to the official records of nineteenth-century slave owners where
the enslaved are listed only by their newly given Christian names –
the erasure of their original names and surnames precluding further
ancestral investigation and leaving the trail cold. Here an aesthetic of
absence has a relational link to historical and political campaigns of
erasure.
The emphasis on place and the retracing of ancestral steps appear
as a form of re-enactment that link the format with other trends in
historical programming (see Agnew 2007) including the popularity of
the ‘historical travelogue’. Recent years have seen presenters such as
Julia Bradbury and Nicholas Crane retracing the paths of famous travel
 Memory and Identity in the Family History Documentary 85

writers in Wainwright Walks (BBC, 2007–), Great British Journeys (BBC,

2007) and Nicholas Crane’s Britannia (BBC, 2009).23 The spectacle of
landscape and a strong heritage discourse serve to emphasise lines of tra-
dition that feed into constructions of national identity and ‘Britishness’.
In WDYTYA, with its emphasis on personal identity and transformation,
the interplay between the individual and the collective is embedded,
once again, through the trope of the journey. Here we might return to
Eleftheriotis’ work on cinematic journeys, as his argument aligns with
the genealogical explorations of the family history format:

such explorations and the movements that enable them are not only
quests for pleasure but also for meaning, as the mobile subject often
retraces tracks already laid out and finds him/herself travelling jour-
neys that include but also exceed individuals, the journeys of the
anonymous collective subjects of grand narratives.
(2010, p. 32)

Following a trail laid by the programme-makers but also retracing

the tracks of ancestors and the ‘journeys of the anonymous collective
subjects of grand narratives’ WDYTYA as family and social history doc-
umentary is invested in building a particular portrait of the nation,
inevitably shaped by the stories the producers choose to tell.

Closed space? Home and nation

The domestic lives of the celebrity investigators and their interactions

with family and friends are often featured in WDYTYA. Our celebrities
are often positioned at home at both the beginning and end of their
respective journeys, often returning to their families with the informa-
tion, images and even relics or mementoes they’ve gathered on their
family histories. Meera Syal returns from tracing her grandfather’s story
in India to her parent’s home in Epping Forest with a brick taken from
her mother’s family home. Stephen Fry returns to a family gathering
to reveal the fates of the related Lamm family who were discovered to
have perished at Auschwitz. Actress Amanda Redman’s journey also con-
cludes with a family gathering, though this time it is more celebratory,
as she introduces some long-lost cousins to the family.24 Lesley Garrett
is viewed returning from Yorkshire to her London home and an enthu-
siastic reception from her children, whilst David Baddiel returns home
to his mother and daughter to celebrate his fortieth birthday. In Jeremy
Paxman’s episode, the return to familiar surroundings, and arguably to
86 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

his more familiar television personality, is marked by his return to the

Newsnight (BBC, 1980–) studio, whilst Moira Stuart returns from the
lapping shores of the Caribbean to the River Thames and the familiar
cityscape of the London embankment.
The cyclical nature of these journey narratives and the insistence on
the return home or at least to familiar surroundings and iconography
seems suggestive of, contrary to the aesthetic of empty space, a way
of closing down imaginative investment. Memory work as process, as
the ‘permanent labour of connecting’, is illuminated by the trope of the
journey, but an insistence on affirmation and a stress on completion and
closure is emphasised in the denouement of the various stories. The loss
of family members and ancestors is often filled by the discovery of dis-
tant relations and new familial connections. For example, whilst David
Baddiel is unable to ascertain the fate of his uncle, he encounters new,
albeit distantly related, family members in London’s Jewish community.
In Macdonald’s analysis of the codes and conventions of television doc-
umentary that ‘act both to vivify but also to constrict “memory work” ’
(2006, p. 327), she concludes that ‘television too often finds ways to
integrate, and subdue, the performance of witnesses’ memories within
its own narrative and visual requirements. Commentary and archive
footage, with their directing or generalising capacities, tend to smooth
away the rough edges of potential moments of disruption or tension in
memory evocation’ (2006, p. 342). The return to the safety of the home
is suggestive of one of the ways in which television is often involved in
a process of ‘taming’ difficult material.
WDYTYA has undoubtedly been successful in its campaign objec-
tives, prompting through a multi-platform approach an increase in the
genealogical enquiries of the British public.25 Whilst the format was
designed to ‘dovetail’ with larger themes and histories, it arguably cre-
ates a more inclusive and affirmative vision of a British national identity.
The content of the histories represented in WDYTYA might be seen as a
negotiation with, for example, Britain’s post-colonial identity reflected
in the selection of television personalities such as Meera Syal, Moira
Stuart, athlete Colin Jackson and TV chef Ainsley Harriot. An image
of a ‘New Britain’ is arguably realised through the personal narratives
of emotion and experience charting social, industrial, colonial and
wartime family histories. Writing on the theme of ‘relational move-
ment’, in which different types of mobility are placed in ‘comparative
frames of reference’ (2010, p. 125), Eleftheriotis sensitively illuminates
a ‘process of cultural syncretism’ within which ‘journeys of exploration,
 Memory and Identity in the Family History Documentary 87

discovery and revelation are substantially contextualised by movements

of displacement, exile, diaspora and migration’ (2010, p. 124). How-
ever, where the experiences of dispossession and dislocation, often as
a result of the movements of the British Empire, are uncovered by the
celebrity investigators, the tales of the colonised, via acts of transfer and
post-memorial work are, more often than not, appropriated back into
a multicultural narrative of New Britain. For example, quintessentially
English actor Rupert Penry-Jones’ journey to India uncovers a colonial
family line which goes back eight generations. However, the history he
pursues is whether or not he has Indian ancestry and a personal multi-
cultural heritage, rather than challenging the legacy of colonial power
in mixed race relationships.26
Whilst in some ways the programme opens up a productive engage-
ment with personal and national history and memory, there is an
overemphasis on catharsis and closure – the end point of the therapeu-
tic narrative – which closes down further investigation into the more
difficult stories. Aside from the risk of appropriation, the affirmations
and melodramatic gestures of the format might be seen to preclude fur-
ther investigation into these difficult histories, whilst returning us to
the insistence on the traumatic and painful content of memory and his-
tory. The dramatising gestures, the stress on emotional engagement and
experiential knowledge all, according to Helen Weinstein, are effective
ways of delivering audiences for ‘UK TV history products’ to broadcast-
ers. But these must be situated within wider concerns surrounding a
‘contemporary confessional culture in which the key attraction is the
disclosure of true emotions’ (Aslama and Pantti 2006, p. 167). In some
senses, the family history documentary may suffer from an emptying
out of meaning, replaced by the fascination with celebrity revelations or
with the private genealogical investigations of the viewer.27 We might
also question whether certain forms of televisual memory re-engage
audiences with their private and emotional engagements with memory
and history at the cost of the exorcism of the irreconcilable and the
problematic, returning us to familiar patterns of collective remembering
and forgetting. This dialectic informs Paul Gilroy’s conceptualisation of
‘post-imperial melancholia’, where British culture’s ‘unhealthy’ obses-
sion with both world wars (embodied in the football chant ‘Two world
wars and one World Cup’) and specifically the conflict with Nazi
Germany is obsessively re-imagined whilst there is the absence of other
colonial conflicts in popular cultural memory.28 This patterned and
pathological forgetting of our colonial past and its continued impact on
88 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

British society today is positioned against the overabundance of other

kinds of dominant memory.29

Travelling television

Emerging over the last few years as a global brand, WDYTYA’s formatted
approach to representations of the past inevitably promotes the forms
of storytelling encouraged by the genealogical narrative – the empha-
sis on emotional engagement and the dovetailing of grand narratives
with personal stories. Television memory canons are inevitably weighted
according to national contexts and are particularly significant for cer-
tain understandings of national identity – the dynamics of remembering
and forgetting are endemic in the stories each nation tells of itself. For
example, produced in the period of the family history television boom,
the awkwardly titled series Where Was Your Family During the Famine?
(RTE, 2008) used genealogy to investigate a key moment in Irish history.
Whilst the British family history documentary predominantly engages
with tales of industry, empire and world war, the American version
has a different canon of historical events that are dovetailed with the
celebrity’s ancestral line – the foundational myths of puritan fundamen-
talism, European colonialism and immigration, the American Civil War
and the legacy of slavery. Indeed the latter is central to the celebrated
genealogical series African American Lives (PBS, 2006–8), a miniseries
hosted by Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. that focused on
the family histories of prominent African Americans explored through
genealogy and genetic analysis.
The WDYTYA format’s movement between different television
nations offers an additional form of relational movement to be investi-
gated in this chapter. In Albert Moran’s essay on programme formats and
international and domestic television cultures, he usefully highlights
how circulating formats become ‘modified to seem local or national in
origin’, acting as a ‘flexible template or empty mould awaiting partic-
ular social inflexion and accent in other television territories to appeal
to home audiences in that place’ (2009, p. 151). The most immediate
version of such modification is apparent in the different national adap-
tations of the WDYTYA brand image – originally featuring the simple
image of a lush green tree mounted on a grassy hill and framed against a
blue sky, an image which neatly symbolises the dynamic of the individ-
ual (the lone tree) and the collective (the genealogical map) at the heart
of the format’s historical project (see Figure 3.4). Whilst each version
keeps the title graphics the same (a plain sans serif font in white framed
 Memory and Identity in the Family History Documentary 89

Figure 3.4 WDYTYA’s original brand image (Wall to Wall for BBC, 2004–).

by the connective lines of the family tree structure) and employs a sim-
ilar composition, the features and colours of the natural landscape vary.
The Australian version (SBS One, 2007–) features a scorched-looking
tree against a royal azure blue sky and burnt orange grassland. The
Canadian adaptation (CBC, 2007) employs an autumnal-coloured maple
tree against a sunny jade sky dotted with white clouds, and a flock of
geese flying in the distance against a light blue mountain range. The
Irish version (RTE1, 2008–) modifies the image to produce an emerald
green tree atop a similar coloured hill, a line of grey hills in the distance
and rays of sunlight bursting through a dark rain-clouded sky. Each
image is clearly adapted to reflect the differing and iconic landscapes
of the different nations, with shifts in colour and shape – the emerald
green, the maple tree – signifying a new territory open to genealogical
investigation. Whilst further pointing towards the connections between
landscape and national identity, the shifting brand images are also a
clear example of the global format as a ‘flexible template’ that can be
invested with national specificities. This is further compounded by the
specificity of the format and its explicit address to questions of national
histories and identities.
Despite Moran’s assertion that the advent of television formats can
be seen to signal the ‘emphatic endurance or even reappearance’ (2009,
p. 157) of the national within a new television landscape, the circulation
of such templates has implications for what Sonja de Leeuw, through
Anthony Giddens, refers to as the ‘global creation of a standardised
past’ (2010, p. 142), with each version open to the critiques of the
British series – its taming of difficult histories and the overemphasis
90 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

on celebrity revelations. However, it is the differences that I want to

focus on here; to explore how the grammar and accent of different tele-
vision nations might be revealed through comparative versions of the
travelling format.
Co-produced by Wall to Wall and Is or Isn’t Entertainment (the pro-
duction company of Friends actress Lisa Kudrow), the first series of the
US version of WDYTYA was broadcast by NBC in March 2010. In the
World Cup summer of the same year three episodes of this series, fea-
turing Sarah Jessica Parker, Brooke Shields and Susan Sarandon, were
transmitted on BBC One, scheduled as an alternative to the football
coverage. Travelling from the UK to the US and back again is not a
unique journey in terms of the circulation of television formats, with the
American versions of reality TV hits such as Wife Swap (ABC/Channel
4, 2004–) or Hell’s Kitchen (Fox/ITV, 2005–) often being brought back to
their UK channel of origin with the expectation that they will be ‘louder
and brasher than the originals’ (Sutcliffe, 2010). What is interesting in
the case of the imported version of WDYTYA is how it was re-edited and
re-modified for the British audience. Taking the US and the UK broad-
casts of Sarah Jessica Parker’s episode as the example, I want to consider
the stylistic shifts in the format which produce a series of changes in the
tone and address of the show.
The US series debuted on 5 March 2010 with actress Sarah Jessica
Parker’s exploration of her family history. Investigating her mother’s
‘German’ side of the family tree, Parker firmly believes herself to be of
immigrant stock, referring to herself as a ‘mutt’ (though this reference
is absent from the US version). She encounters, however, a new identity
as an ‘archetypal American’ as her ancestors are revealed to have been
involved in key events in American history – the 1849 Gold Rush and
the Salem witch trials of 1692. She proudly proclaims: ‘I have real stock
in this country, real roots . . . you know, I’m an American, I’m actually an
American.’ The format remains heavily invested in the construction of
national identities though on this occasion it is the dubious uncover-
ing of an archetypal/authentic American identity as Parker’s family line
collides with these ‘foundational’ moments.
The NBC version, classified as ‘alternative reality’ by the US televi-
sion industry, has a much faster pace than the original British format,
which producer Lisa Kudrow acknowledges as being a result of the
US series being bought by NBC.30 Lasting 40 minutes and totalling one
hour with commercials, there is less time for historical context and an
increased emphasis on the ‘personal emotional journey’ of the celebrity.
 Memory and Identity in the Family History Documentary 91

This is achieved by the heavy use of ‘sentimental’ musical layovers,

the celebrity’s own voice-over narration of the journey in first person,
and a closing montage framed by a pop track (Little Wonders by Rob
Thomas), which acts both as a musical coda and self-consciously works
to memorialise the journey.
The BBC reversioning is extended to an uninterrupted 45-minute
programme; the removal of commercials also sees the removal of the
precaps and recaps which bridge the commercial break. Extra contex-
tual information is provided for an audience more unfamiliar with the
grand narratives of American history, the music is stripped back in
line with the British version and the measured tone of Mark Strong’s
voice-over is reinserted.31 Whilst the first-person voice-over ensures
the centrality of the subject in the US version, the extra footage
of Sarah Jessica Parker’s interactions with her brother and mother
and her ‘tour’ of significant childhood sites in Cincinnati afford an
additional level of familiarity with the celebrity as the focus of the
documentary. Despite the changes, the reviewer in the British broad-
sheet paper The Independent complained that Parker’s ‘noisy incredulity’
and ‘wide-eyed excitement’ was ‘not entirely British’ (Sutcliffe 2010).
Aside from the male critic’s general dislike of Parker, her performance
of self clearly did not exhibit the desired level of restraint that,
for example, marked Paxman’s attempt to shield his tears from the
camera.
After the revelations of her ancestor Esther’s involvement in the witch
trials, an accused witch who narrowly escapes the court of Oyer and
Terminer, Parker takes a moment for reflection in the Salem memorial
garden. The NBC version, accompanied by Parker’s voice-over, clearly
foregrounds her experience. From the shot of birds flying against a blue
winter sky, a medium close-up pans across a line of gravestones, the
unfocused figure of Parker moving across the top of the frame in the
distance. Her voice-over questions:

Parker: Who knows what would have happened to our family had
the witch hunt continued? This has been such a moving experience
for me; I wanna pay my respects to those who were not as fortu-
nate as Esther. I’m visiting their memorial in Salem before I return
home.

The narration is layered over a sequence of images of Parker walking

through the snow-covered graveyard, pausing to look at one of the stone
92 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

memorial benches, and the close-up of the engraved inscription – Ann

Pudeator. Hanged. Sept 22nd 1692. The studio voice-over then shifts
to Parker’s location interview and her declaration that the experience
has ‘changed everything about who I thought I was.’ A solemn string
arrangement accompanied by soft power chords and piano signposts
the emotional tone of the scene, quickly shifting towards the end of the
memorial sequence to a more upbeat arrangement that has been used at
various points in the programme to propel the narrative and the journey
forward. As the Los Angeles Times reviewer remarked, the viewer is not
allowed time to contemplate before being ‘whisked away to the next “oh
my gosh” moment’ (McNamara 2010). The music here bridges Parker’s
return to New York City, New Jersey, and her mother’s own incredulity
on hearing the story.
The BBC’s version of the scene uses the same sequence of images and
is the same duration but the changes in voice-over, narration and sound-
track have a very different effect. From the shot of birds flying against
a blue winter sky, a medium close-up pans across a line of gravestones,
the unfocused figure of Parker moving across the top of the frame in the
distance. Here, Mark Strong’s melancholic voice reveals the death toll of
the trials.

Strong: Between July and September 1692 the Salem witch trials
claimed the lives of twenty men and women.

A historical fact which is ‘thrown away’ in the brief introduction to the

trials in the US version, significantly, is not revealed until this point
in the BBC edition. The voice-over pauses as Parker walks towards the
stone bench and stops, and the close-up of the inscription Ann Pudeator.
Hanged. Sept 22nd 1692 is contemplated in silence. The scene uses the
same solemn string arrangement without the additional musical layers
of guitar and piano and as the scene plays out the soundtrack fades out
completely, leaving Parker to her own silent reflections: the repetitive
piano refrain, familiar from the British series, then returns to accompany
her journey home.
There is much to comment on in the transatlantic translation of the
format, and the rhythm, pacing, narration and use of music and silence
reveal much about the different televisual vernaculars of the NBC and
the BBC versions. Here, again, it is the sense of movement that is of
interest. The insistent forwards momentum of the NBC version, com-
mented on by the Los Angeles Times reviewer, is countered in the BBC
version by an insistence upon reflection – the pause in the narration,
 Memory and Identity in the Family History Documentary 93

the use of silence offering the personality and by extension, the viewer,
the space for contemplation; a space which is nonetheless managed
and performed by the grammar of the scene. It is the management of
this space that I would argue characterises the public service value of
the format in the BBC’s hands. This has much to do with the sub-
tle connections it leaves the viewer to make by him or herself and is
achieved through the use of the third-person narration which opens
up the relationship between the investigator and his/her investigations.
This relationship between the explorer and the explored is collapsed in
the use of first-person narration which allows the viewer little respite
from the mediation of the historical via the personal. The possibility
of an empathetic connection to the community is closed down in this
insistence on individual experience.
This brief investigation of different versions of the same format points
towards the productive work that can be achieved through compara-
tive analysis. It is in the comparison between NBC and BBC versions
of the same episode that the public service aesthetic of the British
WDYTYA is brought into focus, and it is the programme’s context within
recent discourses of public service broadcasting that I would like to
conclude.

