Popular television in authoritarian Europe

Editor:
Peter Goddard
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This collection brings together work on forms of popular television produced within the authoritarian regimes of Europe after World War II. Ten chapters based on new and original research examine approaches to programming and individual programmes in Spain, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Romania, the Soviet Union and the GDR at a time when they were governed as dictatorships or one-party states. Rather than foregrounding the political economy of television or its role as an overt tool of state propaganda, the focus is on popular television-everyday programming that ordinary people watched. An editorial introduction examines the question of what can be considered ‘popular’ when audience appeal is often secondary to the need for state control. With familiar measures of popularity often absent, contributors adopt various approaches in applying the term to the programming they examine and in considering the reasons for its popularity. Drawing on surviving archives, scripts and production records, contemporary publications, YouTube clips, and interviews with producers and performers, its chapters recover examples of television programming history unknown beyond national borders and often preserved largely in the memories of the audiences who lived with them. Popular Television in Authoritarian Europe represents a significant intervention in transnational television studies, making these histories available to scholars for the first time, encouraging comparative enquiry and extending the reach – intellectually and geographically – of European television history.
eISBN:
9781526111739
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526111739
Online Publication Date:
16 May 2016
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Front matter
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 1: Introduction
Part I: Southern Europe
Chapter 2: Football and bullfighting on television
Chapter 2: Football and bullfighting on television
Chapter 3: From puppets to puppeteers
Chapter 3: From puppets to puppeteers
Chapter 4: Entertaining the Colonels
Chapter 4: Entertaining the Colonels
Chapter 5: Staying outside ‘the egg’
Chapter 5: Staying outside ‘the egg’
Part II: Eastern bloc
Chapter 6: Between politics and soap
Chapter 6: Between politics and soap
Chapter 7: Re-staging the popular
Chapter 7: Re-staging the popular
Chapter 8: KVN
Chapter 8: KVN
Part III: German Democratic Republic
Chapter 9: Undercover
Chapter 9: Undercover
Chapter 10: Agitprop gone wrong
Chapter 10: Agitprop gone wrong
Chapter 11: Popular music on East German television
Chapter 11: Popular music on East German television
Timeline
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Cover Dance and politics

Dance and politics

Moving beyond boundaries

Author:
Dana Mills

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Online Publication Date:
21 Nov 2016
Subjects:
  1. Film, Media and Music
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Dance has always been a method of self- expression for human beings. This book examines the political power of dance and especially its transgressive potential. Focusing on readings of dance pioneers Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham, Gumboots dancers in the gold mines of South Africa, the One Billion Rising movement using dance to protest against gendered violence, dabkeh in Palestine and dance as protest against human rights abuse in Israel, the Sun Dance within the Native American Crow tribe, the book focuses on the political power of dance and moments in which dance transgresses politics articulated in words. Thus the book seeks ways in which reading political dance as interruption unsettles conceptions of politics and dance.

Cover Tony Garnett

Tony Garnett

Author:
Stephen Lacey

Book

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Online Publication Date:
19 Jul 2013
Subjects:
  1. Film, Media and Music
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This is a book-length study of one of the most respected and prolific producers working in British television. From ground-breaking dramas from the 1960s such as Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home to the ‘must-see’ series in the 1990s and 2000s such as This Life and The Cops, Tony Garnett has produced some of the most important and influential British television drama. This book charts his career from his early days as an actor to his position as executive producer and head of World Productions, focusing on the ways in which he has helped to define the role of the creative producer, shaping the distinctive politics and aesthetics of the drama he has produced, and enabling and facilitating the contributions of others. Garnett's distinctive contribution to the development of a social realist aesthetic is also examined, through the documentary-inspired early single plays to the subversion of genre within popular drama series.
Cover Theorising Media

Theorising Media

Power, form and subjectivity

Author:
John Corner

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Online Publication Date:
19 Jul 2013
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  1. Film, Media and Music
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This book explores how issues of power, form and subjectivity feature at the core of all serious thinking about the media, including appreciations of their creativity as well as anxiety about the risks they pose. Drawing widely on an interdisciplinary literature, the author connects his exposition to examples from film, television, radio, photography, painting, web practice, music and writing in order to bring in topics as diverse as reporting the war in Afghanistan, the televising of football, documentary portrayals of 9/11, reality television, the diversity of taste in the arts and the construction of civic identity. The book is divided into two parts. In the first part, three big chapters on each of the key notions provide an interconnected discussion of the media activities opened up for exploration and the debates they have provoked. The second part presents examples, arguments and analysis drawing on the author's previous work around the core themes, with notes placing them in the context of the whole book. The book brings together concepts both from Social Studies and the Arts and Humanities, addressing a readership wider than the sub-specialisms of media research. It refreshes ideas about why the media matter, and how understanding them better remains a key aim of cultural inquiry and a continuing requirement for public policy.