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This book explores a new cultural moment in the history of the BBC TV series, Doctor Who: the casting of a female lead. Following the reveal that Jodie Whittaker would be the thirteenth Doctor, the series has been caught up in media and fan controversies – has it become ‘too political’? Has showrunner Chris Chibnall tampered disastrously with long-running continuity? And has the regendered thirteenth Doctor been represented differently from her predecessors? Analysing Whittaker’s era – up to and including Doctor Who’s responses to 2020’s first lockdown – this edited collection addresses how the show has been repositioned as a self-consciously inclusive brand. Featuring brand-new interview material with those working on-screen (series regular Mandip Gill and guest star Julie Hesmondhalgh) and those operating behind the scenes in crucial roles (Segun Akinola, composer of the current theme and incidental music), Doctor Who – New Dawn focuses on how the thirteenth Doctor’s era of spectacular TV has been created, and how it has diversified representations of queerness, race, and family. Moving beyond the television show itself, chapters also address fan responses to the thirteenth Doctor via memes, cosplay, and non-Anglophone translation. Finally, this collection looks at how the new ‘moment’ of Doctor Who has moved into gendered realms of merchandising, the commercial ‘experience economy’, and a paratextual neo-gift economy of Covid-19 lockdown reactions that were created by previous showrunners alongside Chris Chibnall. A vigorous new dawn for Doctor Who calls for rigorous new analysis – and the thirteen chapters gathered together here all respond adventurously to the call.
– as part of the historical suspicion of the media – assumed to pacify viewers. In this chapter, I consider how TV spectacle has been theorized before identifying three discrete modes where, I argue, televisual spectacle enhances audience engagement. These three modes of visual spectacle activate: contemplation of setting; curiosity and criticality of content, and (through recognition of diversity) personalized viewing pleasures. My focus on viewer agency is intended to recognize how TV can be understood as a dispersal
2 Football and bullfighting on television: Spectacle and Spanish identity during Franco’s dictatorship Juan Francisco Gutiérrez Lozano The aim of this chapter is to analyse how television in Spain during the 1960s, controlled by the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, used popu lar entertainments such as football and bullfighting to gain popular acceptance and to feed the patriotic sentiment encouraged by Francoist propaganda. After addressing the characteristics of the Televisión Española (TVE) model as a state-controlled channel, these pages will explain how
irrelevant to the lives of most people in Britain, this was the end of empire as a rather agreeable ‘docu-soap’, a television spectacle that had positive rather than negative resonances. Even in an act of departure and decline, the British could put on a ‘good show’. So a few islands are left, in the Caribbean, the Atlantic and the Pacific, together with the ever-anomalous Gibraltar. There are
than the squarer ratio of the television frame, announcing its status as spectacle. 5 8.2 Doctor Who : Widescreen television spectacle in ‘The Gunfighters’. The following rhythmic exchange between Masterson
. 8 Ellis theorised that whereas cinema invites the viewer to attentively ‘gaze’ at the screen, television ‘engages the look and the glance rather than the gaze’ ( 1982 : 128). This and Williams's concept of flow have been much debated but are still responsible for the idea of television as competing with cinema. Wheatley ( 2016 ) has taken Caldwell's correctives of ‘glance theory’ as the point of departure for her discussion of television spectacle. See Britton and Barker ( 2003 ) for a critique of television as only
2012). Also the Table reminds us that this media–sport symbiosis is a global and not just a Western phenomenon. It shows us the geographic and economic range of variation in the commercial valuations of the Olympic mega-event as television spectacle and programming. So it records the differential range of fee income from television companies in world regions which roughly relate to the Continental Associations which make up the Olympic organisational structure. The Continental Associations are Africa, America (North and South), Asia (including the Middle East
Kennedy Martin, the larger creative role given to the director saw a partial dilution of the assumption that television was predominantly a writer’s medium. Edge of Darkness, along with other prestige dramas of the time, embraced the other strand of televisuality identified by Caldwell, that of the ‘cinematic’, which ‘brought to television spectacle, high-production values, and feature-style cinematography’.32 Shot entirely on 16mm film with extensive location shooting and expressive lighting design, this is a far more integrated style of televisuality by comparison
the same edition’s leader column argued that the television spectacle ‘should not obscure the seriousness of the enterprise’. In the Times (9 December), Martin Fletcher and Sam Kiley also made it clear that the media circus did not diminish the value of the operation: ‘“This is just great!” said one unidentified Somali. “What a relief.”’ It is notable that the August 1992 US airlift occasioned only
narcotics’ (VL 51). Towards the end of the novel, Frenesi reflects with dismay upon the degree to which Hector’s televisual idea of law enforcement has brought about very real perversions of the US legal system. Zuniga ‘depended upon these Tubal fantasies about his profession, relentlessly pushing their propaganda message of copsare-only-human-got-to-do-their-job turning agents of government repression into sympathetic heroes’. The comforting aestheticisation of a fascist system, through its incarnation as television spectacle, not only elides serious discussion of law