Remembering public service broadcasting

Returning home to the original British version of WDYTYA, whilst I have

drawn examples from later episodes and from the various international
incarnations, this chapter has focused predominantly on the first two
series of the show as broadcast on BBC Two in 2004 and 2006. The
work done across these series established the format and nurtured its
continued success. These two series also coinciding with the period of
the BBC’s most recent charter renewal and licence fee negotiations, the
celebrations of WDYTYA and the specific nature of its address must be
viewed in relation to the renewed public service ethos of the BBC in this
period.32 It is within this climate that I wish to suggest that an addi-
tional layer of memory is at work in the WDYTYA ‘campaign’. Whilst
the programme used strategies of memory work to reaffirm personal and
national identities, the BBC used WDYTYA to secure its own sense of
identity and remind the viewer of its role as an effective and relevant
public service broadcaster.
Narratives of transition and crisis have become increasingly prevalent
during a time of dramatic technological change and uncertainty over
the future of television. Increased commercialisation, competition and
94 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

the fragmentation of the television audience has brought into question

the efficacy of public service broadcasting as a form of ‘social cement’.
As Philip M. Taylor comments ‘the idea that television, as a medium
which enjoys near universal social penetration, can unite a nation is in
decline. The likelihood of an affirmative answer to the question “did
you see on TV last night?” ’ has diminished in less than a generation’
(2001, p. 174). However, a show like WDYTYA might be seen to rein-
vigorate those qualities that Taylor laments. A ratings success for the
BBC, often with sensationalist appeal, the programme is also significant
in its exploration of national history and identity. It attempts to re-
imagine British identity through the investigations of personal history,
memory and identity. It also employs the significant popular appeal of
family history research itself as a form of ‘social cement’. One might
argue that, in its careful construction of a portrait of ‘New Britain’,
WDYTYA, alongside projects such as A Picture of Britain (BBC, 2005) and
Coast (BBC, 2005–), marked a renewed public service broadcasting ethos
that focused on the construction of ‘Britishness’ and national iden-
tity; public service broadcasting as nation-building rather than nation-
binding.33
The consumer and audience research report on the first series of
WDYTYA outlined, via quantitative data on the ‘success’ of the web-
site and related family history events, how the BBC had fulfilled its
campaign objectives. According to the report, 7% of UK adults claimed
to have started researching their family history for the first time in
the two months after the transmission of the first series. 61% of
bbc.co.uk/familyhistory users said that they were new users to family
history on the Web, whilst there was an 18% increase in first-time visi-
tors to the National Archive website (in the last quarter of 2004 versus
the last quarter of 2003). WDYTYA, as the forerunner of the genealogy
show, may certainly have ‘come to symbolise the kind of programme
the newly public service focused BBC should be doing: serious-minded,
but also accessible and popular’ (Brown 2004); at least this is the assess-
ment within BBC discourses. I want to conclude by suggesting how
WDYTYA is tied to a complementary form of television memory, one
which we might refer to as BBC nostalgia and is explored in more detail
in the next chapter. It is perhaps not surprising that the programme was
promoted as a jewel in the BBC crown throughout the period of the
recent licence fee negotiations. Along with ratings success, the inter-
active platforms attached to the programme produce a form of public
service that is tangible and quantifiable, in which the relevance of the
BBC can be clearly visualised via statistics. WDYTYA is perhaps a key
 Memory and Identity in the Family History Documentary 95

example of the BBC’s attempts to secure and reaffirm its own identity
through a period of transition and uncertainty. The show is arguably
as much about our memories of, and nostalgia for, effective and rele-
vant public service television as it is about family memory and national
history.
4
Safe Returns: Nostalgia
and Television

Derek Kompare’s work on North American television examines what he

refers to as the ‘regime of repetition’ – the constant recirculation of the
nation’s cultural and individual pasts in the present through the ubiq-
uity of past television (2002, p. 19). His book Rerun Nation (2005) traces
the historical development of the rerun on American television, from
the industrialisation of culture in the nineteenth century to the emer-
gence of the DVD market in the late 1990s. What clearly emerges in
Kompare’s work is the production of a constantly evolving and ‘dynamic
television heritage’ (2002, p. 20) creating specific forms of public his-
tory and memory, both of television itself and the world it represents.
Television is central to our understandings of the past and by paying
attention to the recirculation of television’s own past, the devices and
forms of re-contextualisation, we can reveal specific attitudes towards
television as a cultural form and attitudes towards our historical selves.
As Kompare successfully demonstrates, ‘how we – as viewers and schol-
ars – “remember” the television of a particular time is inescapably bound
to how television remembers itself’ (2002, p. 31), and how television
remembers itself is bound to the construction of broader social and
cultural memory. Archive or ‘old’ television, particularly news and cur-
rent affairs footage, forms the basis of much popular modern history on
television. This chapter, however, has a more specific focus in its consid-
eration of ‘television about television’.1 It is a focus which allows me to
consider the complex interplay between the old and new, the past and
present that we witness in television programming, as specific televisual
structures of and relations to the past can tell us more about televi-
sion’s own memory cultures and their influence on the construction
of broader cultural memories.
It is nostalgia that emerges here as the dominant framework through
which television remembers and refers to itself. The term brings with

96
 Nostalgia and Television 97

it a long and contradictory history of critiques, uses and applications.

Whilst I do not feel it is necessary to outline the history of nostalgia in
full within this chapter, I will highlight a series of points and observa-
tions that have become central to my own understanding of the term
and its relationship with television. The title of this chapter refers to
the multiple uses of nostalgia within television cultures. Here, I use the
notion of the safe return in several senses. It refers to the economic
‘good sense’ of forms of nostalgia television as cheap and populist pro-
gramming and corresponds with the commercial safety of reproducing
past successes and familiar forms. It responds to the conservative appli-
cations of nostalgia and the safety of the past in an idealised or anodyne
form, but it also relates to a notion of nostalgia where recovery or return
is not the object of desire but the relative safety of distance and longing.
Through two particular characteristics of the medium, television itself
is seen as a privileged site of nostalgia. First, as I have explored in
Chapter 1, both nostalgia and television are attached to the idea of the
home and this is central to the resonances of nostalgia produced within
the examples discussed in this chapter, from the different articulations
of home in Life on Mars (BBC, 2006–7) to the period domestic settings of
TV on Trial (BBC4, 2005). Secondly, and related to the home base of tele-
vision, the medium’s dynamics of closeness and distance can be seen to
correspond with understandings of nostalgic desire. Susan Stewart writes
that ‘the nostalgic is enamoured of distance, not of the referent itself.
Nostalgia cannot be sustained without loss’ (1993, p. 145). As a form of
longing that does not seek restoration, it is balanced in the play between
past and present, sameness and difference, recognition and estrange-
ment. This is a dynamic which similarly captures the iterative motions
of television as an ebb and a flow, moving back and forth.
In exploring these ideas I will also take into account the ways in
which nostalgia is nationally, historically and generationally specific.
This becomes apparent in the construction of different ‘Golden Ages’
and the role of generational memory in remembering television. These
are linked within a discussion of institutional nostalgia that considers
television about television through an example of the self-promotional
practices of the BBC.

Nostalgic frames (1)

Collections
Television is arguably responsible for the construction of a popular
iconography of nostalgia, and though not alone, it can be seen to build
98 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

and reinforce a series of visual repertoires which refer to a specific era

or period, or combine selected and selective images, objects, sounds
and soundtracks to connote an appropriate sense of ‘pastness’. Here,
the past is reordered into a collection – a list. The collection, according
to Stewart, ‘is a form of art as play, a form involving the reframing of
objects within a world of attention and manipulation of context. Like
other forms of art its function is not the restoration of context of ori-
gin but rather the creation of a new context’ (2003, pp. 151–2). In this
sense, what is central to the textual re-encounters with past television
is not the recovery of the original broadcast or viewing experience but
its positioning within new frames and contexts that hold the past at a
distance and reframe it in relation to the present. Paying attention to
these forms of re-contextualisation offers a way of approaching the sig-
nificance of nostalgia television for understandings of television history
and the cultural memories it collects and constructs.
Caddyshack (Harold Ramis, US, 1980), The Vapors’ ‘Turning Japanese’,
punk and preppy fashion, Strawberry Shortcake, Brooke Shields’ Calvin
Klein ads, designer jeans, Who Shot J.R.? This list makes up some of
the ‘defining’ popular culture moments of 1980 according to VH1’s
I Love . . . series (2002–8). Based on the BBC series of 2000–1, each episode
is dedicated to a year within the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s and hosted
by a key personality or ‘celebrity fan’ of the period. The I Love . . .
series, along with other list or clip shows, is structured by the use of
clips with talking-heads commentary, offering a collection of moments
from film, television and the archive coverage of popular culture events
selected around a theme, a specific year or period and generally framed
by the reminiscences of celebrity commentators.2 As potentially the
most prevalent form of nostalgia programming, on British television
at least, list television invites the force of Jameson’s famous critique
of the ‘nostalgia mode’.3 Nostalgia, here, is understood to be conser-
vative, regressive and subject to the ‘market imperatives of the culture
industry’ (Jameson 1991, p. 21). A critique of its manipulative and com-
mercial functions is clearly apparent in the economic ‘good sense’ of
re-presenting or repurposing archival material; the ‘sleeping assets’ of
the television industry. The ahistoricism of such shows can be seen to
further correlate with Stewart’s observations on the collection: ‘In the
collection, time is not something to be restored to an origin; rather,
all time is made simultaneous or synchronous within the collection’s
world’ (1993, p. 151).
Forms of nostalgia programming such as clip shows and countdowns,
and the programming of reruns on US nostalgia networks Nick at Nite
 Nostalgia and Television 99

and TV Land, have received limited academic interest beyond the work
of O’Sullivan (1998), Spigel (2001), Moran (2002) and Kompare (2005).
Yet, from the retrospective scheduling practices of BBC Four and its cur-
rent trend for biopics of ‘telly greats’,4 to the ‘panicky self-cannibalism’
(Brunsdon 2004, p. 115) of list television, the television archive is repur-
posed in a variety of ways. Examining the British television schedules
across a four-month period in 2008 (August–November) the ubiquity of
these forms of archive television became apparent. Though I don’t wish
to offer a strict typology, programmes fell into a series of categories:
compilations or ‘best ofs . . . ’ – 1001 Nights of the Late Show (BBC4),
The Best of the Royal Variety (ITV1); retrospectives, celebrations and
anniversaries – Dad’s Army Night (BBC2 – 40th anniversary), Blackadder
Exclusive: The Whole Rotten Saga (UKTV GOLD – 25th anniversary); trib-
utes and profiles – The Unforgettable . . . series (ITV1), Mark Lawson Talks
To . . . series (BBC4); production histories, behind the scenes and genealo-
gies – Comedy Connections, Drama Connections (BBC1), Drama Trails
(ITV3); archive magazine shows – Something for the Weekend, Sunday Past
Times (BBC2); revisitings – Return To . . . series (BBC2 – revisiting 1990s
docusoaps), I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! Biggins Goes Back (ITV2);
genre histories – The Art of Arts TV (BBC4), Eric Bristow’s Golden Arrows
(ITV4); representational histories – Liverpool on the Box (BBC4), The Real
Life on Mars (BBC4); and television review shows – Charlie Brooker’s
Screenwipe (BBC4), Harry Hill’s TV Burp (ITV1).5
With the move to multi-channel digital television services there is an
increasing amount of television ‘space’ to fill. This brief taxonomy illu-
minates some of the ways in which the archive is reused in order to fill
this space, and with the majority of programmes featuring on niche dig-
ital channels, which, according to Kompare, build their brands through
the acquisition and promotion of programming appropriate to their
image, television as history is at once both ubiquitous and marginalised.
Our interpretation of and the value afforded to past television, in addi-
tion to the nature of the comparison that can be made between the
old and the new, is inevitably weighted according to the presentation
of television archive material and the strategy of re-contextualisation
employed. The scheduling of archive television presents one form of
re-contextualisation. Archival ‘viewing strips’, particularly common on
digital channels, produce ‘clusters of meaning’ (Ellis 1982, p. 118).
Framing original programmes through the commentary provided in
behind-the-scenes vignettes or profiles of writers and actors, digital
channels can offer bespoke viewing packages that compete with the
‘added value’ of the TVDVD extra. More widely commented upon as
100 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

another form of re-contextualisation is the ‘comic-archaic’ quality of

past television and how this is exploited through the ‘camp’, ‘kitsch’ and
‘retro’ repackaging of the television archive on the nostalgia network or
in the list show; formats which emphasise these qualities through, to
quote Tim O’Sullivan, the ‘juxtaposition of the “dated” old within the
flow of the new’ (1998, p. 203). For example, part nostalgia show and
part ‘comedy of obsolescence’ (Marc 1984, p. 8), Channel 4’s series TV
Heaven, Telly Hell (2006–7) captures an ambivalence central to forms of
nostalgia programming. Borrowing heavily from the Room 101 (BBC,
1994–) format, comedian Sean Lock invites a celebrity guest to share
what they love and what they hate about television. The presentation of
the selected archive material in this series is framed by the comedic com-
mentary and observations of Lock and his guest, seated on either side
of the screen, and by the ‘highly-stylized’ and ‘retro-feel’6 of the studio
set; complete with disco ball, shagpile rug and the repetitious use, across
the set design and graphics, of the iconic ‘bulging-rectangle’ of the old
television screen (see Figure 4.1). Nostalgia in this instance operates as
a particular mode, a recognisable style or framework through which we
glimpse past television.

Figure 4.1 Sean Lock and Johnny Vaughan in series 1, episode 3, TV Heaven, Telly
Hell (dir. Lissa Evans, prod. Objective Productions for Channel 4, 2006).
 Nostalgia and Television 101

As perhaps the most clearly defined type of nostalgia programme, the

‘countdown’ often runs across several hours and is occasionally drawn
from viewers’ polls in listing magazines such as the Radio Times. Pro-
grammes such as The 100 Greatest Kids’ TV Shows (Channel 4, 2001) or
Greatest TV Comedy Moments (Five, 2005) present popular canons of tele-
vision that are based upon the notion of the ‘memorable moment’ – but
are also, through the process of canonisation, involved in constructing
certain moments as memorable. Hierarchies of value also exist in terms
of the shows, genres and forms that become canonised with a distinct
privileging, for example, of drama and comedy. List shows can be seen to
reproduce limited access to a canon of texts which in turn may be seen
to reproduce collective memories of television, raising concerns around
both the representation of television history and the management of
those memories. For example, often voted as the ‘greatest moment’ in
British television comedy history, Del Boy (David Jason) falling through
the bar in Only Fools and Horses (BBC1, 1981–2003) has been cultivated
through its canonisation and repetition as one of the great moments of
British television. One must question whether the repurposing of the
television archive through these nostalgic forms means we are simply
being marketed the same commercially viable memories, reproducing a
narrow view of both television’s own and wider social and cultural his-
tory. For example, with regard to popular representations of the 1970s,
Dave Haslam writes of the ‘Abba-fication of history’ – that nostalgia tele-
vision produces an ‘image of the decade dominated by a selection of the
most anodyne, obvious symbols: the Bee Gees, flares, platform shoes
and Abba [ . . . ] history without the rawness and unpredictability’ (2007,
p. 1). Televisual forms are once again involved in the process of ‘taming’
more difficult histories and memories, couching the past in the safety of
the anodyne.
Television as history is subject to as many of the codes, conventions
and trends that appear in history on television, where, to re-employ
Kerwin Klein’s line of argument, memory can operate as a way of soft-
ening and making history more accessible. From the C-list celebrities’
reminiscences of spangles and clackers, to the staged encounter between
the television personality and their archival past, memory and nostal-
gia are the principal modes through which highly selective glimpses of
the television archive are viewed. Personal anecdote and reminiscence
contextualise and lend significance to what can feel like the haphazard
nature of the television archive.
For Joe Moran, nostalgia programming illuminates ‘how easily the
banal objects of everyday life [ . . . ] can be invested with affective
102 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

meaning’ (2002, p. 159). Both Moran and O’Sullivan position those

texts that might be considered to be depthless and superficial in
relation to the affective meaning they induce and the ‘deep forms
of cultural and emotional (in)security’ they invoke (O’Sullivan 1998,
p. 203). What interests me here and what I will return to is how our
response to and understandings of television’s own history are medi-
ated by forms, like the collection of nostalgic re-contextualisation.
What is revealed are the ways in which attitudes towards television’s
past are constructed through a collage of past and present and cate-
gorised in various ways by autobiographical, generational and cultural
memories.

Recollections
For me, ‘television about television’ has an additional significance in
that part of the pleasures of this ‘genre’ questions not only what we
remember but also how we remember. Nostalgia television is charac-
terised by the playful address with the expectations of remembering.
Here, a desire to remember may translate into the pleasure of recog-
nition and deep forms of affection generated by nostalgia, yet this is
tempered by the risk of non-recognition or the disappointments of
mis-remembering. Despite these variable ‘payoffs’ the pleasures of nos-
talgia television are driven by curiosity and anticipation: will it be how
I remembered? Is this how we once were? These pleasures in part reveal
the successful ‘hook’ of the popular countdown format.
As a form of engagement, nostalgia is more about a desire to remem-
ber not to re-experience; to recall not to recover. My own understanding
of nostalgia television is borne from Jean Pickering’s notion of nos-
talgia as a ‘leisure activity’. For Pickering, nostalgia ‘seems to have
something in common with Wordsworth’s idea of poetry as “recollec-
tion in tranquillity”, needing both distraction from immediate concerns
and deliberate recollection for its manifestation’ (1997, p. 207). Nostal-
gia television, at least in the forms I discuss in this chapter, involves
the conscious and deliberate recollection of past television – television
about television which re-works, jumbles and reframes itself, construct-
ing and interrogating the relationship between past and present and
our expectations of memory and recollection. In this sense it is related
to Dyer’s understanding of pastiche, which can illuminate ‘the feeling
of the dialectic of sameness and difference vis a vis the past’ and ‘sets
in play our relationship to [that] past’ (my emphasis 2006, p. 177), and
similar to his model of pastiche it invites the co-existence of critical
thinking and emotional engagement. As Pam Cook argues, in relation
 Nostalgia and Television 103

to the nostalgia film, the audience’s interaction with the representations

of the past demands a cognitive response, as well as an imaginative and
performative one (2005, p. 4).
Cook’s account, which seeks to avoid a traditional hierarchy and sees
nostalgia as existing on a continuum with history and memory, forms
part of a body of revisionist work on the term and a growing interdis-
ciplinary interest in nostalgia and its uses (see Wheeler 1994, Tannock
1995, Boym 2001, Grainge 2002, Pickering and Keightley 2006). This
is work which seeks to rescue nostalgia and its potential from more
pejorative, conservative and simplistic applications of the term, and
to complicate the notion of nostalgia as being essentially inauthentic,
ahistorical, sentimentalising, regressive and exploitative (particularly in
commercial terms). Whilst the evocative etymology of the word and its
original use as a diagnostic label for the homesickness experienced by
Swiss soldiers provide us with a relatively secure point of origin, the
shifting meaning and variable uses of nostalgia since its conception in
the 1700s have made it a slippery and complex concept which, as Adam
Muller observes, ‘even the most sophisticated of its critics acknowledge
is paradoxical’ (2006, p. 739).
Given its shifting meaning over time, particularly the perceived shift
from the description of an affective response, to spatial displacement,
to a sense of loss generated by a temporal dislocation, nostalgia, as
Pickering and Keightley put it, is ‘not all of a piece’ (2006, p. 929). Here,
I wish to employ the television drama series Life on Mars as a way of
approaching and illustrating the paradoxical and playful nature of nos-
talgia on television, and to discuss how, in its play with space and time,
nostalgia can operate as a mode of critique prompting reflection on pat-
terns of change and continuity. It is in this comparative function that
nostalgia plays a role in the negotiation of identities, communities and
forms of historical connectivity; of how we were then, who we are now
and where we want to be. Nostalgia can offer an escape from the present
and an idealisation of the past, but it can also be invoked to reaffirm a
belief in the progress of the present, and whilst nostalgia is always about
loss, recovery is not the objective and the return home is not always
welcome.

Life on Mars (BBC, 2006–7)

My name is Sam Tyler. I had an accident and I woke up in 1973. Am

I mad, in a coma, or back in time? Whatever’s happened it’s like I’ve
landed on a different planet, now maybe if I can work out the reason
I can get home.
104 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

Life on Mars, which ran for two series, was a critical and commercial
success for the BBC. A successful spin-off series Ashes to Ashes (BBC,
2008–10) set in 1981 followed and a high-profile, though less successful,
American version was made for ABC in 2008.
After being hit by a car, twenty-first century detective Sam Tyler
(John Simm) wakes up in 1973. The central enigma of the show, which
became its tag line, is whether Sam is back in time, in a coma or sim-
ply mad. Trapped in the past Sam is teamed up with DCI Gene Hunt
(Philip Glenister) and begins working in a 1970s police department. The
generic playfulness and self-reflexivity of the series attracted much aca-
demic interest as the show itself became a framework for both historical
accounts of the television police genre and an exercise in the evolution
of generic forms (see Downey 2007, Chapman 2009). Nostalgia became
the other framework through which to investigate the significance and
influence of the series (see Tincknell 2010). In this account I will attempt
to bring these two lines of inquiry together.

