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Making the everyday epic in Detectorists
Phil Wickham

This chapter examines the final moment of the second series of Detectorists (2014–17), first transmitted on 5 December 2015. The series follows metal-detector hobbyists Andy (Mackenzie Crook) and Lance (Toby Jones) as they attempt to deal with the mundanity and underachievement of their daily lives by searching the fields around their Essex homes for buried treasure, invariably without success. However, in this scene, Lance finally discovers a gold, jewel-encrusted Saxon aestel; the treasure we as viewers have seen buried beneath the crowd for two series in the show’s credit sequence. This moment offers the excitement of the great find that the characters have always craved; a fulfilment of a quest to create an ‘epic’ moment in ordinary lives. Yet this chapter argues that Detectorists is a series that strives on a series of levels to make the everyday itself, epic. Detectorists’ comedy derives from empathy, from a recognition of our own struggles, pain and even joy. It confers dignity on the ordinary and everyday and on its characters, and John Ellis’s theories of television ‘working through’ are examined in this respect. The aesthetics of the series also explore this binary, making the familiar landscapes seem as beautiful and as extraordinary as possible. The chapter concludes that metal detecting becomes a metaphor for digging deeper to find out the truth about our everyday life, the buried treasure that was there all the time. This becomes the epic narrative.

in Epic / everyday
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Epic/everyday
Sarah Cardwell

Both ‘epic’ and ‘everyday’ have been employed explicitly and implicitly in critiques of television programmes and indeed the art (or medium) of television – sometimes to TV’s benefit, sometimes to its detriment; rarely with neutrality. This volume advocates that notions of epic and everyday, when used in appropriately reflective and nuanced ways, can be of value when assessing television works. The Introduction explores and assesses the ways in which the concepts ‘epic’ and ‘everyday’ are used in television studies, and proffers a number of fresh perspectives and possibilities which are taken up in contributors’ chapters. Television has been overtly and sustainedly correlated with everyday life – in practice, in criticism and in scholarship. The Introduction explores the value of this existing work, going on to recommend that we also attend more closely to everyday aesthetics. The established genre of TV is examined, tracing its connections with earlier and alternative epic forms. However, the idea of epic is then explored more deeply, revealing surprising, previously unacknowledged ways in which it shapes perceptions and evaluations of modern television. Furthermore, though epic and everyday can be conceived as near-opposites, this book argues that they are intimately interdependent. The introduction closes by presenting the chapters, briefly summarising the content of each one. Most importantly, it highlights the connections and flow within the book, especially in terms of the exploration of the binary ‘epic/everyday’, but also in terms of the programmes chosen, the approaches taken by authors, and other themes that arise across chapters.

in Epic / everyday
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Philip Braithwaite

The introduction lays out the basic contention of the book: that science fiction television changed its style and focus in the Thatcher-era series, swapping political contentment for themes of revolution, anarchy and terrorism – supplanting the utopian dream for a dystopian nightmare. It started to integrate the logic of the marketplace, and presented a wavering engagement with the themes of Thatcherism – the focus on the individual, the accumulation of wealth in private hands, the loss of traditional authority and the various engagements with authoritarianism. This necessitates a discussion about Thatcherism and its main themes, and a presentation of the basic theoretical framework.

in Time Lords and Star Cops
Original science fiction series of the 1980s
Philip Braithwaite

In this chapter, the only two British science fiction television series written directly for television in the 1980s are examined. The first, Knights of God (1987), is a deeply conservative King Arthur fantasy about a dystopian England taken over by a fascist organisation. Although it seems to be about resistance and freedom fighting, it soon becomes apparent that it is thinly disguised propaganda for the Church and other traditional British institutions. It uses the neoliberal tropes of ‘the hero’s journey’ and other conservative touchstones to tell its story. Star Cops (1987) is a wholly different enterprise. It tells the story of Nathan Spring, a detective who is sent to command the Star Cops – the police force on the moon. Drenched in neoliberal concepts, it presents a future where almost everything is controlled by private corporations, and almost everyone is governed by the logic of the marketplace.

in Time Lords and Star Cops
Zöe Shacklock

Lost (2004–10) can be categorised as a ‘vast narrative’: sprawling serial narratives concerned with epic journeys, extraordinary physicality and extensive seriality. Critical and popular discussions largely present these programmes as epic television, defined by both their narrative sprawl and their removal from everyday life. This chapter argues that, in contrast, the affective impact of Lost emerges as much through a set of ordinary aesthetics as anything extraordinary. Using Yuriko Saito’s work on ordinary aesthetics, the chapter considers how much of Lost revolves around ordinary experiences such as walking, cooking, cleaning and laundry. It is these everyday, ordinary actions that make the programme affectively meaningful to the audience. To explore Lost’s investment in the ordinary and the everyday, the chapter focuses in detail on the opening scene of the second season, in which the answer to the Season 1 cliffhanger – ‘what’s in the hatch’ – is revealed to be a man’s very mundane, morning routine. The chapter also considers how serial narrative on television exists as part of the flows of everyday life, and argues that Lost’s long-form seriality allows the programme to become part of the audience’s ordinary experience. The chapter aims to reconfigure Lost’s legacy as a ‘gamechanger’, instead positioning it as part of television’s traditional relationship to the fabric of everyday life. As the hatch reveal demonstrates, the heart of the island is not a mysterious problem to be solved, but something much closer to home.