The shock of the old

The series draws attention to the processes of remembrance through
a structure of both recognition and defamiliarisation or estrangement.
In a sequence from the first episode, Sam is still clearly in shock after
waking up in 1973 and is convinced his mind is playing tricks on him.
Following one of many violent encounters with Hunt, we cut to Sam as
he strides round a corner onto a busy Manchester street. When Annie
(Liz White), a WPC and future romantic interest, catches up with him
he explains his motivations. Determined to shake himself out of it he
states – ‘my mind can only invent so much detail y’ know. So I’m gonna
walk until I can’t think up anymore faces or streets. I mean this is
just . . . ’. Throwing his hands out in exasperation, Sam’s gesture moti-
vates both Annie and the camera to shift their attention to the street
environment. The camera then pans 360 degrees to reveal the world
which Sam is now in. The stuff of 1970s everyday life confronts the
viewer: shop fronts, fashion, buses, cars and so on become the content
of this nostalgic spectacle. As the camera returns to Sam and the con-
fused Annie, she asks ‘just what?’ to which he replies with increasing
bafflement – ‘it’s just madness!’
John Caughie has written that ‘our glimpses of old television [ . . . ]
seem to function – like old photographs – as a kind of musée imaginaire,
a museum which, as Andreas Huyssen suggests, may remind us of the
non-synchronicity of the past, of our difference from ourselves’ (2000,
 Nostalgia and Television 105

p. 13). What we might refer to as the ‘shock of the old’ refers back to
television’s ‘comedy of obsolescence’ and the ‘comic-archaic’ quality of
past television. However, this ‘shock’ presents itself in a different way
in this series, allowing us to examine ‘our difference from ourselves’
as a nation. This is clearly expressed through Sam Tyler’s reaction to
the ‘madness’ of 1973, and the camera movement in this sequence sig-
nals Sam as our main point of identification as the ‘shock of the old’
is mediated through his experience. His forward movement pushes the
camera back, locating his action as the focal point of the scene, and it
is his exasperated gesture, as he throws out his hands to signal to Annie
the ‘absurdity’ of 1973, that motivates the 360-degree pan.7 One might
argue that in Life on Mars, the past is not just a foreign country, it is a
different planet.8 The spectacular presentation of this sequence and the
use of The Who’s ‘Baba O’Riley’ on the soundtrack, which builds from
the opening of the scene with the first verse bursting in to accompany
the pan, helps to defamiliarise the 1970s milieu. But in the authenticity
of its recreation of period detail it reveals another pleasure of televisual
nostalgia existing in its appeal to living memory.
John Simm’s performance of this ‘shock’ is central to the effectiveness
of the opening episode and beyond. The ‘waking up’ scene, which fol-
lows the accident, reveals much about the significance of performance,
particularly as this analysis is enabled by a cross-comparison with the
ABC version and with Jason O’Mara in the role of Tyler. The two versions
are extremely similar in the construction and ordering of shots, with the
use of 360-degree pans, though this time revolving around the charac-
ter. The dialogue of the original is adjusted for an American audience
(mobile phones become cell phones), and in both, the use of Bowie’s
‘Life on Mars’ shifts between the diegetic (the iPod then the eight-track
in the car stereo) and the non-diegetic, flooding the soundtrack at key
points in the scene (waking up and the reveal of the changed cityscape).
These techniques situate the character within a new landscape which is
rendered strange, spectacular and familiar.
Simm employs a range of gestures to signify Tyler’s disorientation. His
performance in the series is necessarily understated in comparison with
Philip Glenister’s portrayal of Gene Hunt, the unreconstructed male, all
bravado and machismo. In comparison the intensity of the experience
captured by Simm is expressed through the character’s interiority, his
vulnerability and his swagger – he closes his eyes as if he can’t believe it,
he gulps, he squeezes the bridge of his nose, he sneers at the 1973 police-
man. He captures an impressive range of emotions without losing sight
of either the gravity or the comedy of the scene. We cannot fail but to
106 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

compare the subtlety and range of this performance with Jason O’Mara’s
one-dimensional expression of shock – a permanently furrowed brow.
A ‘reveal’ is constructed at the close of each version of the scene,
specifically identifying the action as occurring in a different time but
the same place. Simm, as Tyler, scurries out of the building site he’s
woken up on and encounters a billboard advertising Manchester and its
‘highway in the sky’ (see Figure 4.2). The billboard depicts the highway
Sam was previously underneath and as he hurries out of the bottom
of the frame, a crane shot tracks back and up and the un-regenerated
cityscape comes into view. The ‘reveal’ of the ABC version is arguably
much more disruptive and establishes a different form of shock, which
breaks the continuity of both the performance and the creation of place
and time. Tyler, in this version, doesn’t leave the scene; conversing with
the 1973 policeman, he turns around to face the camera and looks
up. The cut is to a low-angled computer-generated image from behind
Tyler as he encounters the Twin Towers, gleaming in the midday sun,
they loom down upon him as rain clouds ominously gather behind
(see Figure 4.3). The self-conscious and simulated presence of the World
Trade Center at the close of the scene is an effective, albeit highly manip-
ulative reveal, but this form of restoration breaks with the construction
of a 1973 New York. Whilst the towers would have been a part of the
past cityscape, their spectacular presentation here is on a completely

Figure 4.2 Un-regeneration, Manchester in 1973, series 1, episode 1, Life on Mars

(dir. Bharat Nalluri, prod. Kudos Film and Television/Red Planet Pictures for BBC,
2006).
 Nostalgia and Television 107

Figure 4.3 Disruptive restoration, New York in 1973, ‘Out Here in the Fields’,
episode 1, Life on Mars (dir. Gary Fleder, prod. Kudos Film and Television/20th
Century Fox/ABC Studios, 2008).

different scale and refers not to that past but to a different one – their
traumatic collapse on 11 September 2001.
The different reactions and reveals of the two versions illuminate not
only the relative successes and failures of each, but also how the spe-
cific construction of both a period setting and the characterisation and
performance of Tyler are central to the series’ creation of recognition
and defamiliarisation. It is from these that the tone of the relationship
between past and present is initially created.

Over the rainbow

The makers of Life on Mars explicitly stated that the programme
was designed to challenge nostalgic representations of the 1970s (see
Downey 2007). Based on an understanding of nostalgia as a longing for
an idealised past, Life on Mars certainly offers a more complicated world
view – 1973 Manchester is far from idealised. However, it is Sam’s cen-
tral ambition to ‘get home’ that makes the series, first and foremost, a
nostalgic narrative. The different articulations of home across the series
layer the programme’s play with nostalgia, both spatial and temporal.
Home is Sam’s prelapsarian childhood of 1973 Manchester (before the
disappearance of his father – a mystery solved in the finale of the first
series). It is also the future present of 2007 to which he is desperate to
108 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

return, and it eventually becomes the present past of 1973 that the adult
Sam grows to love.
The shifting meaning of home for Sam is clearly addressed in the
final episode of the second series, when he finally returns to the future.
A sting operation to thwart a railway heist goes disastrously wrong and,
as the team are fired upon by an armed gang, Sam is lured into the
safety of a railway tunnel by senior officer Frank Morgan (Ralph Brown)
and promised that leaving the team behind and Hunt to take the blame
Sam can now return home. The show’s central puzzle is revealed as
Sam, walking into the enveloping dark of the tunnel, awakens from
a coma in a modern hospital to find Morgan, apparently his surgeon
all along, smiling down on him. Sam’s return ‘home’ however is short-
lived. Unable to reintegrate into this future world, he is distracted by
both guilt and a loss of feeling, and recalls the words of Winston, the
quasi-mystical barman of the 1973 Railway Arms, to his mother – ‘You
know a barman . . . a barman once told me that you know when you’re
alive because you can feel, and you know when you’re not because you
don’t feel anything.’ The distinctive colour palettes of the two times
are representative of Sam’s attitude to his return home. The brown and
caramel hues of the 1970s are no longer resonant of a tobacco-stained
north rife with corruption and discrimination but of warmth, char-
acter and feeling compared to the concrete, glass and chrome-plated
Manchester metropolis of 2007.9 It is the present which now imprisons
Sam as, accompanied by Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s melancholy version
of ‘Over the Rainbow’, he pensively takes in the altered crowds and
cityscape, continually framed behind blinds, steel handrails, banisters,
chains and bollards (see Figures 4.4 and 4.5). Returning us to where the
first episode ended, his liberation comes at the expense of his life as he
finally makes the jump from the rooftop of the police headquarters, this
time in order to return to 1973 and to rescue his friends.
The meaning of the shift is not ambiguous and what is of interest is,
first, how it responds to a growing familiarity with the world of 1973
and the affection built for the series’ characters. Sam’s return to 2007 is
very much a betrayal of the bonds built between the characters and with
their audience. Secondly, Sam’s reaction to the return home, the sense of
deflation, disappointment and alienation corresponds with Boym’s dis-
cussion of nostalgia via Jorge Luis Borges’ observations on The Odyssey,
where upon Ulysses’ return home he becomes ‘nostalgic for his nomadic
self’: ‘Homecoming does not signify a recovery of identity; it does not
end the journey in the virtual space of imagination. A modern nostalgic
can be homesick and sick of home, at once’ (Boym 2001, p. 50).
 Nostalgia and Television 109

Figure 4.4 Sam leaves hospital, series 2, episode 8, Life on Mars (dir. S. J. Clarkson,
prod. Kudos Film and Television for BBC, 2007).

Figure 4.5 Alone in a crowd, series 2, episode 8, Life on Mars (dir. S. J. Clarkson,
prod. Kudos Film and Television for BBC, 2007).

The idea of home is a shifting site in Life on Mars, the recovery of

which illuminates the distance necessary in retaining both nostalgic
desire and the potential of nostalgic appraisal. We might consider this
in relation to Boym’s concept of ‘reflective’ nostalgia: ‘the focus here is
not on recovery of what is perceived to be an absolute truth (home) but
110 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

on the mediation on history and passage of time’ (2001, p. 49).10 Life

on Mars is both an example of but also reveals how television becomes
significant for our sense of change and continuity. The comparative
function of both television memory and nostalgia highlights the com-
plexity of the relationship between past and present individual, cultural
and national identities, becoming a ‘rear view mirror’ on who we were
and how we have changed (O’Sullivan 1998, pp. 202–3). Here lies the
critical potential of Life on Mars to invite ‘complex viewing’ (Nelson
2007, p. 179).

New wine in old bottles

In Sam Wollaston’s review of the first episode of Life on Mars in The
Guardian he wrote – ‘It’s The Bill × Doctor Who = The Sweeney, if you’re
looking for a mathematical equation to sum it up’ (Wollaston 2006).
This pithy pitch of the programme’s concept points towards the poten-
tially formulaic nature of the series (no less formulaic than Wollaston’s
form of popular television criticism) but also highlights the generic play-
fulness on display in the series. In Life on Mars, the detail of everyday life
in 1973 is filtered through television’s past and its self-conscious use of
the crime genre. This is achieved through the use of an iconography
of 1970s crime fiction as embodied by The Sweeney (ITV, 1975–8): to
borrow some of Charlotte Brunsdon’s descriptions (2000, p. 196), the
‘squealing tyres’ of the Ford Cortina and the ‘macho heritage’ of John
Thaw’s DI Jack Regan channelled by Glenister’s Gene Hunt as the aggres-
sive no-nonsense detective. But the series can also be seen to respond to
the questions that Brunsdon sees at the heart of the police series of the
1980s and 1990s. The questions ‘who can police?’ and ‘who is account-
able?’ clearly resonate with Life on Mars as issues of policy, technique,
management and discrimination are central to storylines. These con-
cerns arise principally in the cultural conflict between Sam and Gene
and their different styles of policing (beer-gut intuition vs CSI style stress
on evidence). Whilst the comic-archaic qualities of the formula provide
a source of humour, the nostalgic play with a genre which focuses on
particular concerns demonstrates how a specific dialogue with another
age can be opened up.
Transported back to a recognisable televisual landscape, Sam Tyler’s
predicament in Life on Mars offers a neat commentary on the role of
television as a portal between past and present. The television appara-
tus became central to the show and its ‘time travel’ narrative. Sam’s ‘life
line’ to the present is often connected via television programming. It is
 Nostalgia and Television 111

his portal between the past and the present as loved ones and doctors
appear in the context of 1970s-style programming interrupted to relay
messages to the comatose Sam. In his dream state it is the girl from the
BBC test card that, in a nod to the horror genre where defamiliarisa-
tion becomes the uncanny, comes out of the television set and appears
in Sam’s room to offer cryptic messages about his predicament. In the
broadcast of the second series, each episode was preceded by an aes-
thetic shift in time. In each moment before the start of the episode, the
broadcast flow of interstitial segments appeared to break up, with the
1970s test card and colour bars flickering onto the screen accompanied
by the sound of a rewinding tape and static. Television appeared to be
breaking down or rewinding to a different time. The 1970s ident for
BBC One was then cut in and the announcer’s voice, marked as distinc-
tively from the past via the received pronunciation of its ‘BBC’ tones
and tinny sound quality, introduced the programme. This framing of
the new within the old was employed through the promotion of the
second series and became key to its branding, with trailers for the series
and features in the Radio Times employing the respective style of the
BBC’s 1970s branding (see Figure 4.6).
The broadcast context and promotion of Life on Mars reveal the
nostalgic value of television’s perceived ephemera, in particular, the
channel ident. The iconic images and sounds of past idents have been
re-employed in recent years, for example, as part of Channel 4’s 25th
anniversary celebrations in 2007 and BBC Two’s eighties season in 2010.

Figure 4.6 Trailer for second series of Life on Mars (BBC, 2007).
112 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

The channel ident has the potential to become an evocative marker of

television memory through its repetitious use by a channel across a spe-
cific period of time. The distinctive use of graphics, music and sound
which work to distinguish the channel identity for the viewer on its
reappearance arguably crystallises memory and summons a series of
associations with the period. What is also significant about the use of
the 1970s BBC ident in Life on Mars is how the BBC works to reclaim as
part of its own heritage the populist idiom of Thames Television’s The
Sweeney.
The generic playfulness and self-reflexivity that are on display in Life
on Mars provide a way in which we can consider nostalgia as a specific
form of televisual engagement. Here I return to the notion of repe-
tition with a difference that characterised the narrative ‘moments of
return’ in serial drama. In the case of Life on Mars nostalgia television’s
repetition with a difference is tied to generic production and playful-
ness. John Caughie examines the phenomenon of generic playfulness
in television drama in his essay ‘Adorno’s reproach’, and through Linda
Hutcheon’s work, which also considers parody as characterised by rep-
etition with difference, Caughie suggests how complicity and distance
might be seen as both a ‘characteristic form of engagement in generi-
cally mixed forms’ and as defining ‘television’s capacity to be critical’
(1991, p. 151). In the example of nostalgia television it is arguably
the movement between closeness and distance that defines this criti-
cal capacity but also allows for an emotional engagement with affective
memories. This is perhaps illuminated in the strategy of recognition and
estrangement and the playfulness with the processes of remembrance
that mark a programme such as Life on Mars. Whilst the nostalgic text
is inhabited by forms of longing and loss, a capacity to be critical is also
produced by the nostalgic appraisal of who we were and how we have
changed.
Whilst this outlines a form of engagement characteristic of nostalgia
television, we might also suggest how nostalgia operates as a meta-
generic structure; television might be seen to produce nostalgia for itself
in its ‘regime of repetition’, where the strategy of re-contextualisation
marks difference. Nostalgia television, however, does not always sig-
nal innovation and difference and is perhaps rarely thought of in
these terms, as there is often an over-reliance on winning formulas
and past successes. A competitive television market highlights the ten-
sion between creativity and tradition, and here, nostalgia emerges as a
formula that offers another form of safe return.
 Nostalgia and Television 113

Institutional nostalgia

The BBC and the rebranding of Stephen Poliakoff

With the competition from new media technologies and new forms of
consumption (DVD, online streaming, downloading, etc.), the televi-
sion industry, though not alone, faces much uncertainty. Nostalgia for
the ‘good old days’ or a more secure time often arises as a response to
moments of change and crisis. This might begin to explain the trend
for remakes, because returning to existing and previously successful for-
mats offers a form of security and quite often will deliver a pre-existing
audience. Recent years have seen the return of a variety of earlier televi-
sion drama and comedy successes as remakes, re-imaginings, prequels,
sequels and spin-offs populate the schedules. Alongside Life on Mars and
its spin-off Ashes to Ashes have been the regeneration of Doctor Who
(BBC, 1963–89; BBC, 2005–) and the re-imagining of The Prisoner (ITV,
1967; ITV/AMC, 2009). A new generation has seen a new version of
Robin Hood (BBC, 2006–9) and a fresh generation commands and obeys
alongside the old in Upstairs Downstairs (ITV, 1971–5); BBC, 2010). There
have been one-off visits to old friends in This Life +10 (BBC, 1996–7;
BBC, 2007) and To the Manor Born (BBC, 1979–81; BBC, 2007), and new
histories imagined for the Only Fools and Horses gang in Rock and Chips
(BBC, 2010).11 American television has also seen its fair share of remakes
with the return of, among others, teen and post-teen dramas Beverly
Hills, 90210 (Fox, 1990–2000) revived as just 90210 (The CW, 2008–)
and Melrose Place (Fox, 1992–9; The CW, 2009–10), and sci-fi series
Battlestar Galactica (ABC, 1978–9; Sci-fi, 2004–9) and V (ABC, 1983–5;
ABC, 2009–).
Whilst connecting the viewer to their memories of the original incar-
nations, the most successful of these present some form of reflection on
the original and build upon potential resonances. These remakes, rein-
ventions and regenerations offer a point of anchor but also market the
present and the future on the performance of the past. It is with this
in mind that I refer specifically to the practices of the BBC as a way of
opening out a consideration of the institutional practices of memory
through the notion of BBC nostalgia.
The BBC’s promotion of itself through discourses of memory and tra-
dition has been discussed in relation to other texts within this book –
the promotion of the BBC’s mobile news service in Chapter 1 and the
discussion of the campaign attached to the success of Who Do You Think
You Are? in Chapter 3. What I wish to question here is how issues of
114 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

creativity, innovation and value are affected when this is what we do

(the tag line for the 2006 charter renewal campaign) becomes this is
what we did, and resurrection becomes regurgitation. Whilst the BBC is
certainly not the only institution to operate a form of institutional nos-
talgia, for the purposes of this study it is a useful point of focus for the
discussion of notions of creativity and tradition in relation to nostalgia.
As Philip Schlesinger highlights, ‘creativity (defined as innovative pro-
gramme making) was seen as the BBC’s core competence, in line with
long-established tradition’ (2010, p. 275). As an example I want to focus
on the promotion of Stephen Poliakoff as a ‘jewel in the crown’ of the
BBC over the last decade, and the implications of this for constructions
of a television Golden Age.
Stephen Poliakoff began his career in the theatre and has worked in
film, but it is for his television work, produced during his 30-year rela-
tionship with the BBC where he is often both writer and director of his
work, that he is best known. Poliakoff’s first major television success
was the BAFTA award-winning Caught on a Train (BBC2, 1980) made
for BBC2 Playhouse and starring Peggy Ashcroft and Michael Kitchen.
However, that level of success wasn’t revisited until 1999 when Shoot-
ing the Past was broadcast. Shooting the Past is seen to be the first part
of what Poliakoff has described as an unconnected trilogy, followed by
Perfect Strangers in 2001 and The Lost Prince in 2003. Whilst all three
dramas were popular and critically acclaimed, The Lost Prince has been
Poliakoff’s biggest success to date, with ratings of 13 million and an
Emmy award win. The success of this trilogy secured Poliakoff’s status
within a ‘great tradition’ of British television drama but also within
the BBC. Following The Lost Prince he was commissioned to write and
direct two television films for the broadcaster – Friends and Crocodiles
(2005) and Gideon’s Daughter (2006) – and his status as ‘quality tele-
vision auteur’ was secured across two more high-profile productions,
Joe’s Palace and Capturing Mary, co-produced with the stable of American
quality television drama, HBO, and broadcast in 2007.
A fascination with the archive, themes of memory, nostalgia and
history, and concerns with modernity, technological and institutional
change have been consistent points of interest across Poliakoff’s work,
along with a distinctive style which I have characterised elsewhere as
‘slow television’. What I am interested in here is how Poliakoff him-
self is constructed as an object of nostalgia and how this feeds both
into the legacy of the single play as the ‘Golden Age’ of British tele-
vision and lines of tradition emphasised by the BBC’s self-image. One
might note how the nostalgic promotion of Poliakoff is exaggerated
 Nostalgia and Television 115

in comparison with other veteran British television dramatists such as

Jimmy McGovern or Alan Bleasdale. Working within social realist tradi-
tions of television drama, the contemporary edge of their work arguably
doesn’t complement, to the same extent as Poliakoff’s, the nostalgic
rhetoric of the BBC.
Poliakoff, as a contemporary television dramatist, is seen to hold a
distinct and singular position, licensed with an unusually high level of
artistic freedom within the BBC. Though the stress on the unique and
original quality of his work is drawn from a romantic notion of the
creative artist, he is constructed in the reviews of his work as a rarity,
even an oddity – a leftover from a ‘Golden Age’ of British television who
brings with him the ‘qualities’ of that age, notably the perceived cre-
ative freedom subsequently lost during the Birt era at the BBC. This is
evidenced through both reviewers’ and Poliakoff’s lamentations on the
demise of the single play. It is with a nostalgic inflection that Poliakoff
introduced his first choice of record on Desert Island Discs (18 March
2005); for Poliakoff, Dusty Springfield conjures up the image of the
woman featured on the opening credits of The Wednesday Play (BBC,
1964–70), and reminds him of ‘those exciting days when you never
knew what you were going to see on television’. The invocation of a
more exciting time or even a time when drama was more ‘valued’ seems
to play upon the current climate in television and the nostalgia for its
own history. Poliakoff’s unique position in contemporary drama may
be because of his evocation of a drama past – a sentiment that is sup-
ported by Robin Nelson, who sees Poliakoff as part of the ‘British single
play tradition’. As both writer and director ‘Poliakoff’s work is as close
to “authored drama” as it is possible to be’ (2006, p. 124).
An article from The Guardian by Mark Lawson on Poliakoff and Perfect
Strangers is itself entitled ‘Like Nothing Else’, and in which he writes:

After the award-winning Shooting the Past [ . . . ] comes Perfect Strangers

(BBC2), which, once again, feels like nothing else in the schedules.
Poliakoff is also given the rare accolade for a living writer of a tie-in
documentary: Stephen Poliakoff: Shooting the Present (BBC2). This also
marks a shift in television history. A Late Show-type project in the
old Late Show slot, it stands, like the drama that inspired it, as a treat
that would once have been taken for granted by the viewer.
(Lawson 2001)

In Graham Murdock’s early investigation into the promotion of author-

ship and creativity within broadcasting institutions, he argues that the
116 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

promotion of such elements ‘lies at the heart of the broadcasters’ pre-

sentation of themselves as guarantors of cultural diversity and patrons
of the contemporary arts, elements which are central to their claims to
responsibility and public service’ (1980, p. 20). Murdock argues that this
is not simply a question of self-presentation but that the value placed
upon creativity and individual expression is evidenced through the level
of freedom experienced by distinguished dramatists and authors. Whilst
promoting the broadcast of Friends and Crocodiles and Gideon’s Daughter
Poliakoff proudly chuckled on BBC Breakfast (tx: 13 January 2006) that
the BBC was ‘moving the news’ for the first of the two dramas. Though
arguably an outmoded scheduling decision, it clearly plays up to the
promotion of Poliakoff and his work as rare and valuable BBC commodi-
ties – ‘must-see-event-drama’ which was accompanied by a season of his
work on BBC Four and a second documentary on the dramatist entitled
Stephen Poliakoff: A Brief History of Now (BBC4, 2006).12 It is in the open-
ing of this documentary that Poliakoff is praised by a series of actors
and critics in a selection of sound bites that testify to his ‘vision’, ‘cre-
ativity’ and ‘autonomy’. Poliakoff is presented as a master storyteller,
and among the montage of sound bites and extracts from his work
he is filmed walking across a windswept park. As he pauses to observe
his environment, the low angle of the camera positions Poliakoff, with
unkempt beard and crumpled suit, against the sky and backlit by the
evening sun, creating a marketable vision of the television auteur as
romantic artist.
The BBC’s nostalgic promotion of Poliakoff as both one of a kind and
as part of the lost tradition of the single play and the creative freedom
associated with it might be read as a response to the current period
of technological and institutional uncertainty and transition, where
the renewed emphasis on its public service tradition forms part of a
response to competition and digitisation. It is possible to read Shooting
the Past, in particular, as a meditation on modernity and technological
change with a specifically self-reflexive content. Poliakoff’s own unique
30-year relationship with the BBC has lent him a certain insight into the
changes within the institution, and parallels may be drawn between the
threat brought to the archive by Anderson and the ‘21st School’ and the
increased bureaucratisation of the BBC. As revealed by another profile
of the dramatist in The Guardian:

Poliakoff is well aware of the post-Birt climate in which he is now

working: too much damage was done to creative drama by the suits
with their ‘Producer’s Choice’ – which translated as a mission to
 Nostalgia and Television 117

downsize or tame the unreliable creatives. The BBC now has a bad
conscience. ‘In the past few years there had been a huge shrinkage
in drama output,’ Poliakoff says. ‘There was a department that used
to be called television plays. It completely vanished one summer,
unmourned and largely unremarked by the media. It was the destruc-
tion of the single film or play. I was surprised they got away with it,
but they did. John Birt should be forever ashamed.’
(Lennon 2001)

However, the obsessive ‘going back over things’ that Sarah Cardwell
(2005, p. 191) identifies as a key feature of Poliakoff’s form of story-
telling also illuminates how a continued preoccupation with certain
stylistic and thematic concerns might be seen to exhibit a form of
authored art television which is not only slowed down, but which has
also become stuck in a quagmire of memory and the nostalgia for former
glories. In this example, we might see the production of nostalgia as an
increasingly institutional practice that reflects the particular situation
of a national television broadcaster. Nostalgia, in this case, functions as
both a response to a loss of creative freedom, the desire to recapture
what has been lost, and as a solution to a loss of creative freedom: the
ability to market, via nostalgia, past television forms.

Golden ages and generations

The presence of the television programme-maker, critic and academic

within specific generational audiences underpins the construction of
the ‘Golden Age’, a notion which, alongside the subsequent fall, is ‘a
key trope of the nostalgia rhetoric’ (Tannock 1995, p. 454). This is a
rhetoric which recurs across academic and popular understandings of
the television Golden Age and reveals much about the role of gener-
ational relationships to the medium and the historical and national
specificities of television nostalgia. Within the US context William
Boddy’s study Fifties Television seeks to account for the aesthetic and
industrial changes within North American television of the mid-1950s
which were seen to implement a shift from a Golden Age of American
television to its commercial fall into a ‘vast wasteland’ (1993, p. 2).
The transfer from the New York-centred production of live drama to
the rise of the Hollywood film series is seen as largely responsible for the
fall, with the former characterised by the ‘autonomous teleplay of the
anthology series’ and the ‘prestige of the television playwright’ (1993,
p. 5). The American Golden Age of Boddy’s study, with its commitment
118 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

to aesthetic experimentation, programme balance and free expression,

bears a familiarity with a British Golden Age of the single authored play.
In both cases, commercial imperatives are held to blame for the demise
of standards and issues of quality and value that are fundamental to
Golden Age thinking – an age which is tied to the romantic conception
of creative autonomy and individual expression embodied in the figure
of the individual artist.
However, in the North American context there is arguably a shift in
popular constructions of the Golden Age, from the more experimen-
tal prestige productions of the early 1950s to the ‘good old days’ of
Father Knows Best (CBS/NBC, 1954–60) and Leave It to Beaver (ABC/CBS,
1957–63). Derek Kompare argues that this shift occurred in the 1970s as
part of a wider cultural nostalgia for the 1950s, where 1950s situation
comedy, for example, re-running in the 1970s, became emblematic of
more stable and simpler times.

The primary spark in the Golden Age myth in the seventies

(as opposed to earlier) was not so much the programs’ ‘liveness’ but
rather their ‘fifties-ness’. In an increasingly nostalgic era, past tele-
vision’s visual and narrative styles were increasingly perceived as a
quick audio-visual reference to ‘how it was’. Accordingly, the Golden
Age tag was broadened to incorporate series and genres other wise
far removed from the live dramas with which it was originally associ-
ated. It eventually blurred enough to take in virtually any series first
produced and aired in the ‘fifties’, a diffuse cultural category that,
since the seventies, has stretched from the end of the 1940s to the
early Kennedy Administration. The Golden Age began to refer to the
time itself (i.e., American economic and cultural stability) rather than
a particular mode of television production.
(2005, p. 109)

The political functions of nostalgia, and in particular its conservative

applications, have been charted by Daniel Marcus in his study Happy
Days and Wonder Years. Here he examines the ‘significance of the 1950s
and 60s for contemporary political and social life in the United States’
(2004, p. 2). Marcus interrogates the dichotomous view of the 1950s and
1960s in American political discourse and writes that ‘in the nostalgia
of the 1970s, the 1950s became defined as a time of innocence, secu-
rity and a vibrant adolescent culture. Many of the accounts of the time,
however, also defined it as inevitably yielding to a movement into adult
experience and trauma, a movement associated in public discussion
with the 1960s’ (2004, p. 6). Whilst these accounts of the 1950s revival
 Nostalgia and Television 119

in 1970s America highlight the conservative uses of nostalgia, they also

clearly reveal its historical specificity; how, why and when are forms of
television nostalgia called upon?
The various studies of the 1950s revival contrasted with Boddy’s study
also mark a distinction between academic and popular cultural applica-
tions of nostalgia and where the employment of nostalgia by institution
and practitioner can be added to this dynamic. The American politi-
cal and cultural discourse that characterises the 1960s as a traumatic
‘movement into adult experience’ might be compared with the British
experience of the decade as ‘swinging’. Rather than being based on the
stability and apparent innocence of the past, innovation, transgression
and experimentation appear to be characteristics of the Golden Age of
British Television, with industrial changes, again, cited as the cause of
the fall.
In the introduction to his collection of interviews with key British
television dramatists, Sean Day-Lewis writes that:

It is self-evident that there is much less space than there was for
scriptwriting originality. The elimination of commissioning pro-
ducers, able to cultivate writing talent, does not signal a better
future. Centralisation of power throughout British terrestrial televi-
sion means all decisions are made by channel controllers lacking
any drama background. They look for known market appeal, ‘drama
demographics’ as pointed by ‘focus’ groups, not writers’ visions.
(1998, p. vii)

Day-Lewis’ attempts to ‘beat a drum for a tradition’ that ‘looks to be

slipping away’ (1998, p. vii) are echoed in many of the contributions to
Bignell et al.’s anthology British Television Drama: Past, Present and Future
(2000). The collection features a selection of industry professionals asso-
ciated with the Golden Age of British television drama who offer their
recollections of and comments on the industry as it was then and how
it is now. Irene Shubik, John McGrath, Shaun Sutton, Alan Plater and
Andrew Davies, whether directly applying the label of the Golden Age
or not, all appear to mourn the passing of past, more autonomous, work-
ing practices in television, or more specifically BBC drama production,
often focusing on the demise of the ‘single-play’ as the short-hand for
quality television drama.
Discussions of the Golden Age often come with disclaimers but
inevitably draw upon the programmes and practices ‘worth remem-
bering’ (McGrath 2000, p. 49). Whilst James McGrath protests that ‘it
was nothing like a Golden Age in its extreme backwardness, culturally,
120 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

socially and politically’ (2000, p. 48), his brief account is inflected

with nostalgia for an age when ‘people could feel responsible, could
feel a certain autonomy, could feel a certain self-respect’ (2000, p. 53).
Tony Garnett somewhat oppositionally claims that ‘there never was a
“Golden Age”’ (2000, p. 18) yet his rhetoric is steeped in the imagery
of the struggle (‘I fought a bloody battle with the BBC’, ‘I will carry on
the fight a while longer’), mythologising his role in the politically and
socially conscious dramas of the period.
John Caughie has delineated the Golden Age of British television
drama as the period between 1965 and 1975. Whilst Caughie warns
against the nostalgic reflections of Golden Age thinking where ‘an
unrecoverable and idealised past is used as a stick with which to beat
the all-too-material present’ (2000, p. 57), he argues that ‘the idea of
a Golden Age may be meaningful: when it refers to that historical
moment when one set of meanings and values is being replaced by
another, when the traditions which stabilised a culture are beginning
to be questioned and rewritten, and when creativity seems to transgress
the boundaries of received good taste’ (2000, p. 57). By placing televi-
sion drama within a consideration of wider cultural, social and political
movements, Caughie’s aim is to situate the Golden Age in the ‘real’,
rooting it firmly in the ‘transformations and transitions of the cul-
ture’ (2000, p. 87), rather than leave its explanation up to myth and
coincidence. However, the nostalgic potential or problems implicit in
the idea of the Golden Age are locked by Caughie in the realm of
fantasy and desire, and the implications of this nostalgia upon con-
temporary television production are not explored. If those rewritten
meanings and values of the post-1964 period remain as the standard
for British television drama, what transgressive potential can it offer us
now; instead of looking forward are we just continually harking back?
However, this potentially regressive position is much more complicated
and explicitly linked to the social and political ambitions of a specific
generation. Rooted in transformation and transition, the construction
of this particular Golden Age is based upon the rejection of an earlier
generation. The elegiac accounts of these writers and critics capture a
sense of lost potential, for what could have been, but in their nostalgia
for the future they also re-imagine a different way, a different role for
television.
In this context the Golden Age carries a specific currency and can
be utilised in both regressive and progressive ways. With this in mind,
the discussion of the term within all contexts should engage with
the question of who constructs the period and content of any Golden
 Nostalgia and Television 121

Age, and for whom does the age remain golden? Boddy, for example,
offers a reconsideration of the critical consensus surrounding television’s
Golden Age through his focus on journalistic television criticism, and
the work of Madeleine Macmurraugh-Kavanagh on The Wednesday Play
(BBC1, 1964–70) raises the important question of who is excluded from
the mythologies of the Golden Age. Whilst Caughie acknowledges the
gendering of the British Golden Age in its emphasis on the ‘scholarship
boys’,13 what are the implications of a television nostalgia that is gen-
dered? The construction of a mythology of television drama authorship
that is associated with ‘maleness’ and the single play and where the sin-
gle play is emblematic of quality, authority and seriousness necessarily
excludes female-authored and female-addressed drama from the Golden
Age. Macmurraugh-Kavanagh argues that this ‘ideologically motivated
socio-cultural myth’ is the legacy of The Wednesday Play (1999, p. 423)
and that it has ‘conditioned the roles of both gendered authorship
and gendered audience reception in television drama. Thirty years on,
women writers and female audiences are still fighting the legacy of this
history’ (2000, p. 160).

TV on Trial (BBC4, 2005)

Evidently inspired by the popularity of countdown and ‘best of’ nos-
talgia formats, BBC Four’s series TV on Trial sought to find the Golden
Age of British television through ‘7 nights of programming from the
past six decades of British television, culminating in a live debate and
the announcement of the best-loved decade following a public vote’.14
Each night was introduced by two prominent broadcasting figures – one
a champion, the other a critic of that evening’s featured decade. The
two commentators were viewed within an age-appropriate period living
room watching and discussing the selected programmes (three or four
each evening). The programmes themselves were framed upon a blue
digital background, emphasising their position within the ‘flow’ of TV
on Trial or via split screens which displayed the reactions and responses
of the commentators (see Figure 4.7).
Alan Plater has written that ‘there was a “Golden Age” in the one
great sense that we were all young once’ (2000, p. 68). What is per-
ceived as golden is specifically tied to the ‘youth’ of the commentator.
In the case of TV on Trial the ‘witness for the defence’ (at least in the first
three episodes) is clearly identified as being a young professional dur-
ing that specific decade. The ‘witness for the prosecution’ on the other
hand is identified as being either a very young child or not yet born.
122 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

Figure 4.7 Chris Dunkley and Mark Lawson review Steptoe and Son in episode 2
of TV on Trial (dir. Amanda Crayden, prod. BBC, 2005).

TV on Trial specifically reveals how producers of a television heritage

are influenced by their own generational references and preferences,
as, in this example, different generations of ageing media professionals
and critics endeavour to seal their own youth within the confines of a
Golden Age. In addition, the format encourages a series of comparisons
to be made both between the decades and with the present. Framing
the archive image on the digital blue screen exaggerates the variable
 Nostalgia and Television 123

‘quality’ of the image and prompts the viewer to make comparative

aesthetic judgements. The selection of specific content and commen-
tator also prompts a comparative critique of the sociocultural values
of television. For example, journalist Kathryn Flett (the only female
critic featured in the programme) is chosen to reflect upon 1955 and
the representation of gender roles in sitcom Life with the Lyons (BBC,
1955–60), and British-Asian critic Sarfraz Manzoor is selected to reflect
upon 1975 and the incendiary content of the sitcom Love Thy Neighbour
(ITV, 1972–6).
Lynn Spigel has written that the history of television cannot be iso-
lated into periods ‘once we recognise that audiences are potentially
interpreting new shows within the context of the syndicated reruns
that surround them on the daily schedule’ (2001, p. 360). Whilst we
should question the effect of the interplay of past and present televisual
forms, genres and aesthetics on understandings of television history and
memory, the co-existence of pre-digital and digital aesthetics operates
as a patchwork of television history, generating both nostalgia for past
forms and a celebration of present achievements. An understanding of
generational shifts might also be employed to make sense of this increas-
ingly complex patchwork. For example, Derek Kompare reveals how the
US nostalgia network Nick at Nite has been central to creating a sense
of an American Television heritage, a heritage that shifts alongside the
changes in line-up on the network that in turn reflects the shifting gen-
erations tuning in. Launched in 1985, Nick at Nite was designed to
attract the baby boomer parents of the daytime viewers of Nickelodeon,
harking back ‘to the boomers’ nostalgic TV neverland of the late 1950s
with colourful space age shapes, bouncy pre-program bumps and pro-
mos’ (2005, p. 181). This line-up and iconography, however, has shifted
alongside the changing audience, with the current Nick at Nite sched-
ule consisting mainly of 1990s shows to attract the parents of the new
millennial generation. As another example of such a patchwork, TV
on Trial also highlights the currency of the notion of the Golden Age
and the use of generation as a framing device in which to ‘interrogate’
past television, pointing towards the potency of television’s relationship
to notions of generation as a phenomenon that, I would argue, merits
greater attention.15

Nostalgic frames (2)

To quote Charlotte Brunsdon, ‘television once was new, but is now old-
fashioned’ (2008, p. 128). I want to conclude this chapter by thinking
124 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

about the recurring visual motif of the cathode-ray television (CRT) set
and its bulging rectangular frame, which litters the design and graphics
of ‘television about television’. Colourful bulging frames and banks of
CRT receivers line the studio sets of programmes such as That’s What
I Call Television (ITV, 2007) and You Have Been Watching (Channel 4,
2009–10) (see Figures 4.8 and 4.9). Old-style receivers self-reflexively
frame the commentary and sound bites featured in satire shows such
as TV Ruined Your Life (BBC2, 2011) or in heavily self-memorialised
television such as the final series of the UK’s Big Brother (Channel 4,
2000–10). These self-conscious displays of obsolete media objects and
iconography are reminiscent of the celebratory ‘consciousness of the
televisual apparatus’ as part of an aesthetic agenda popularised in the
1980s (Caldwell 1995, p. 13).16 Here, though, the apparatus as object
and image has become kitsch.
Susan Stewart writes that the materiality of the kitsch object is ‘split
into contrasting voices: past and present, mass production and indi-
vidual subject, oblivion and reification [ . . . ] Kitsch objects are not
apprehended as the souvenir proper is apprehended, that is, on the
level of the individual autobiography; rather, they are apprehended on
the level of collective identity. They are souvenirs of an era and not of
a self’ (1993, p. 167). Television as a kitsch object is both. An object
of mass production yet historically associated with the intimate space

Figure 4.8 Studio set of You Have Been Watching (dir. Richard Valentine, prod.
Zeppotron for Channel 4, 2009).
 Nostalgia and Television 125

Figure 4.9 Fern Britton presents That’s What I Call Television (dir. Simon
Staffurth, prod. Unique Television for ITV, 2007).

of the home – the object and its iconography draw upon collective
identity and individual autobiography. Perhaps no longer a signifier
of modernity it has become an icon of nostalgia for these symbolic
associations.
Across this chapter nostalgic programming and iconography have
been read partly as a response to changes taking place in television, gen-
erating nostalgia for real and imaginary losses. Within a British tradition
of public service broadcasting and the address to a national audience,
television’s transition to a digital, multi-channel era of narrow casting
has been seen to threaten the medium’s provision of a public sphere,
a shared experience and a communal space. As an anxiety it is not
unique to either British broadcasting or to television and responds to
fears regarding the dematerialisation of digital culture. These anxieties
have invested the television receiver with the paradoxical value of nos-
talgia. On the one hand, writing on the arrival of new projection and
LCD display systems, Margaret Morse suggested that ‘our box of sym-
bols and words is emptied out, spilling husks of speech and gestures
out into the air. Inside has become outside. And outside has become
inside, without a frame to call us home from dreamtime’ (1990, p. 140).
Yet the television frame can also be seen to act as a form of anchor
for an increasingly amorphous televisual landscape, as Daniel Marcus
126 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

observes: ‘In a geographically mobile society marked by technological

and social change, television’s screen has been an icon of familiarity, a
stable location through which discontinuous, fragmented, and variable
representations of American experience have passed (2004, pp. 4–5).
Here we see how television is at once both cosy and old-fashioned
yet invested with culturally specific anxieties, and it is as a paradoxical
symbol of both security and potential loss that it has become a deeply
nostalgic technology.
5
Television’s Afterlife: Memory, the
Museum and Material Culture