in Epic / everyday
Doctor Who in the late Thatcher era
Philip Braithwaite

This chapter follows the adventures of the Doctor in the late Thatcher era, 1983–89. Doctor Who (1963–89) had been in production for many years before Thatcher’s rise to power, but during Thatcher’s time in office the series changes considerably. The character of the Doctor becomes more Machiavellian, the series darker and more brutal. Doctor Who of this era attacks Thatcherism head-on (and intentionally on the part of the writers), but also brings about themes that appear pro-Thatcher in their implications. Doctor Who is the most inconsistent of the three series studied, in part because there were many hands involved in producing the series. In the era of Sylvester McCoy – the seventh actor to play the Doctor (1987–89) – Andrew Cartmel took over as script editor. Cartmel assembled a team of writers who, along with McCoy himself, were stridently anti-Thatcher, and this sentiment was often reflected in the themes of the series. Yet Cartmel, in an effort to reintroduce mystery into the series, also reimagined the character of the Doctor as dark and manipulative. This was known in fandom as the ‘Cartmel Masterplan’ or ‘Andrew Cartmel’s Dark Doctor’. The ironic consequence of this characterisation is that it turns the Doctor himself into a more Thatcherite figure, as he acts as the ultimate authority in the universe, deciding when it is appropriate to kill, to manipulate others, and even to commit genocide.

in Time Lords and Star Cops
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The illusion of independence
Philip Braithwaite

This chapter discusses the ITV television series Sapphire & Steel (1979–82) and its relationship to the early years of the Thatcher government. This series was produced by ITV and concerns two mysterious extraterrestrial travellers called Sapphire and Steel, operatives of an unseen higher power, whose origins are an almost complete mystery. Their job is to repair ruptures in time, where malevolent forces have entered the universe. Futility is also a strong theme in this series, which ends on a similar note to Blake’s 7: the protagonists are confined to an eternal prison. The characters in Sapphire & Steel are more ‘conservative’ than the characters in Blake’s 7, yet I argue the series is just as strongly anti-Thatcher in its claims about the illusion of individualism and independence. In the final episode, Sapphire and Steel, independent operators, are betrayed by their superiors and confined to an eternal prison in space. The chapter posits that an analogue can be found in Thatcher’s many claims about independence, and her simultaneous attempts to silence those with contrary political opinions.

in Time Lords and Star Cops
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The marital logic of the Cold War in The Americans
Courtney Hopf
and
Liam Creighton

This chapter considers the television series The Americans (2013–18) through its overlapping contexts as spy narrative and domestic drama, aligning the former with the epic and the latter with the everyday. The classic super-spy figure, as represented in the genre since its 1960s’ heyday, possessed an autonomy and individualism that was central to his ability to enact the wishes of the state. However, in the early years of the twenty-first century, that figure underwent an evolution through television dramas such as 24, Alias and Homeland, which used domestic settings to complicate the spy persona through a network of personal and familial obligations. This chapter argues that The Americans represents a further evolution of this trend. Rather than the familiar arrangement whereby the domestic drama acts as a microcosm of broader geopolitical events, The Americans constructs its metaphors to project in both directions: the Jennings’ marriage functions as a metaphor for the Cold War, but the Cold War also functions as a metaphor for their marriage – and by extension the institution of marriage itself. This particular interweaving of the epic and the everyday underscores how epic narratives and global events are driven by flawed, conflicted characters, ultimately highlighting how the choices of those characters are both influenced by and reverberate into the everyday lives usually ignored by the epic form.

in Epic / everyday
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Russell T Davies, the epic and the everyday
James Walters

Throughout his television career, screenwriter and producer Russell T Davies has explored potential relationships between the spectacular intensity of epic storytelling and the intricate patterns of everyday life. This investment results in a synthesis of contrasting scales and dramatic tones as the extraordinary and grandiose become fused with the modest and familiar. Years and Years (2019) encapsulates Davies’ approach, as the cataclysmic events of an alternative near-future are given shape and meaning within the domestic context of a family’s commonplace existence. Emphasis is frequently placed upon slight, nuanced aesthetic features which come to express and encapsulate global tensions and traumas. This chapter explores the ways in which Davies builds up layers of meaning and significance through his evocation of the everyday in the epic, and the epic in the everyday. The discussion moves through earlier examples of Davies’ television work, tracing complementary and contrasting patterns across earlier programmes The Second Coming (2003) and his rebooted Doctor Who (2005– ). Attending to moments from the span of Davies’ career in this way reveals thematic coherence in his writing and, consequently, gestures towards a wider sense of his status as a television author. More specifically, however, Davies’ ability to consistently find dramatic potential in the balance between the epic and the everyday might also reveal his especially acute understanding of television itself, which is always small and domestic but also vast and unbound. In this way, Davies’ stories reveal and reinforce aspects of the medium, shaping narrative fiction to the television experience.

in Epic / everyday
British science fiction television in the 1970s–1980s

British science fiction television series of the late 1970s and 1980s present dystopian worlds and fatalistic themes. They appear at a tumultuous time in British politics – the seismic shift from the consensus era to the election of Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1979, and the ushering in of neoliberal economics. This book begins by discussing the themes of 1970s British science fiction series – collectivism, teleology, technology, scientific progress – and goes on to show that they have been replaced in the Thatcher era by much darker tropes – individualism, Machiavellian behaviour, selfishness, personal wealth accumulation. The optimism of the 1970s series has been superseded by inertia, loss and futility. Characters have moved from hopeful, traditional and rational to duplicitous, ironic and cynical. The book undertakes an analysis of these series to determine if these changes can be read as a response to Britain’s changing political landscape.