The stuff of nightmares, reduced to an exhibit

The first series of the revived British science-fiction programme Doctor

Who features an episode simply entitled ‘Dalek’. Rose (Billie Piper) and
the Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) encounter a last relic of the Dalek
race, the persistent pepper-pot villains believed to have been destroyed
in the ‘Time War’, when they are attracted to the underground lair of a
billionaire collector of alien artefacts by an anonymous distress signal.1
It is the opening pre-credit sequence of this episode which is of partic-
ular interest as the long-running series self-consciously refers to itself
as an object of memory by placing itself in the museum. The open-
ing setting of the episode is an exhibition of alien artefacts housed in
large glass cases inside a cavernous hall (see Figure 5.1). Various arte-
facts from the world of Doctor Who are featured in the mise-en-scène
of the museum: something old (a Cyberman’s head, created in 1966),
something new (a Slitheen’s claw, 2005 series), something borrowed
(a milometer from the Roswell spaceship) and something blue, with the
TARDIS similarly placed as an exhibit through the composition of the
frame.2
First broadcast in 1963 it is the longevity of Doctor Who which has
led scholars to respond to the series as a ‘receptacle’ for multiple forms
of history, memory and identity. For example, in its changing construc-
tions of ‘British-ness’ and understandings of British social history and
memory, the programme ‘provides the cultural historian with a window
on the culture that created and embraced it’ (Cull 2001, p. 95), with
a key attraction of the show being its ability to ‘map the shifting cul-
tural landscape’ (Chapman 2006, p. 201). The programme might also be
utilised to map a shifting television landscape as the new Doctor Who

127
128 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

Figure 5.1 The Doctor and Rose in the museum. ‘Dalek’, series 1, episode 6 of
the new Doctor Who (dir. Joe Ahearne, prod. BBC Wales, 2005).

self-consciously employs the knowledge of its own status as an iconic

television institution. For example, the contents of the exhibition in
‘Dalek’ place the new against the old, inviting comparison particularly
on the level of production design and special effects and illuminating
how the show is involved in creating as well as prompting television
memories. These memories are inevitably tied to experiences of change
and continuity, of growing up with Doctor Who and the feelings it might
invoke. This emerges as a central theme of the Russell T. Davies era
(2005–9), with both storylines and a particular characterisation of the
Doctor (as played by Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant) preoc-
cupied with the passing of time, ageing, loss, longing and belonging.3
‘Dalek’ and other episodes, such as the reunion with former compan-
ions Sarah Jane (Elizabeth Sladen) and K-9,4 arguably address those who
have grown up with the series and find themselves, as does Sarah Jane,
much older on the Doctor’s return, and as the Doctor himself poignantly
remarks when he encounters the exhibited head of a Cyberman, ‘I’m
getting old’.5
‘Dalek’ is certainly not unique in its use of the museum as a site of
drama. In ‘The Space Museum’, a story from the 1965 series starring
William Hartnell as the Doctor, the empty shell of a Dalek stands on
display, offering a hiding place for the Doctor from the ‘curators’ wish-
ing to turn him into an exhibit himself (see Figure 5.2). In series 5 of the
 Memory, the Museum and Material Culture 129

Figure 5.2 William Hartnell hides inside the Dalek exhibit in ‘The Space
Museum’, series 2, serial 15 (dir. Mervyn Pinfield, BBC, 1965).

new Doctor Who an ossified Dalek, revived by the light of a time capsule,
cracks out of its stony shell in the ‘National Museum’ to terrorise an
already preoccupied Doctor and his companions. There are many exam-
ples across the life of the programme of the use of, not only museums,
but also archives, collections and libraries as enchanted and enchant-
ing spaces, and Doctor Who is not alone in employing the museum as a
space for the encounter with a series’ history and its re-imagining. The
re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, based on the 1970s series, employs a
similar strategy. It is at the opening of a museum about the first Cylon
War, where relics from the original series appear as exhibits on board
the soon-to-be decommissioned Battlestar, that the Cylons attack again
after 30 years and the series is rebooted.
Andreas Huyssen’s thoughts on the museum offer a way of fram-
ing both these examples from science-fiction series and the discussion
within this chapter on memory and television’s material cultures. Writ-
ing in Twilight Memories, Huyssen observes that ‘fundamentally dialec-
tical, the museum serves both as burial chamber of the past – with all
that entails in terms of decay, erosion, forgetting – and as site of pos-
sible resurrections, however mediated and contaminated, in the eyes of
the beholder’ (my emphasis 1995, p. 15). Within these ‘resurrected’
fictions it is the site of the museum that allows a direct engagement
130 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

with the programmes as history but that also draws a parallel between
the museum and television as sites of possible resurrection.
The material artefacts of these two series are themselves not
unfamiliar to the museum. A travelling Battlestar Galactica exhibition
opened at Seattle’s Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum in
October 2010. In the UK Doctor Who props, costumes and memorabilia
have a long history of exhibition, from the ‘Doctor Who Exhibition’ on
Blackpool’s Golden Mile (1974–85), to the touring exhibition ‘The Doc-
tor Who Experience’ held in civic museums across the UK and featuring
items from the new series.6 A life-size Dalek also graces the exhibition
space of TV Heaven at the UK’s National Media Museum – ‘the stuff of
nightmares reduced to an exhibit’, as the Doctor himself proclaims (see
Figure 5.3).
For Huyssen, the museum is both the space of the archive and the
exhibition, and it is the transfer of objects from one to the other, their
re-contextualisation within the ‘spectacular mise-en-scène’ of the exhi-
bition, which marks their resurrection. It is television in the museum
which is the main concern of this chapter. In particular, I will focus on
the curatorial practices of the UK’s National Media Museum (NMM) and
how they reveal some of the symbolic functions, meanings, memories
and feelings generated by television’s material cultures. Museum exhi-
bition is where the ‘past is made to speak’ (Steedman 2001, p. 70); this
chapter is about the stories that it tells and the afterlife it constructs.

Figure 5.3 A Dalek in TV Heaven (courtesy of the National Media

Museum/Science and Society Picture Library).
 Memory, the Museum and Material Culture 131

The transformation of the archive

John Corner has written that the ‘study of television has often been
preoccupied with the contemporary moment, it has been the study of
a perpetual present’ (Corner 1999, p. 121). Whilst this remains true,
more recent shifts in the status of the television archive have arguably
prompted increased interest in television history and historiography
(see, for example, Wheatley 2007). In The Television Heritage, Steve
Bryant, head of the television collections at the British Film Institute
(BFI), writes that when the BBC began its television service in 1936 no
technology existed to record the live transmissions, and it wasn’t until
1948 when the corporation opened a film department and started its
own news film programme (BBC Television Newsreel) that the ‘story of
television archiving really begins’ (1989, p. 5). For Bryant, the attitude
that ‘television was, by its nature, ephemeral and therefore not worth
preserving’ (1989, p. 2) along with various technological and opera-
tional influences meant that television programmes were not preserved
and only fragments remain. Only with a ‘realisation of the economic
value of archives’ from the mid-1970s onwards have the ‘chances of
television programmes being preserved’ been improved (1989, p. 2).
Bryant’s early work on the ‘story of television archiving’ points towards
the need to consider the increasing marketability of the television
archive, but also addresses the fact that as television, as technological
and cultural form, changes, so too do its forms of memorialisation.
Digitisation has increased the ease of access to and use of televi-
sion archives, with digital dissemination projects underway at national,
regional and university archives – examples of which, in the UK, include
BFI projects Screenonline and inview, Scotland on Screen and the col-
laborative European venture Video Active. As educational resources
these archives are offered in protected form and are only accessible
through educational institutions. In comparison YouTube has emerged
as a ‘default’ or ‘accidental’ archive, alongside the cumulative force of
many online television nostalgia archives and forums and the phe-
nomenon of the DVD boxset and its cultures of collection. Traditional
models of television research and pedagogy are being challenged and the
lines between academic and popular histories of television are increas-
ingly blurred.7 The status of moving image archives has prompted much
academic interest, with special editions of journals and conferences ded-
icated to its discussion. Whilst a few years ago there was a fevered
interest in the ‘death’ of television, its afterlife in the space of the archive
is now at the centre of debate.
132 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

Lynn Spigel has warned, however, against the ‘fantasy of total accu-
mulation’ (2005, p. 91) – a belief that digitisation will allow complete,
unmediated access to the archive. There is a clear necessity to pay greater
attention to the frames and logics of the television archive, in its dig-
ital and material forms, and increasing transparency in the work of
archivists, their frames of reference and the selection policies (what is
and isn’t recorded, preserved, digitised) that they employ. Spigel’s work
offers a welcome overview of some of these concerns. Presenting an
account of the history of the television archive in North America, she
focuses on the logics of the archive and the reasons for preservation
and collection (2005, 2010). Paying specific attention to the space of
the museum and the exhibition of television history, I would argue, also
offers a way of addressing some of these concerns and provides a frame-
work through which we might analyse the ‘curatorial practices’ at work
in such digital archive projects.
Spigel’s work also raises questions regarding the role of the television
archive and museum in relation to discourses of civic histories, archi-
tectures and tourism. Her account, in relation to my own research on
Britain’s NMM, serves to illuminate the national differences between
these heritage projects. Most apparent is the distinction between the
television archive and museum as private and public institutions. Here,
the commercial and public service traditions of US and European tele-
vision systems play a significant role in the creation of and access
to different television heritages. Whilst this chapter does not stretch
to include a comparative analysis of the histories and practices of
international ‘media museums’ such as Canada’s Toronto-based MZTV:
Museum of Television, The Paley Center for Media in New York and
Los Angeles, or the Netherlands’ Institute of Sound and Vision, further
research on these museums has the potential to illuminate national
differences and similarities whilst engaging with the limitations, pos-
sibilities and practices of exhibiting media histories across a series of
international examples.
In Britain, the National Archive, operated by the BFI, has functioned
as the main institution responsible for the archiving of commercial
television. The relatively recent formation of the television curatorial
unit has provided a new focus for the BFI which, until then, had
followed an archival procedure but the television collection wasn’t
curated or put into use. In 1988, the BFI developed the Museum of
the Moving Image (MOMI); however, amid controversy and despite its
success, the museum was closed in 1999. The site was regenerated as
the BFI Southbank complex, which now includes the BFI Mediatheque.
 Memory, the Museum and Material Culture 133

Opened in March 2007, the Mediatheque is a free and open-access facil-

ity which allows access to a selection of films and television programmes
from the National Archive.8
The museum in Britain responsible for the archiving and exhibition
of television is to be found outside London. Located in the centre of
Bradford, West Yorkshire, the NMM, formerly the National Museum
of Photography, Film and Television (NMPFT), was founded in 1983.
Along with the Science Museum in London and the National Railway
Museum in York, the NMM forms part of the National Museums of
Science and Industry. In 1999, a three-year and £16 million expansion
programme was completed and the NMM currently attracts, according
to the museum website, more than one million visitors a year. Sited near
the university district, the museum, appearing like a curved wall of con-
crete and glass (see Figure 5.4), overlooks the Victorian architecture of
the city centre, with a statue of a famous son of Bradford, J. B. Priestly, as
its companion. As part of a larger complex it is situated next to the city
library. It houses three cinema screens (one of which is an IMAX screen),
three permanent galleries dedicated to film, television and photogra-
phy, and a significant space for revolving exhibitions. Partnered with

Figure 5.4 The renovated museum, with glass atrium, was reopened in 1999.
It was renamed as the National Media Museum in 2006 (courtesy of the National
Media Museum/Science and Society Picture Library).
134 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

the BBC, the museum plays a significant role in the city’s cultural life,
hosting an International Film and an Animation Festival. The museum
was central to Bradford’s successful bid to become the first UNESCO City
of Film.9 In its collections the museum houses more than three mil-
lion items, and boasts a larger collection of television technology than
the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC. Some of the objects that
aren’t on display in the galleries are accessible via the museum’s research
facilities and archive tour.
Huyssen explores how a contemporary fascination with memory
might be viewed as a reaction to the ‘spread of amnesia’ and forms of
‘planned obsolescence’ in Western society (1995, p. 254). He goes on
to suggest that the increasing popularity of the museum and the mon-
ument as central to this ‘memory boom’ may have something to do
with the fact that both offer something ‘that television denies: the mate-
rial quality of the object’ (1995, p. 255). Opening up a consideration of
the relationship between television and the museum, he begins with a
discussion of Jeudy and Baudrillard’s evocation of the museum as ‘just
another simulation machine: the museum as mass medium is no longer
distinguishable from television’ (1995, pp. 30–31). However, his analysis
stops at the notion of museum as television and doesn’t extend to a con-
sideration of television in the museum, or even television as museum.
This chapter begins to interrogate the apparent incompatibility between
television and the museum, and it is to the question of materiality that
I respond as it seems to mark the ‘paradox’ or ‘dialectic’ of remembering
and forgetting that Huyssen tackles. How can what Geoffrey Hartman
calls the ‘self-consuming present’ (in Bal 1999, p. 180) of television
operate in the halls of memory and history?
The romanticised image of the archive as dusty burial chamber sits at
odds with the modern storage, preservation and security systems of the
NMM archives. Whilst there is a strange presence of the old and archaic,
in collections of early photography, for example, where the daguerreo-
type, tentatively uncovered by the gloved hand of the archivist, is both
enchanting and terrifying in its ghostly singularity, there is a definite
absence of dust which might have previously characterised the archive.
But this absence of dust also exists in a metaphorical sense and is partic-
ularly striking in relation to the museum’s television objects collection,
viewed whilst on the archive tour; these objects are not really that old –
they are just obsolete. It is difficult to get as excited by the shells of
battered wood, black plastic and grey glass – they seemingly lack that
historical aura that perhaps made the daguerreotype so moving – and
in their number, Huyssen’s observations are called to mind. Huyssen
 Memory, the Museum and Material Culture 135

writes that ‘our fascination with the new is always already muted, for
we know that the new tends to include its own vanishing, the fore-
knowledge of its obsolescence in its very moment of appearance’ (1995,
p. 26). The television collection at the NMM stands at a point beyond
the vanishing – it is the grave/junkyard of television technology.
Carolyn Steedman writes in Dust that ‘commentators have found
remarkably little to say about record offices, libraries, repositories, and
have been brought face to face with the ordinariness, the unremarkable
nature of archives and the everyday disappointments that historians
know they will find there. There is a surprise in some of these reactions,
at encountering something far less portentous, difficult and meaning-
ful than Derrida’s archive would seem to promise’ (2001, p. 9). The
familiarity and everydayness of the television as domestic object seems
to further counteract the possibility of being struck down by ‘archive
fever’.10
We might equate the fever-inducing dust of Steedman’s account with
Huyssen’s observations on the auratic appeal of museum objects:

The desire to preserve, to lend a historical aura to objects otherwise

condemned to be thrown away, to become obsolete – all of this can
indeed be read as a reaction to the accelerated speed of moderniza-
tion, as an attempt to break out of the swirling empty space of the
everyday present and to claim a sense of time and memory.
(1995, p. 28)

How is this historical aura to be attached to the objects in this room,

to continue the metaphor, how are they to be made dusty? For those
unaware of the technological history written into the objects, and as
with the space of the museum exhibitions, the ‘sense of time and mem-
ory’ is achieved through narrative. By ordering the fragments, creating
narrative meaning, the dream of the archive is fulfilled in its exhibition,
where the past is made to speak (Steedman 2001, p. 70). An understand-
ing of the context/use/history of the object, as narrated by the curator,
for example, reinserts the object with a memory. Through contextu-
alisation and narrative, the ‘clapometer’ featured on Hughie Green’s
Opportunity Knocks (ITV, 1956–77) becomes a point of nostalgia, as does
the floor camera used on early episodes of EastEnders (BBC, 1985–),
attached with the camera operator’s prompt script authenticating its use.
The early cabinet sets and homemade televisions become documents of
social history, and the BBC clock that reputedly set the time for the
whole institution becomes a source of awe.
136 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

Ordering the fragments

In Marion Leonard’s research into and work on the exhibition of the

material cultures of popular music histories she considers the con-
ceptual underpinnings of popular music exhibitions and divides these
approaches into three main categories: ‘canonic representations, contex-
tualisation as art and the presentation of popular music as represented
as social or local history’ (2007, p. 153). Whilst identifying the central
approaches to the exhibition of television, I want to reflect upon the
significance, difficulties and potentials of exhibiting television. Key to
these reflections are the thoughts of the television curators at the NMM,
drawn from a series of informal interviews conducted across the dura-
tion of this project, which also correspond with a series of changes at
the museum itself and the television galleries in particular.11
The museum’s original interactive television gallery was developed
in 1986, to mark the 50th anniversary of public service broadcasting.
After a £3 million renovation project, ‘Experience TV’, the new inter-
active gallery, opened on 21 July 2006.12 One of the only galleries of
its kind in Europe13 it was designed to approach the ‘story of TV’ via
technological, industrial, historical, commercial, cultural, political and
personal/nostalgic exhibits and narratives (NMPFT press release, 2005).
Part of the new gallery also houses ‘TV Heaven’. Prior to the open-
ing of the BFI’s Mediatheque in spring 2007, TV Heaven was the only
free, open-access television collection in the UK. Influenced by the
viewing facilities at the MTVR in New York, TV Heaven opened at the
NMPFT in 1993 with a collection of little over 100 titles from the last
50 years of British television. The collection now contains over 1000
programmes and is continually growing. The TV Heaven facilities were
extended along with the regeneration of the museum’s permanent tele-
vision exhibitions and collections, and the facilities now include, after
redevelopment, six small soundproof viewing booths for two to five peo-
ple, a large viewing room providing seating for up to 36 people, and a
revised system of electronic storage and exhibition.
The curators and project director identified for me the four key themes
that they wanted to include in the galleries’ renovation. First, following
consultation with practitioners, they wanted to illuminate for visitors
the work involved in the production of television. Secondly, they were
keen to utilise the television objects held in the museum archives.
Thirdly, they hoped to stress the sociocultural impact of television upon
the nation and allow viewers to rethink the impact the medium has on
their own lives. Lastly, they wanted to offer some understanding of the
 Memory, the Museum and Material Culture 137

business of television. The four concerns of the project curators stress

the desire to remember television ‘through its industrial practices and
social effects’ as well as its ‘creative and cultural practices’.14
Leonard suggests that the ‘dynamic, experiential, transient’ nature of
popular music runs against the materiality of museum cultures (2007,
p. 147). Here, the ability of the static space of the museum ‘to capture
or properly reflect the experience of listening to music and partic-
ipating within its associated cultures’ is questioned (2007, p. 148).
These concerns are also significant in thinking about television in the
museum and point to a wider anxiety with regard to the material-
ity of museum practices and their apparent inability to capture the
everydayness and ephemerality of popular cultural forms and practices.
Discussions regarding the musealisation of electronic and digital media
forms inevitably have a parallel with concerns regarding the use of these
media in museum practices. As Ross Parry discusses, the physicality of
tangible objects has for many centuries defined what a museum was. The
development and implementation of computing technology and digiti-
sation projects and strategies into the museum’s functions and facilities
prompted a great deal of anxiety. What emerged, according to Parry,
was a familiar discourse of the ‘real’ (authenticity, uniqueness, trust)
against that of the ‘virtual’ (inauthentic, untrustworthy, artificial), with
two futures for the museum routinely presented. The first being a ‘night-
marish scenario’ in which the museum was ‘reduced to a simulation’
and where curators would witness the death of the object as the visi-
tors inhabited only an online space. In the second, the museum became
a ‘sanctuary for material things in an increasingly digital world’ (2007,
p. 61). Whilst Parry goes on to consider the possibilities of utilising digi-
tal media in the work of the museum, paying attention to the exhibition
of media histories might also serve to illuminate the potentials of these
intangible forms in exhibition design.
However, the tangible object remains at the heart of the exhibitions at
the NMM. At Experience TV, the emphasis upon television technology
is clearly motivated by the remit of the NMM as part of the National
Museums of Science and Industry. As the museum website outlines:

The Television Collection represents the evolution of the techno-

logical means of generating, storing and displaying moving images
by electro-mechanical and electronic methods from the late 19th
century until the present. It aims to record by associated material
how the various processes of television production have developed,
particularly in Britain.
138 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

This presentation of the ‘evolution’ of television as one of the museum’s

‘conceptual underpinnings’ clearly builds a canonical and linear his-
tory of its technologies. Many of the items languishing in the museum’s
archives were put to use in the renovation of the television galleries. For
example, the ‘Race for TV’ exhibit places the sets and artefacts from the
museum’s collections within a chronology which maps the changing
styles and technologies of the television set, and recording and film-
ing technologies (see Figure 5.5). Both the ‘Race for TV’ and the ‘Future
of TV’ exhibits stress the science and technology behind the medium
and its continuing evolution. Incorporated in the centre of this display
is the ‘Evolve Pod’. Sponsored by PACE, the digital television technol-
ogy developer, it is designed as a flexible exhibit to focus on continuing
developments and changes in technology, with recent exhibitions on
digital and 3D television.
In a 2005 press release announcing the Experience TV renovation
project Kathryn Blacker, the museum’s cultural content director, com-
mented that ‘this won’t just be an opportunity to enjoy some fantastic
telly nostalgia – though there will be plenty on show. The gallery will
also allow people to have a go in front of the camera and try behind the
scenes tasks to really get under the skin of television.’ A large interactive

Figure 5.5 Linear histories of television technology (courtesy of the National

Media Museum/Science and Society Picture Library).
 Memory, the Museum and Material Culture 139

area explores the world of television production (from development

through to post-production), where visitors can pretend to read the
news or operate a television camera. This strong interactive focus was in
part a renovation of the previous gallery’s successful interactive exhibits,
but also responded to the demands of the Labour government’s ‘Inspir-
ing Learning for All’ framework, which placed a stress on experiential
learning and the development of skills.15
The success of the interactive elements of the gallery across its history
clearly responds to a different form of materiality employed by the exhi-
bitions, allowing visitors to get ‘under the skin of television’.16 The stress
on experiential forms of learning marks the NMM, and the wider group
of UK National Museums of Science and Industry, as a clear example of
what Eilean Hooper-Greenhill has referred to as the ‘post-museum’. As a
site of mutuality rather than authority, ‘the post-museum must play the
role of partner, colleague, learner (itself), and service provider in order
to remain viable as an institution’ (2000, p. xi).
What emerges most clearly in relation to the gallery’s ‘production
zone’ and its open-access archive – ‘TV Heaven’ – is the role of both
ritual and play within the museum and its intergenerational appeal.
On one hand, the exhibits themselves offer a strong intergenerational
stimulus; the ‘Gallery of Televisions’, for example, a display of television
sets from across the medium’s history, operates as a point of memory for
older visitors, who remember living with the various sets, and a point
of history for younger ones (see Figure 5.6). The museum itself and its
relationship to different generations growing up within the city and the
region is a point of memory and nostalgia. Keeping the same interactive
features (reading the news, a blue screen ‘play’ area) operates as a way
of both prompting and creating memories for the adults who came to
the gallery as children and the children of those adults who routinely
return. I am not arguing that this is unique to the NMM but that the life
of a public museum and its relationship to local and regional communi-
ties is seeped in forms of memory that transcend and complement the
value of the ‘historical aura’ of the objects on display.

Capturing the everyday

The material archive

In Glasgow, rather than residents having to travel to out-of-town recy-
cling centres, the city council offers a collection service whereby large
refuse items will be picked up from the street. On street corners and
140 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

Figure 5.6 The Gallery of Televisions (courtesy of the National Media

Museum/Science and Society Picture Library).

pavements one often encounters the relics of our television lives –

sofas, armchairs and old analogue receivers abandoned in the rain
(see Figure 5.7). Citing Michael Thompson’s work, Rubbish Theory, Joe
Moran writes that ‘while “something which has been discarded, but
never threatens to intrude, does not worry us at all”, rubbish in the
wrong place produces unexpected meanings because it is “emphati-
cally visible” ’ (2004, p. 65). It is the unfamiliar context of the familiar
object that highlights the visibility of obsolete media technology ‘erupt-
ing into the present with evidence of old habits and dead routines’
(Moran 2004, p. 61). Contrary to the accidental and unexpected mem-
ories evoked by abandoned furniture and receivers, the museum is
tasked with the conscious attempt to capture the everyday and the
routine.
Though Experience TV is currently the most popular gallery at the
NMM, the curators can be seen to face two particular challenges in
exhibiting television. First, as a popular cultural form, the visitor comes
with an already extensive knowledge of the medium in relation to both
their own and wider social histories. The challenge of the curator is how
to add additional value and interpret the objects for the ‘expert’ visitor,
 Memory, the Museum and Material Culture 141

Figure 5.7 A television set as an obsolete object (image: author’s own).

and related to this is the project of ‘re-enchantment’. Discussing the

‘museal glance of re-enchantment’, Huyssen writes that:

the point of exhibiting was quite frequently to forget the real, to lift
the object out of its original everyday functional context, thereby
enhancing its alterity, and to open it up to potential dialogue with
other ages: the museum object as historical hieroglyph rather than
simply a banal piece of information; its reading an act of mem-
ory, its very materiality grounding its aura of historical distance and
transcendence in time.
(1995, p. 33)

What does this ‘glance of re-enchantment’ mean for the exhibition of

television? The Gallery of Televisions offers one particular example of
this practice. Neither chronologically ordered nor extensively framed by
contextual information, the display is striking in its breadth and height
as visitors’ necks crane back to see the top-shelf receivers.17 Framed by
a pool of light that sets shadows at play and emphasises the changing
depth of the various receivers, the lighting design is also reminiscent
of the blurred edges of the cathode-ray television set. An evocative
and arresting display, we might see this design in relation to Stephen
Greenblatt’s description of the production of ‘wonder’ as a model for
142 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

the exhibition of works of art.18 By wonder he refers to ‘the power of

the displayed object to stop the viewer in his or her tracks, to convey
an arresting sense of uniqueness, to evoke an exalted attention’ (1990,
p. 42). The use of ‘boutique lighting’ is key to this effect whereby ‘a pool
of light that has the surreal effect of seeming to emerge from within
the object rather than to focus upon it from without – is an attempt to
provoke or to heighten the experience of wonder’ (1990, p. 49). Rather
than emphasising uniqueness, in this instance the pool of light binds
the objects together whilst illuminating their various dimensions – an
effect which underlines the part/whole relations of the collection.
A dialogue between the objects is opened up in this particular display
as they speak to one another about shifting designs and technolog-
ical ‘progress’ in neither a linear nor a didactic fashion. By lifting
the objects of television’s material archive out of their everyday func-
tional context and into the ‘wondrous’ mise-en-scène of the exhibition,
re-enchantment is realised. The aim of the Experience TV project
appears to be the provision of space, where visitors can both reinvest
in television and reappraise its significance (as technology, industry,
cultural and artistic form) in everyday life. Whilst the removal of the
object’s context is successful in this instance as a way of highlighting the
visibility and significance of the material archive, it is the experiential
histories of television that prove more difficult to capture.
Whilst experiential forms of learning have come to dominate museum
pedagogy, capturing these experiential histories is a different and a dif-
ficult curatorial challenge. The ephemeral and transient practices of
television as a popular cultural form find a material base in the rou-
tine and everydayness of the domestic home. It is this relationship
that has been and could be used as an attempt to represent changing
viewing experiences within the limitations and possibilities of museum
exhibition. Putting the set back into its domestic context is a possi-
bility that has already been explored by the museum. The museum’s
earlier television gallery, opened in 1986, can be seen in a programme
entitled Television Comes to Bradford (BBC, 1986), broadcast to publicise
the opening of the new gallery at what was then called the NMPFT.
Revealing both the dramatic changes in the exhibitions and its points
of continuity, the early gallery reconstructed historical ‘scenes’ from the
development of television technology, its earlier forms of production
and viewing practices through the use of mannequins. Television’s ‘fam-
ily circle’ of the late 1940s and early 1950s was recreated, complete with
its generational and gender dynamics, by placing the receiver back into
the context of a period domestic setting and scenario where a white,
 Memory, the Museum and Material Culture 143

Figure 5.8 Domestic viewing as an exhibit in the 1986 television gallery at the
NMPFT, Television Comes to Bradford (dir. Simon Willis, BBC, 1986).

clearly affluent, family gathers around the set; father sits sternly in his
armchair, the daughter crouches on the floor and the wife serves the
drinks (see Figure 5.8). The now outmoded reconstruction serves as an
attempt by the museum’s earlier curators to capture an earlier form of
viewing experience through its representation.
An experiential form of history that attempts to capture the history
of experience is familiar from forms of history on television, which
are often described as ‘reality history’. 1900 House (Channel 4, 1999)
followed the lives of a contemporary family living in the recreated con-
ditions of a family at the turn of the twentieth century. More recently,
production company Wall to Wall revised this format in the three-part
series Electric Dreams (BBC4, 2009), where a family, stripped of mod-
ern technologies, lived through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s (a new year
each day) and the changing effects and experiences of technology upon
the home. In getting ‘under the skin’ of television, there is arguably
the potential for museum visitors to engage in this form of experiential
history. The conversion of period sets and the recreation of appropriate
domestic interiors in which archive television could be viewed would
allow visitors to try on, Iain Logie Baird, ‘their ancestors’ technological
clothing’.
It is a notion that has possibilities for pedagogy within both the
museum and the classroom. Writing in 1990, John Caughie observed
that ‘there is a real risk in the theorising and, particularly, in the
144 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

teaching of television of opening up a gap between the television

which is taught and theorised and the television which is experienced.
Teaching seeks out the ordering regularities of theory. A television is con-
structed which is teachable, but may not be recognisable’ (1990, p. 50).
This is a dilemma exacerbated by the shift from analogue to digital.
Though the current generation of students are old enough to remember
the former, the ways in which to capture the experience of the analogue
for a generation of ‘digital natives’ require greater exploration.19

The programme archive

The above suggestion illuminates the ways in which the material
and immaterial parts of the television archive could combine within
museum exhibition and beyond to illuminate television’s various histo-
ries and ignite memories of the everyday. As Joe Moran has written ‘the
value of memories of the everyday is that they can shatter this illusion
of timelessness, erupting into the present with evidence of old habits
and dead routines’ (2004, p. 61). The gallery’s open-access programme
collection ‘TV Heaven’ arguably presents a space where memories of the
everyday can be invoked by the visitor, in this instance, rather than the
museum.
Though on the same floor of the museum, TV Heaven is situated in
a second part of the gallery. It is away from the interactive gallery and
the displays of television technology and situated beyond a series of dis-
plays engaging with the ‘social effects’ of television. Through smaller
text- and image-based exhibits these displays provide information on
advertising, audiences and ratings as well as asking questions about the
‘influence’ and ‘power’ of television.20 It is within this context that the
gallery explicitly engages with visitors’ memories of television through
an installation of ‘flashbulb’ memory moments in British television
history. Just before the entrance to TV Heaven, in a partitioned and
darkened viewing room, there is another video installation featuring
‘iconic moments of television’. Screened on loop in a small viewing
space with a large screen, the installation provides a space for both
learning and recollection, framed by the statement – ‘You’ll remem-
ber where you were and who you were with the first time you saw
them.’ The ‘moments’ feature the following events: the first man on
the moon (1969), the fall of the Twin Towers (2001), the marriage of
Prince Charles to Diana Spencer (1981), Live Aid (1985), the fall of the
Berlin Wall (1989), Thatcher arriving at Downing Street (1979), the New
Labour/Blair landslide (1997), England winning the World Cup (1966),
the Challenger disaster (1986), Diana, Princess of Wales’ funeral (1997),
 Memory, the Museum and Material Culture 145

the Hillsborough tragedy (1989), the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth

II (1953) and the Iranian Embassy siege (1980). Remarking that the ‘dif-
ficult content’ on display in this installation required great sensitivity,
the curators chose a reverential treatment, creating a darkened space
away from the other exhibits and abstaining from using voice-over nar-
ration. This creation of a privileged space within the gallery emphasises,
not the tragedy or celebration of each event, but the power and reso-
nance of television both to capture them and to reverberate down the
years. This canonisation of memory is certainly not unique and returns
us to the dominance of the news and media event in constructions of
television memory.
TV Heaven is arguably an avenue for more open and less didactic
forms of remembrance, yet, given this chapter’s emphasis on television’s
material archive and its use within museum exhibition, what are the
potentials and limitations of the programme archive? Is it possible for
the contents of TV Heaven, as a collection of television programmes,
to similarly re-enchant the visitor? If it is the ‘very materiality’ of the
museum object that grounds ‘its aura of historical distance and transcen-
dence in time’, then how does TV Heaven, without ‘material’ content,
work as an exhibition space? How can a non-material form accumu-
late dust? Huyssen stresses the importance of the materiality of objects
in the museum and their temporal aura as a ‘guarantee against simula-
tion, but – this is the contradiction – their very anamnestic effect can
never entirely escape the orbit of simulation and is even enhanced by
the simulation of the spectacular mise-en-scène’ (1995, pp. 33–4). The
exhibition of television in the museum has an interesting relationship
to this contradiction of materiality and simulation as it is clearly situ-
ated in both realms. Television as object, technology and activity retains
its material quality, yet the television image, according to Huyssen, is
‘incompatible’ with material reality (1995, p. 34). If we view television
as a possible point of collective identification, rather than a ‘vanishing
act’, then both TV Heaven and the wider gallery act as a place to share
and affirm experiences and memories of our television autobiographies.
If the museum and the archive are to be read as expressions of ‘the grow-
ing need for spatial and temporal anchoring in a world of increasing flux
in ever denser networks of compressed time and space’ (Huyssen 2003,
p. 27), then television in the museum might offer an alternative form of
anchoring, allowing us to reclaim, via the television image, a ‘sense of
time and memory’.
On one occasion, whilst observing the users of TV Heaven, I was
struck by the over-excitement of two middle-aged men from north-east
England, one of whom had a dramatic response to the possibility of
146 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

(re)watching an episode of Jukebox Jury (BBC, 1959–67), an episode

that he remembered originally viewing as a young man. Sitting in the
archive, I observed the users processes of selection and the viewing of
their programmes. As many users come and view in groups, this pro-
cess is often vocalised and their selections are often validated through
stories of personal memories. I have also seen single users feel the need
to discuss or reminisce with the museum staff as though the experi-
ence of reviewing programmes that are important to their respective
personal memories and histories produces a surplus of feeling that has
to be vocalised.
‘Performing autobiography’ is a phrase employed by Garoian in his
discussion of the display of works of art to refer to the memoires and cul-
tural histories brought to the museum by the visitor, which enables both
a framework for interpretation and the performance of their subjectivi-
ties (2001, p. 241). A phrase which Leonard also applies to the exhibition
of popular music (2010, p. 177), it refers to a mode of engagement which
is clearly not specific to television, music or fine art, but in the context of
this discussion it illuminates the significance of the visitor’s encounter
with the television image to personal and collective forms of resonance.
As visitors share the experience of remembering television, vocalising
their excitement and forging identifications among themselves and with
the staff, what you can witness in TV Heaven is the active existence
of television functioning as a powerful point of autobiographical and
collective reference for remembered lives.

To days to come/all my love to long ago

Although it only opened five years ago, Experience TV, according to

Baird, is already in need of updating, in relation to continuing develop-
ments in television technology and media convergence. Colin Philpott,
head of the NMM, has said that, ‘As technologies converge and the lines
between genres become blurred we need to reflect this and be the win-
dow through which audiences can follow, understand and engage in
those changes’ (in Spicer 2006). According to Greg Dyke, these changes
must also be memorialised: ‘It’s the speed of change that’s happening
now that’s interesting and that’s what we need to understand – what is
the impact? And, of course, we need to keep some of that in our collec-
tions, because that’s part of our heritage’ (in Spicer 2006). The decision
to change the name of the National Museum of Photography, Film and
Television to the National Media Museum, and the decision to extend
its remit to cover and collect new media forms, is indicative of these
 Memory, the Museum and Material Culture 147

changes. With a new foyer, a temporary Games Lounge (drawing from

the National Videogames Archive) unveiled in February 2010 and an
internet gallery in development, complicated questions about how to
best exhibit a new generation of media technologies and how to draw
in a new generation of visitors are being handled by the museum’s cura-
torial teams. It is arguably the experience of media convergence that
presents a significant challenge to the museum, both in the rapid pace
of change and the blurring of the distinctions between media forms.
The Museum of Television and Radio in the US took a different strat-
egy to tackle the changing media environment. In June 2007, it was
announced that the museum was changing its name to the Paley Cen-
ter for Media. According to Elizabeth Jensen in the New York Times the
intention behind the change in both name and remit was to make the
museum ‘more inviting and its holdings more accessible’, to encourage
a younger generation of visitors and expand the ‘pool of possible bene-
factors’ (Jensen 2007). Whilst the museum never focused its attention
on the exhibition of television artefacts, the ‘center’ further ‘down-
played’ its archive of television and radio programmes and recast itself
as a centre for discussion between the public and industry leaders.
The collections policy also became more discriminating, with attention
being focused on the digitisation of existing collections and new digital
dissemination strategies.
There is a clear difficulty in writing about the constantly evolving
practices of the NMM determined, as it is, not only by technologi-
cal innovations but also financial constraints, and particularly at the
time of writing, a phase of deep governmental cuts to public services.
What is revealed by the NMM’s current collecting policy, though, is its
unique attempt to reflect technological change and update the media
histories it curates and to make visible a longer history of the rela-
tionships between media forms and their impact on one another. For
example, with regard to the television collections, the key themes of
the collecting policy include the impact of television technology devel-
opment on other media and the analogue to digital transition.21 The
NMM makes visible the constant evolution of media technologies, chal-
lenging accounts of the revolutionary powers of ‘new media’ which are
often predicated on an illusory understanding of television as a static
and stable object.
In capturing change and convergence, the NMM is also a monu-
ment to media obsolescence. On 6 July 2010 The Guardian reported the
‘death of the analogue television set’, with all major high street elec-
tronics retailers stopping selling analogue receivers ‘nearly 85 years after
148 Television, Memory and Nostalgia

John Logie Baird held his first public display’ (Conlan 2010).22 It is the
transition between analogue and digital that has run through the course
of this book as both an anxiety and a catalyst, central to television’s
own paradoxical memory boom, and whilst the museum endeavours to
capture and interpret this transition for current and future users, the
viewer’s changing relationship to television poses new and continuing
challenges. This is not uniquely the challenge of the museum but poses
wider problems and possibilities for future engagements with television
and its relationship to memory and nostalgia. This book has stressed,
for example, the role of ‘growing up’ with television as fundamental to
this relationship, and it is the experience of having grown up with ana-
logue television that has framed my own memories and observations
within this project and has determined my response to new television
technologies and formats. This line of argument inevitably prompts a
series of questions which cannot yet be answered – what different expe-
riences, memories of and attitudes towards television will be formed by
growing up in the digital era, and what effect will this have on the forms
of television that are made, remembered and researched? It is my hope
that this book might pave a way for thinking about television memories
forged in days to come.
James Bennett usefully describes television as ‘a technological and cul-
tural form that lies at the boundaries of old and new media’ (2008,
p. 163). Blurring distinctions between the two, television, once again,
can be seen to inhabit, evoke, construct, complicate and play with
the relationship between past and present. The title of this conclusion
returns us to Doctor Who and is drawn from a brief encounter between
two Doctors in a special short episode from 2007 produced for the BBC’s
annual charity telethon Children in Need (1980–). In ‘Time Crash’ the
TARDIS short-circuits and the tenth Doctor, played by David Tennant,
finds himself occupying the same time zone as the earlier fifth Doctor
played by Peter Davison (1982–4). Our heroes bicker and bond as they
work to fix the TARDIS and as the fifth Doctor fades from view he bids
farewell: ‘To days to come’ Davison remarks, to which Tennant replies –
‘all my love to long ago.’ This is not a collapse of past and present but an
affectionate evocation of television’s significance to our understanding
of and relationship to both. It is in this ebb and flow that autobiograph-
ical and collective forms of memory and nostalgia reveal themselves as
both central to and generated by the workings of television.
Notes

Introduction
1. Television memory canons are inevitably weighted according to national
contexts and are particularly significant for certain understandings of national
identity. For example, the dominance of televisual narratives regarding both
world wars and the popular evocation of England’s 1966 World Cup win.
For Paul Gilroy, the ‘obsession’ with these events embodied by the infamous
chant within English football culture – ‘two world wars and one world cup’ –
supplies a ‘wealth of valuable insights into the morbid culture of a once-
imperial nation that has not been able to accept its inevitable loss of prestige
in a determinedly postcolonial world’ (Gilroy 2004, p. 117).
2. A characteristic I also explore elsewhere, see Holdsworth 2010.
3. ‘The Turin Bomb: Making and Unmaking the Memory of World War II’, a
research seminar presented at the University of Glasgow, 17th May 2010.
4. BBC Four launched in 2002 and is a BBC television channel available to dig-
ital television viewers in the UK. Viewed as a ‘cultural’ channel, BBC Four
aims to ‘offer an intelligent alternative to programmes on the mainstream TV
channels’ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/faq).

1 Half the World Away: Television, Space, Time

and Memory
1. For example, the work of Andrew Hoskins, Steven D. Brown and Nuria
Lorenzo-Dus (and their research team) on the Arts and Humanities Research
Council-funded project: ‘Conflicts of Memory: Mediating and Commemo-
rating the 2005 London Bombings’ offers a sustained and interdisciplinary
investigation into the coverage of one particular traumatic news event and
the forms of memory and remembrance that follow.
2. Arrest of ex-president Chun Doo-Hwan (1995); Hong Kong handover cere-
mony; Princess Diana’s death and funeral; official approval of the Interna-
tional Monetary Fund; presidential inauguration; millennium celebrations;
President Kim Dae-Jung visits North Korea; attack on the World Trade Cen-
ter; FIFA World Cup held in Japan/Korea; Roh Moo-Hyun elected president
(2003).
3. For further discussion of these points, see Holdsworth 2010.
4. This music is taken from the score of the television drama series Deadwood
(HBO, 2004–6).
5. One of the most famous examples of the black mirror is a circular mirror
formed of polished obsidian stone, on display in the British Museum, and
used by Dr John Dee in divination. Maillet’s account, through the history
of the black mirror, focuses on the small black convex mirrors, known

149
150 Notes

as the ‘Claude Glass’, and used in the eighteenth century as an optical

device.
6. Taken from Boym’s short essay ‘The Black Mirror, or Technoerrotics’
which accompanies this collection of images. Available at http://www.
svetlanaboym.com/mirrors.html (accessed 11 January 2011).
7. In another short essay, ‘Nostalgic Technology: Notes for an Off-modern Man-
ifesto’, Boym describes her use of ‘off-modern’: ‘The prefixes “avant” and
“post” appear equally outdated or irrelevant in the current media age. The
same goes for the illusions of “trans.” But this doesn’t mean that one should
try desperately to be in. There is another option; not to be out, but off.
As in off-stage, off-key, off-beat and occasionally, off-color. One doesn’t have
to be “absolutely modern,” as Rimbaud once dreamed, but off-modern. A lateral
move of the knight in game of chess. A detour into some unexplored poten-
tialities of the modern project.’ Available at http://www.svetlanaboym.com/
manifesto.htm (accessed 11 January 2011).
8. Though the loss of reflection in these contemporary screens might appear
to contradict this argument, in Maillet’s account he describes other possi-
ble forms of the ‘black mirror’. These include those used by magicians and
formed out of ‘circular mirrors of paper blackened by carbon pencil or char-
coal, those made of pure black woollen cloth, or else of wood with a surface
slightly charred by a candle flame’. Neither reflective nor bright it is ‘the
color black [which] suffices to capture the gaze and to fix it so that “things”
will come forth’ (2004, p. 59).
9. Recent Christmas specials ‘The New Sofa’ (2008) and ‘The Golden Eggcup’
(2009) saw the Royle’s living room swapped for Denise and Dave’s house
and Christmas with Dave’s parents, and a cramped and fractious holiday in
a caravan in the ‘pearl of Prestatyn’.
10. Karen Lury offers a more sustained analysis of this in Interpreting Television
(2005, pp. 157–61).
11. The project was a close collaboration between the Film and Video
Umbrella, Artists in the City in Reading (UK) and the Ikon Gallery in
Birmingham (UK).
12. Paul Watson’s 12-part fly-on-the-wall series was modelled on the observa-
tional documentary series An American Family (PBS, 1973). More recently
Channel 4 in the UK has resurrected the format with 24-hour surveil-
lance cameras installed in the subject’s home (The Family, Channel 4,
2008–).
13. The three remaining categories of Bourdon’s typology of television memories
are about specific, discrete events. ‘Media events and flashbulbs are related
to memories of actual viewing and concern the specific genre of news or
current affairs. The fourth category, close encounters, consists of memories
of events not directly related to viewing, and concerns ‘real life’ interactions
between viewers and television personalities’ (2003, p. 13).
14. Whilst these memories are drawn from a British perspective, different cli-
mates and environments will work to produce other conditions of viewing
and other patterns and flickers of memory.
15. This discussion is indebted to Karen Lury who shared with me similar
experiences of these phenomena.
16. Series 1, episode 7 (tx: BBC2, 23 November 2004).
 Notes 151

2 Haunting the Memory: Moments of Return in

Television Drama
1. In order, we witness the deaths of series regulars Ruth Fisher (Frances
Conroy), Keith Charles (Mathew St. Patrick), David Fisher (Michael
C. Hall), Frederico ‘Rico’ Diaz (Freddy Rodriguez), Brenda Chenowith (Rachel
Griffiths) and, finally, Claire Fisher.
2. Moment (n): from Latin momentum movement, movement of time, instant,
moving power, consequence, importance (Chambers Dictionary of Etymology,
1988, p. 672).
3. For example, the ‘previously on’ sequence of the 100th episode of Buffy the
Vampire Slayer (The WB/UPN, 1997–2003) was an accelerating montage of
moments/images from all 100 episodes, whilst an increasingly worn out
Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) comments in the episode that the 6th apoc-
alypse they are facing feels like the 100th. The 100th episode of Angel (The
WB, 1999–2004) sees the return of Cordelia Chase (Charisma Carpenter) for
one last mission. The death of the Wisteria Lane handyman (Beau Bridges)
prompts a series of flashbacks and the return of Mary Alice Young (Brenda
Strong) in the 100th episode of Desperate Housewives (ABC, 2004–).
4. Perfect Strangers DVD (BBC, 2004).
5. Proust’s distinction between involuntary and voluntary memory is delin-
eated in Benjamin’s essay ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ (1939) in which
he cites from Proust’s Swann’s Way – ‘And so it is with our own past. It is
a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect
must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond
the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that
material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object,
it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves
must die’ (in Benjamin 1999, p. 155).
6. Faye Woods has considered the particular uses of music that are specific
to the television serial format, such as the inter-episode allusive use of
‘Hallelujah’ in The O.C. (Fox, 2003–7), American Dreams’ (NBC, 2002–5)
use of popular song to tie together multiple storylines, and the end-of-
episode musical ‘Coda’ seen in One Tree Hill (The WB/The CW, 2003–) (2007,
p. 325–6). See also Julie Brown’s analysis of the use of music in Ally McBeal
(Fox, 1997–2002) and the ‘dramatic recapitulatory function’ of the final
montage (2001, p. 285).
7. Caughie writes that ‘art television seems to imply a viewer conceived to
be intelligent, and possibly critical, “reading” an author conceived to be
intentional, and possibly creative’ (2000, p. 140).
8. ‘The Book of Abby’, season 15, episode 3; and ‘Shifting Equilibrium’, season
15, episode 20.
9. Nurse Lydia Wright (Ellen Crawford) wakes both doctors.
10. Season 15, episode 19.
11. The episode is also dedicated to Sheldon Zabel, uncle of executive producer
David Zabel.
12. A self-consciousness that is additionally created through the extra-textual
publicity for the final series and the promotion of the ‘return’ of Anthony
Edwards; the audience is led to anticipate the moment of this ‘reveal’.
152 Notes

13. This is one particular form of reflection as the storylines of specific patients
also often work to reflect upon ‘issues’ of medical care and policy.
14. Callie Torres (Sara Ramirez) in ‘Time Has Come Today’, season 3, episode 1.
15. Forms of ‘speech-making’ are certainly not unique to Grey’s Anatomy and can
be seen elsewhere in, for example, the political rhetoric of The West Wing
(NBC, 1999–2006) or the infamous emotional and verbal dexterity of Julia
Sugarbaker (Dixie Carter) in Designing Women (CBS, 1986–93).
16. ‘Bring the Pain’, season 2, episode 5.
17. This storyline involves the niece of the chief of surgery who is brought into
hospital on the eve of her school prom. Missing this coming of age event the
chief decides to reorganise and host the prom at Seattle Grace. It is perhaps
a more explicit example of the merging of teen and hospital sub-genres.
18. ‘Time Has Come Today’, season 3, episode 1.
19. ‘Didn’t We Almost Have It All’, season 3, episode 25.
20. For regular viewers Denny is closely associated with death as the posthumous
Denny has previously returned to the series in a hallucination sequence dur-
ing Meredith’s near death experience in ‘Some Kind of Miracle’ (season 3,
episode 17).
21. A term regular hospital drama viewers will probably be familiar with, collo-
quially asystole is known as ‘flatline’ meaning a state of no cardiac electrical
activity.
22. A line he consistently repeats throughout his mid-season return, the reso-
nance of which is re-read in his revelation/Izzie’s realisation of her illness –
he is not here to support but to collect.
23. There has been a wealth of scholarship published in recent years on HBO
and/as quality American television, see, for example, Nelson (2007) and
Leverette, Ott and Buckley (2008).
24. Shot by ‘sentimental motherfucker’ Slim Charles (Anwan Glover), there is no
mourning of Cheese’s passing – the rest of the collective are merely unhappy
that they are left short of his monetary contribution.
25. A key characteristic of the soap opera where time, rather than action,
becomes the basis for organising the narrative, creating a sense of life
carrying on even when we’re not watching.
26. ‘Port in a Storm’, season 2, episode 12; and ‘-30-’, season 5, episode 10.
27. ‘Bad Dreams’, season 2, episode 11.
28. ‘The Dickensian Aspect’, season 5, episode 6.

3 Who Do You Think You Are? Memory and Identity in the

Family History Documentary
1. Academic and documentary producer Paul Kerr has spoken about the influ-
ence of WDYTYA on the production of this documentary in his article ‘The
Genealogy of a British Television History Programme’ (2009).
2. ‘ . . . and crucially in the slimmed down BBC, made by an independent
production company. Little wonder, then, that the director general Mark
Thompson has been citing it in his recent speeches’ (Brown 2004).
3. Hunt cites 1900 House (Channel 4, 1999), another Wall to Wall production,
as ‘the pioneer programme in this “experiential history” genre [ . . . ] with
 Notes 153

its easy invitation to empathy, reality history failed to invite more search-
ing questions about the underlying structure of the past’ (2005). In recent
years Hunt has also attacked WDYTYA, arguing that ‘television history is
now more about a self-indulgent search for our identity than an attempt to
explain the past and its modern meaning’ (2007).
4. ‘The Turin Bomb: Making and Unmaking the Memory of World War II’,
Research seminar presented at the University of Glasgow, 17 May 2010.
5. Peter Sherlock’s work on the reforming of memory in early modern Europe
is fascinating in its illumination of the historical specificities of the under-
standings and uses of memory. Exploring memory in relation to the
construction of renaissance and reformation identities, he considers how
‘Petrach and his successors sought to recast memory, not as a practice about
recalling the past, but as a way of projecting the self into the future’. This
‘new emphasis on fame and the desire to find genealogical links to the past
led to an increase in the production of family histories from the fifteenth
century onwards’ (2010, p. 36). Family history operated as a way of fos-
tering allegiances and commemorating the lineages of celebrated families.
Employed to lend credibility, families often rewrote their histories, engaging
the mythmaking services of heralds and their ilk (2010, p. 37).
6. ‘Narrative Strategies and Emotional Engagement: How Genre and Format
Deliver Audiences in UK TV History Products’ Televising History: Memory,
Nation, Identity conference (held at University of Lincoln, 13–15 June 2007).
7. The Daily Mirror TV Guide remarked that ‘This is famously the programme
that made telly toughie Jeremy Paxman cry’ (Anon. 2006, p. 19), whilst
Ciar Bryne wrote in The Independent – ‘It is a sight few people would have
expected to see on television – Jeremy Paxman, that most ferocious of
political interviewers, reduced to tears’ (2005, p. 5).
8. WDYTYA, series 2, episode 1 (tx: BBC2, 11 January 2006).
9. As Alex Graham stated back in 2004: ‘It’s not a very complicated proposi-
tion. It is about people you are interested in, and taking them, perhaps, on
unpredictable emotional journeys’ (in Brown 2004).
10. WDYTYA, series 1, episode 9 (tx: BBC2, 7 December 2004).
11. Tx: BBC2, 12 October 2004.
12. Forms of archival aesthetics and storytelling have been investigated in John
Corner’s (2006) analysis of Wisconsin Death Trip (dir. James Marsh, 2000) and
Holdsworth (2006) and Hogg’s (2010) work on Shooting the Past (1999).
13. Series 2, episode 2 (tx: BBC2, 18 January 2006).
14. A sentiment that runs across key writings on photography by Walter
Benjamin (1999), Susan Sontag (1977) and Roland Barthes (1980).
15. Tx: BBC1, 12 August 2009.
16. WDYTYA, series 2, episode 3 (tx: BBC2, 25 January 2006).
17. WDYTYA, series 1, episode 6 (tx: BBC2, 16 November 2004).
18. Simon Schama’s A History of Britain DVD liner notes.
19. WDYTYA, series 1, episode 7 (tx: BBC2, 23 November 2004).
20. WDYTYA, series 1, episode 4 (tx: BBC2, 2 November 2004).
21. WDYTYA, series 1, episode 5 (tx: BBC2, 9 November 2004).
22. WDYTYA, series 1, episode 8 (tx: BBC2, 30 November 2004).
23. Nicholas Crane uses William Camden’s 1586 topographical survey of Britain
as his guide. In other examples, the tourist handbook of George Bradshaw is
154 Notes

utilised by former MP Michael Portillo in Great British Railway Journeys (BBC,

2010–) and Harold Briercliffe’s cycling tours are revisited by presenter Clare
Balding in Britain by Bike (BBC, 2010).
24. Series 1, episode 2 (tx: BBC2, 19 October 2004).
25. The BBC campaign objectives for the first series of WDYTYA were stated
as the following: 1) To enable and encourage 150,000 ABC1 50+ BBC2
audiences to start researching their own family history for the first time;
2) To bring new users to archives and genealogical websites; 3) To give people
a meaningful sense of their personal connection with history (in Sumpner
et al. 2005).
26. WDYTYA, series 7, episode 5 (tx: BBC1, 16 August 2010).
27. Alison Landsberg also points towards a similar concern in her account of the
success of Alex Haley’s Roots (ABC, 1977) in 1970s America. She writes that
‘while it enabled many whites to see through black eyes for the first time,
what emerged from the experience of Roots was not so much a critique of
white oppression as an appreciation of the importance and power of geneal-
ogy [ . . . ] Rather than forcing white Americans to take a look at their own
attitudes toward race, rather than forcing them to own up to the crimes of
slavery, the mass media stimulated instead a fascination with the project of
genealogy’ (2004, pp. 105–6).
28. Gilroy’s conceptualisation of ‘postcolonial melancholia’ employs the
Mitscherlichs’ model of a German post-war melancholia developed in The
Inability to Mourn (1975). Gilroy’s work explores ‘Britain’s inability to mourn
the loss of empire’ (2004, p. 111), arguing that, ‘rather than work through
those feelings, that unsettling history was diminished, denied, and then,
if possible, actively forgotten’ (2004, p. 98). Gilroy himself calls for more
‘complex and challenging narratives’ (2004, p. 131).
29. This argument is supported by both Paul Kerr and Ross Wilson’s work on the
representations of slavery on British television. Paul Kerr has written of his
frustrations as the producer of The Last Slave and the reduction of a story of
the last slave ship with multiple points of view to the single documentary
about one man’s ‘personal journey’ in search of his slave ancestors (2009,
p. 394). Whilst Ross Wilson has written an account of the selective amnesia
of the BBC’s abolition season, presenting a ‘preferred version’ of history, one
which emphasised the work of the abolitionists and presented a stable mul-
ticultural Britain untroubled by the past by focusing firmly on the trope of
‘moving on’ (2008, p. 393).
30. MacIntyre, A. (2010) ‘Lisa Kudrow interview’ (3 March). Available at: http://
www.monstersandcritics.com/smallscreen/features/article_1538079.php/
NBC-Who-Do-You-Think-You-Are-comes-March-5-Lisa-Kudrow-interview
(accessed on 2 September 2010).
31. An actor renowned for playing dark and menacing characters, his voice,
whilst measured and controlled, is neither theatrical nor comfy – it might
be described instead as resonating with an uneasy melancholia.
32. After the perceived slippage of public service provision in a period of
increased competition, commercial pressures and the battle for ratings, along
with the shift towards ‘Digital Britain’, 2006 saw intense debates around
the ten-year Royal charter review and the future of the BBC. It is within
the context of this period that the BBC attempts to revalidate its role as a
 Notes 155

public service provider and justify the continuation of, and argue for, an
above-inflation increase in the licence fee.
33. A strategy which also becomes apparent in Niki Strange’s account of the
BBC’s changes to commissioning and the development of the ‘bundled
project’ in the same era. She writes that ‘in tying in this content’ [Great
Britons (BBC, 2002), The Big Read (BBC, 2003), A Picture of Britain (BBC, 2005)]
with a range of initiatives with schools, libraries, national literacy organisa-
tions, and charities, as well as with publishers and book retailers, the BBC
sought to emphasise its successful role less as broadcaster than as orchestra-
tor of a multi-partnered, multi-platform campaign whose public service was
in generating debates around, and reflections on, national identity and, also,
personal ‘transformation’ (2010, p. 139).

4 Safe Returns: Nostalgia and Television

1. I am not charting a history of television about television nor am I examin-
ing the operations of the market for archival material, its distribution and
use – though these are both lines of research that would add greatly to our
knowledge of public and commercial uses and understandings of television
history.
2. In the US context the ‘clip show’ generally refers to an episode in a
series that consists primarily of excerpts from previous episodes, gener-
ally depicted as a sequence of flashbacks given plausibility by a narrative
frame. Despite being heavily parodied within popular American culture, they
remain a popular device that allows audiences to ‘catch-up’ with narrative
events and have been recently employed in Lost (ABC, 2004–10) and Grey’s
Anatomy.
3. Jameson’s critique of the ‘nostalgia mode’ in his Postmodernism is a com-
monly cited example in discussions of nostalgia and nostalgia television. He
argues that the ‘past as “referent” finds itself gradually bracketed, and then
effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts’ (1991, p. 18). Nostal-
gia, in Jameson’s terms, is ahistorical, sentimentalising and represents the
decline in ‘our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way’
(1991, p. 21).
4. Recent years have seen a series of biopics and nostalgic retellings of the
lives and careers of some of Britain’s most popular television performers.
For example, Fantabulosa! The Kenneth Williams Story (BBC4, 2006), Fear of
Fanny (BBC4, 2006), The Curse of Steptoe (BBC4, 2008), Eric and Ernie (BBC2,
2010) and Hattie (BBC4, 2011).
5. These examples are representative of the categories, not a complete list of
the programmes scheduled within that period.
6. Presenting a sustained investigation of nostalgia networks on US televi-
sion, Derek Kompare refers to the ‘ “boutique” model of television repe-
tition’ which creates ‘highly stylized spaces for showcasing past television
programmes’ (2005, p. xvii.).
7. Annie, on the other hand, is clearly a part of the 1973 world. She is already
within the scene when Sam enters and is increasingly bemused by his erratic
behaviour.
156 Notes

8. See the famous introduction to J. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953): ‘The

past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’
9. A production style which will itself become dated.
10. The neat etymological dissection of the word (nos meaning ‘home’ and algia
meaning ‘pain’) allows Svetlana Boym to conceptualise two variants of nos-
talgia; ‘restorative’ nostalgia stresses the first half of the term and ‘proposes
to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps’, whilst ‘reflec-
tive’ nostalgia ‘dwells in algia, in longing and loss, the imperfect process
of remembrance’ (2001, pp. 49–50).
11. There have also been a series of returning quiz and gameshow formats
including Family Fortunes (ITV, 1980–2002) revived as All Star Family Fortunes
(ITV, 2006–), Gladiators (ITV, 1992–2000; ITV, 2008), Shooting Stars (BBC2,
1993–7; BBC2, 2008–) and a compendium of Saturday teatime favourites in
Ant and Dec’s Gameshow Marathon (ITV, 2005–7).
12. The broadcasts were also preceded by a screening and interview with
Poliakoff and his leading actors at the National Film Theatre in London.
13. The historical narrative goes that the process of rapid recruitment from a
specific politically aware generation in the wake of the Pilkington Report was
seen to have a transformative effect on the BBC and its drama production.
14. BBC Four repeated the format in 2007 with Children’s TV on Trial.
15. Emma Sandon’s essay on the Alexandra Palace Television Society oral history
collection, recorded between 1936 and 1952, offers a fascinating account of
an example of the generational use of nostalgia. Her work reveals how, as
part of a collective identity constructed in line with a British war ethos, that
for the members of the society there was ‘a generational need to be seen to
have “coped” ’ (2007, p. 108).
16. John Caldwell, for example, describes ‘CNN’s use of banks of monitors
that evoked video installations’ (1995, p. 13). Both then and now the
self-consciousness of the television apparatus works to distinguish the
‘televisuality’ of the content.

5 Television’s Afterlife: Memory, the Museum and

Material Culture
1. The Daleks have also been consistently destroyed and resurrected across
the history of the show. Their emergence in Russell T. Davies’ Doctor Who
had to be expected and the moment the Doctor and his worst enemy were
reacquainted was heavily trailed before it aired. For a complete account of
the Daleks’ history on the programme, prior to Davies’ reincarnation, see
Newman (2005).
2. The National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, is the location for the museum
scenes in this episode and others, including, ‘Planet of the Dead’ (special
episode, 2009), ‘Vincent and the Doctor’ (series 5, episode 10) and ‘The Big
Bang’ (series 5, episode 13).
3. Promising less focus on the show’s history and new monsters and villains
to look forward to, series writer Steven Moffat took over as ‘showrunner’ in
2010 with a new Doctor (Matt Smith) and companion, Amy Pond (Karen
Gillen).
 Notes 157

4. ‘School Reunion’ (series 2, episode 3).

5. Nostalgic retrieval became a successful formula for the show under Russell
T. Davies’ control. With a parade of characters and villains returning from
the original series, the Cybermen, Davros, The Master and even Gallifrey,
the Doctor’s extinct home planet, and the Time Lords were resurrected in
Davies’ last episodes (‘The End of Time’, pts 1 and 2, special episodes, 2009).
6. A new version of the ‘Doctor Who Experience’ opened in London in February
2011, destined for a permanent home base in Cardiff from 2012.
7. Alan McKee (2010) offers a useful comparison between YouTube and
Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive as educational resources.
8. Like the rest of the UK’s public services the BFI has had its funding cut by
the current government. At a time of radical change brought about by both
an archival policy review and the savage cuts to its functions and facilities,
the current status of the BFI as a national television archive is uncertain.
9. Due to funding constraints the ‘Bite the Mango’ world cinema festival was
abandoned in 2010 after 15 years.
10. Steedman is referring here to Derrida’s conceptualisation of ‘archive fever’
and his meditation on the politics of desire associated with this particular
sickness (see Derrida 1996).
11. I initially met with Sheena Vigors (former curator of TV Heaven) in 2006
then with Kathryn Blacker (content director) and Claire Thomas (curator
of television) in 2007. Blacker and Thomas had been heavily involved in
the renovation and redesign of the television galleries into Experience TV.
I returned to the museum in 2010 to meet with the new head of television,
Iain Logie Baird, to discuss the success, the limitations and the future of the
new gallery.
12. After consultation with focus groups and an advisory group featuring indus-
try professionals, academics and learning specialists, the design brief for
Experience TV was finalised in November 2005. Work began in February
2006 and the gallery opened in July 2006.
13. Another example is The Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision. The
focus on interactivity and media production along with a strong nostal-
gic appeal marks the difference, as remarked upon by Kathryn Blacker of
the NMM, between these European initiatives and the ‘intellectual’ and
‘historical’ pursuits of the MTVR (now the Paley Center for Media) in the
US (interviewed 17 April 2007).
14. Kompare has written of the American context that ‘the heritage is largely
constructed, even at the level of “legitimate” history, out of textual arte-
facts. Television is effectively remembered through its creative and cultural
practices, rather than through its industrial practices or social effects’ (2005,
p. 114).
15. Delivered then by the soon-to-be abolished Museums, Libraries and Archives
Council.
16. Though the curators commented that the use of interactive elements resulted
in certain difficulties in establishing the behavioural expectations of (espe-
cially young) visitors. Given the blurring of interactive elements and display-
only exhibits there had been some confusion over what can and can’t
be touched. A decision was reached to use barriers in the majority of the
displays as visitors would often walk straight past the objects in glass boxes.
158 Notes

17. Whilst the framing information emphasises the changing design of the sets
across the years, the sets themselves are shuffled within the display: ‘For
years, the fireplace had been the focal point of the living room. Once the
television arrived, this all changed. It gave people a little window on the
world in their own homes. Early television sets were huge pieces of fur-
niture. By the 1950s, receivers became smaller and more stylish. As time
went on, manufacturers came up with more striking and interesting ways
of building televisions. By the 1990s, everything had changed again. Better
electronics and bigger screens meant that cabinet design was less important.
Increasingly, the focus is on the picture on the screen rather than what’s
surrounding it’ (NMM Gallery of Televisions information card).
18. Greenblatt’s other model is ‘resonance’, referring to the ‘power of the dis-
played object to reach out beyond its formal boundaries to a larger world, to
evoke in the viewer the complex, dynamic cultural forces from which it has
emerged and for which it may be taken by the viewer to stand’ (1990, p. 42).
19. Obviously the financial, material and political realities and constraints on
public museums and higher education inevitably curb and curtail forms of
pedagogy, but this discussion is about various possibilities for exhibiting tele-
vision and the ways in which the television archive can be employed to
engage both visitors and students in different ways.
20. Programmes such as Cathy Come Home (BBC, 1966) and Jamie’s School Dinners
(Channel 4, 2005) are cited as examples of the influence of television upon
political and social policy and a video loop, narrated by Harry Gration, vet-
eran anchor on regional news programme Look North (BBC, 1968–), presents
a brief history of television in terms of its sociocultural relevance. Arguably
one of the least successful areas of the gallery and one which needs much
more work, it currently acts more like a corridor between the main exhibition
area and TV Heaven.
21. Alongside historical perspectives, the social impact of television con-
tent, the social impact of the television medium and the changing
role of television news (National Media Museum Collecting Policy State-
ment, 2 March 2010). Available at http://www.nationalmediamuseum.org.
uk/AboutUs/ReportsPlansPolicies/CollectingPolicy.aspx (accessed 7 February
2011).
22. In Britain, the phasing out of analogue television began in 2005, with the
completion of digital switchover in 2012.
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Index

Note: Page numbers in bold refer to figures.

African American Lives, 88 Cattrall, Kim, 74–7

All that Heaven Allows, 26–7, 27 Caughie, John, 35, 37, 104, 112, 120,
analogue television set, see 143–4
cathode-ray tube television channel idents, 111–12
anniversaries, 1, 24, 36, 136 Chapman, James, 127
Apatow, Judd, 23 Clarkson, Jeremy, 79, 80, 82
archives clip shows, 5, 52, 98–102
digital, 5, 113, 131–3 colonialism, 67, 77, 84, 85, 86, 87
family, 72–7; see also photographs, convergence, 146–8
family Cook, Pam, 40, 102–3
material, 6, 71, 77, 134–5 Corner, John, 131
television programme, 5, 96, 131–3 Creeber, Glen, 17
Ashes to Ashes, 37, 104, 113 Cull, Nicholas. J, 127

Baddiel, David, 29–30, 79, 84, 85, 86 Davies, Colin, 35

Battlestar Galactica, 129, 130 Davies, Russell. T, 128
BBC Four, 5, 99 Day-Lewis, Sean, 119
BBC mobile news promo, 9, 11–14, De Leeuw, Sonja, 89
12, 113 Derrida, Jacques, 59, 77, 135
Bell, Erin, 65 digital switch-over, see television, in
Benjamin, Walter, 74 transition, technological change
Bennett, James, 148 Doane, Mary-Ann, 12
Big Brother, 37, 124 Doctor Who, 5, 35, 110, 113, 127–9,
Blue Remembered Hills, 37 128, 129, 130, 148
Boddy, William, 117–18, 119 Dyer, Richard, 34, 55, 102
Bode, Steven, 21 Dyke, Greg, 146
Bourdon, Jerome, 8, 11, 24
Boym, Svetlana, 14, 15, 108, 109–10 Ebbrecht, Tobias, 24
British Film Institute (BFI), 131–3, 136 Eco, Umberto, 32
Mediatheque, 132, 133, 136 Electric Dreams, 143
Brunsdon, Charlotte, 69, 99, 110, 123 Eleftheriotis, Dimitris, 70, 85, 86, 87
Bryant, Steve, 131 Ellis, John, 25, 99
Burns and Allen Show, The, 16 endings, 36–7, 48, 54–5, 60–3, 85–7,
108–9
Caldwell, John, 124 ER, 3, 36, 47–51, 50, 54, 61, 62
Capote, Truman, 14, 15
Cardiff, David, 24 Family, The, 20–1
Cardwell, Sarah, 45, 46, 117 Father Knows Best, 118
cathode-ray tube television, 100, flashbacks, 40, 49–51, 61
124–6, 140, 141, 142, 147–8 Frasier, 36

169
170 Index

Freaks and Geeks, 16, 22–4, 23 Kompare, Derek, 5, 96, 99, 118, 123
Friends, 36 Kudrow, Lisa, 90
Fry, Stephen, 77, 83–4, 83, 85 Kuhn, Annette, 44, 67, 77, 78, 79

Garnett, Tony, 120 Lacey, Stephen, 4

Garoian, Charles. R, 146 Larkin, Philip, 35
Garrett, Lesley, 81–2, 85 Lawson, Mark, 71, 115
Ghostwatch, 28 Leal, Ondina Fachel, 29
Gilroy, Paul, 87 Leave it to Beaver, 118
Goddard, Tricia, 21 Lennon, Peter, 116–17
Grade, Michael, 5 Leonard, Marion, 136, 137, 146
Gray, Ann, 65 Life on Mars, 5, 6, 97, 103–12, 106,
Greenblatt, Stephen, 141–2 109, 111, 113
Grey’s Anatomy, 3, 36, 52–60, 56, 57, Life on Mars (US), 104, 105–6, 107, 107
58, 61 list television, see clip shows
Logie Baird, Iain, 143, 146
Hancock, Sheila, 74 Logie Baird, John, 148
Hanhardt, John. G, 19 Lury, Karen, 2, 16, 19, 22, 74
Hartman, Geoffrey, 10, 134
Haslam, Dave, 101 MacDonald, Myra, 68, 78, 86
haunting, 11, 26–9, 40–64 Macmurraugh-Kavanagh, Madeleine,
Heath, Stephen, 34 121
Hills, Matt, 35 Maconie, Stuart, 18
Hirsch, Marianne, 67, 73 Maillet, Arnaud, 14
Hislop, Ian, 65, 80, 81 Marc, David, 100
historical programming Marcus, Daniel, 118, 125–6
family history boom, 65–6 McCarthy, Anna, 16
historical travelogue, 84–5 McGrath, James, 119–20
presenter-led, see Schama, Simon media events, 3, 8, 11, 25
reality history, 66–7, 143 and memory canons, 1, 11, 144–5
re-enactment, 84 memory
History of Britain, A, 78 autobiographical, 2, 21–2, 102, 146,
Holocaust, 77, 84, 85 148
Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean, 139 boom, 1, 4, 5, 134
Hoskins, Andrew, 11 crisis, 1; see also television, as
Hunt, Tristram, 66 amnesiac
Huyssen, Andreas, 1, 2, 5, 104, 129, flickers of, 25
130, 134, 135, 141, 145 generational, 2, 6, 21–2, 39–40, 97,
102, 117–23, 139
I Love . . . , 98
iconography of, 79, 91–2
I Love Lucy, 16
institutional, 11, 135
Jacobs, Jason, 52, 62 involuntary, 40, 41–2
Jameson, Frederic, 3, 6, 9, 98 management of, 69–70, 76–7
Johnson, Catherine, 68–9 medium specific, 2, 47
memory-work, 67–8, 77–8, 86
Kermode, Frank, 35, 37 performance of, 69–70, 76–7, 78,
Kinder, Marsha, 60, 61 146
Klein, Kerwin, 67, 79, 101 and place, 11, 14, 77–85, 139
Kleinecke-Bates, Iris, 17 post-memory, 67, 73, 75, 87
 Index 171

Mittell, Jason, 60, 61 Paik, Nam June, 19

Moran, Albert, 88, 89 Paley Center for Media, 132, 147
Moran, Joe, 15, 99, 101–2, 140, 144 Parker, Sarah-Jessica, 90–3
Morley, David, 2, 19 Parry, Ross, 137
Morse, Margaret, 125 Paxman, Jeremy, 68, 69–70, 75, 85
Murdoch, Graham, 115–16 Perfect Strangers, 3, 35, 38–47, 41, 42,
Museum of the Moving Image 43
(MOMI), 132 photographs, 104, 134
museum practice, 104, 129–30 enigma, 72, 74
and digitisation, 137 family, 20, 29, 30, 31, 47, 71–7
exhibition, 135, 136 image matches, 79–85, 81,
post-museum, 139 82, 83
MZTV: Museum of Television, 132 photographic montage, 40, 44
Pickering, Jean, 102
National Media Museum (NMM), 6, Pickering, Michael & Keightley, Emily,
130, 133–4, 133, 146–7 103
Piper, Helen, 77
Experience TV, 6, 136–44,
Planet Earth, 25
138, 140
Plater, Alan, 121
as public museum, 132, 133,
Poliakoff, Stephen, 35, 37, 38,
134, 139
114–17
TV Heaven, 130, 136, 144–6
Poltergeist, 28
Nelson, Robin, 110, 115
Portelli, Alessandro, 4, 67
Netherlands Institute of Sound and
Potter, Dennis, 37
Vision, 132
Proust, Marcel, 40
‘New Britain’ 67, 86, 87, 94
Newman, Michael, 34, 52
Radstone, Susannah, 1, 2, 14
1900 House, 143
reality television, 20, 21
nostalgia
remakes, 5, 113, 127, 129
BBC nostalgia, 13, 93–5, 97, 113–17,
remembering, 3, 35
119
and forgetting, 4, 68, 84, 87–8
critique of, 97, 98, 103
public service broadcasting, 93–5,
and Golden Ages, 37, 97, 114, 115, 116–17
117–23 representations of, 4, 37, 40–4, 47,
and home, 15, 97, 103, 107–10 49–51, 59, 64; see also memory,
iconography of, 97–8, 100, 101, memory-work, post-memory,
111–12, 123, 124–6 performance of
institutional, 6, 13, 37, 97, 113–21 repetition
networks, 98–9, 100, 123 with difference, 59–60, 112; see also
programming, 5, 35, 52, 97–102 photographs, image matches;
reflective, 109–10 remakes
technology, 14, 15, 125–6 generic production, 112
and nostalgia, 101, 112
obsolescence, 134, 135, 140, 141 textual, 3, 5, 34, 35, 39, 43–4, 47,
Oddie, Bill, 68, 70–2, 74, 80, 84 51, 55, 59, 64; see also remakes;
Oldboy, 8–11, 10, 22 reruns
Only Fools and Horses, 101 reruns, 5, 96
O’Sullivan, Tim, 5, 13–14, 21, 99, 100, Rhimes, Shonda, 54
102, 110 Ringu (The Ring), 3, 28, 28
172 Index

Root, Jane, 17 television

Royle Family, The, 2, 16–19, 18, altar, 29–31
30–1, 31 as amnesiac, 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 134
as black mirror, 3, 7, 14–16, 19,
26, 27
Saar, Martin, 77
collective memories of, 11, 13, 14,
Salem Witch Trials, 91–2
96, 101, 124–6, 144–6, 148
Scannell, Paddy, 24
as domestic object, 3, 14–31, 41, 47,
Schama, Simon, 78, 79
124–6, 142–3
Schlesinger, Philip, 114
ebb and flow, 3, 34, 46, 64, 97, 148
Sconce, Jeffrey, 16, 27, 29
end of, 6, 131
September 11th , 11, 106–7, 144–5 flow, 9, 12, 13, 34
serial drama, 3, 4, 17 as kitsch object, 124
generational cycles, 39–40, 48, 60, and material culture, 2, 6, 7, 130,
61, 64 134–44, 145
previously-on sequences, 36, 45 memory boom, 5, 6
reflective codas, 36–7, 46–7, 54, 56, as nostalgic technology, 15, 125–6
57, 58, 59, 61–2, 91 and routine, ritual, 12, 14, 16, 24–6,
seriality, 32, 34, 51, 55, 60 140, 141, 142–4
speeches, 53–4, 60–1 in transition, 4, 19, 93–4, 113,
thematic parallels, 52, 61 116–17, 119, 125–6, 146–8;
Sex and the City, 76 analogue and digital aesthetics,
Shooting the Past, 40, 44, 45, 46, 122–3; analogue and digital
114, 116 experience, 8, 22, 143–4, 148;
Singing Detective, The, 37 technological change, 4, 6, 13,
single play, the, 115, 116–17, 118, 19, 125–6, 147–8
119–21 Television Comes to Bradford, 142–3,
Six Feet Under, 32–3, 33, 63 143
Skirrow, Gillian, 34 That’s What I Call Television, 125
slavery, 77, 84, 85, 88 Thorpe, Vanessa, 65
Smit, Alexia, 17 time, 8, 14
soap opera, 16, 34, 36, 61 accumulation, 34, 36, 51
Sopranos ,The, 36 cyclical, 14, 24, 32, 34, 48, 54, 60
Spigel, Lynn, 4, 16, 21, 99, 123, 132 linear, 8, 9, 10, 13, 14
Star Trek, 25 Turim, Maureen, 40
Steedman, Carolyn, 130, 135 TV DVD, 5, 64, 96, 99, 113, 131
Stephen Poliakoff: A Brief History of TV Heaven, Telly Hell, 100, 100
Now, 116 TV on Trial, 97, 121–3, 122
Stewart, Susan, 17, 97, 98, 124
uncanny, 27–8, 59–60, 111
Strong, Mark, 13, 91, 92
Stuart, Moira, 77, 84, 86
value, 47, 101–2
Sturken, Marita, 74
Van Dijck, Jose, 44
Sweeney, The, 110, 112
Vostell, Wolf, 19
Syal, Meera, 71, 85
Wall to Wall, 17, 65, 66, 67, 90, 143
Tannock, Stuart, 117 Wearing, Gillian
Taylor, Lisa, 19 Family History, 16, 19–22
Taylor, Philip. M, 94 Wednesday Play, The, 115, 121
 Index 173

Weinstein, Helen, 68, 87 Wire, The, 3, 25, 36, 60–3, 62, 63

West, Alex, 66 Wolfreys, Julian, 33, 38, 59, 63–4
Wheatley, Helen, 17, 131 Wollaston, Sam, 110
White, Mimi, 8 Wood, Helen, 19
Who Do You Think You Are?, 3, 29–30, World Cup (1966), 1, 87
30, 65–95, 81, 82, 83, 113 World Trade Center, see September
as international format, 65, 68, 11th
88–93 World War II, 1, 38, 87
Who Do You Think You Are? (US), 90–3
Wilkins, Heather, 20–1 X Factor, The, 37
Williams, Raymond, 9
Willis, John, 69 You Have Been Watching, 124