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Look and Read: BBC School Television and Literacy Teaching 1957-1979
No full textThe BBC began broadcasting school television in 1957. As school television developed in the 1960s, the BBC engaged with educational research and addressed national educational problems. Pedagogy in UK schools was becoming more progressive, and literacy was one of its most important and complex elements. UK Schools had struggled to achieve universal literacy among 7–9-year-olds. The series Look and Read and Words and Pictures used literacy research, adapted to the best method of presentation by television. The series took advantage of the developing televisual genres of children’s drama and animation
Educational Imperialism: Phantom India and The Non-Aligned Movement’s New World Information Order, 1969-1980
No full textThis article explores how the BBC’s new educational format, the BBC-2 docu-series, became consequential to global politics in the “long” 1970s. While educational television in the U.S. has long been an issue of contention among liberal and conservative political factions, European educational television was often understood by European legislators and media scholars as central to public broadcasting. This paper challenges such assumptions by uncovering 1970s debates over media ownership. In June 1970, the BBC showcased its new documentary series, Phantom India to much disapproval from the Indian state and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). In response to the Phantom India affair, the NAM established its Commission for Broadcasting in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia in 1976. And yet, this article shows how ideological inconsistencies between Yugoslav broadcasting and its foreign policy undermined the NAM’s efforts to truly challenge Western media hegemony. Through close textual analysis and archival research, I offer a new understanding of educational television in the 1970s as a battleground for political and cultural dominance in the, then, faltering liberal world-system
Lund Film Society and Interwar Cultural Propaganda
No full textDuring the interwar period, there was a surge in cultural diplomacy efforts in Europe. This article investigates the role of cultural diplomacy within the Swedish film society movement, focusing particularly on Lund Film Society’s travels abroad during the 1930s: to Nazi-Germany in 1935 and in 1938 respectively, as well as to the Soviet Union in 1936. Through international exchange, Lund Film Society did not only get access to artistic and politically radical films but also an increased insight into in the international film industry. The article shows that the trips fulfilled several important functions for Lund Film Society. The film society was theoretically oriented and the possibilities of exploring the film medium practically were limited. During these journeys abroad, the film society managed to gain insight into how modern film studios worked in several different countries. At the same time, interest in cultural exchange was mutual, and the international film connections were purposefully exploited by both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as a form of cultural-political propaganda
Satire in Putin's Russia: Cynical Distance as a Tool of State Power
No full textFor a brief period following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a degree of political freedom existed in Russia that allowed political satire to appear on television. Different oligarchs purchased important television channels and used them to push the Boris Yeltsin government to approve policies favorable to their business interests by polarizing public opinion against the government. The fractious nature of Russian media in the 1990s and the battles for influence between different oligarchs created an environment in which political satire existed openly in Russian culture, which had not been permitted during the nearly seventy years of communist rule. A particularly significant example of this was NTV’s program Kukli (Puppets) (1994-2002) based on the UK program Spitting Image, which featured puppet versions of prominent Russian politicians, and aired three-hundred-sixty-three episodes. Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned as president of Russia on December 31, 1999, and was succeeded by Vladimir Putin, who has remained the central political figure in Russia since then. Putin’s government almost immediately began to reign in media freedoms. By the end of 2002, all of Russia’s major media properties were under the control of either a state-owned company or close allies of the Russian government. Unsurprisingly Kukli was taken off the air that year, and political satire disappeared from Russian mass culture. This paper will map out the development of Russian satire on television since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Using prominent examples from unscripted standup comedy, evening variety shows and scripted dramas that are openly political and apparently apolitical, this paper argues the Russian television industry engages with and subverts the potential of various satirical genres resulting in the creation of cynical distance that potentially impedes the ability of satire to speak truth to power
“I am a historian as well.” - The West German Reception of Die Wannseekonferenz (1984) and Portraying Holocaust Perpetrators in Public Television Drama
No full textDie Wannseekonferenz (1984) portrays the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942, where Reinhard Heydrich chaired a meeting of Germany’s ministers to co-ordinate the “Final Solution.” Produced by the public television network Bayerische Rundfunk (BR), Die Wannseekonferenz is neither mere entertainment nor a dry, unsubtle didactic film. Instead, it portrays history in a compelling and disturbing manner. The West German press, however, panned the film, which gained critical acclaim abroad. This article discusses its negative reception within the context of the 1980s television and memory landscapes through a grounding in archival sources
Tracing the Archival Lives of Radio: Recorded Sound Collections in Belgian and Dutch Radio (1930s-1950s)
No full textThis article investigates the formation of recorded sound collections in Belgian and Dutch radio, which initially largely comprised commercial music discs, followed by recordings of radio music, spoken word content and sound effects. It focuses on the creation, management and use of radio sound recordings in the 1930s, as the forerunner to formalised historical archives following the Second World War, proposing to interpret this development in international comparison. The cases are considered in terms of a common experience of war and German occupation (1940-1944/45), and the ‘archive-mindedness’ of post-war radio broadcasters and those tasked with reorganising sound collections impacted by confiscations, looting, and damage. Wartime conditions have led to an uneven source base today, however acknowledging the gaps and omissions in the historical record is a crucial methodological tool when tracing the archival lives of radio, and the process by which radio came to be seen as a significant site of (national) history and heritage
What to do with 2.000.000 Historical Press Photos? The Challenges and Opportunities of Applying a Scene Detection Algorithm to a Digitised Press Photo Collection
No full textIn 1962, Dutch celebrity Ria Kuyken was attacked by a circus bear. Cees de Boer captured this moment, for which he was awarded both a World Press Photo and the Silver Camera (Zilveren Camera). Though this photo popularised Fotopersbureau De Boer, which Cees had founded in 1945, the importance of the collection lies in its scale. Approximately 2,000,000 photos taken of about 250,000 events in sixty years, accompanied by extensive metadata. Not only major nationwide events are represented, but also subjects of small scale, human interest, such as the shopkeeper around the corner. Our aim is not only the digitisation and publication of all 2,000,000 photo negatives of Fotopersbureau De Boer but also to explore how artificial intelligence can enrich this collection, benefiting both users of the archive and cultural historians studying historical photographs. One of our efforts focuses on scene detection, a method to detect the ‘scene’ represented in an image (Zhou et al, 2018). We will rely on transfer learning to adapt existing computer vision models to our collection and the needs of our users. Existing models can generate labels with high accuracy, however, these labels are ahistorical and more often than not irrelevant to our collection. We will label subsets of the images via crowdsourcing to train and improve existing models. As such, we can add labels relevant to our collection to the model, which are absent in existing models. In this paper, we will highlight the opportunities and challenges of applying artificial intelligence to a collection of historical photographs
Public Service Television as Education: Factual Programmes and The Media and Information Literacy (Mil) Policy Discourse
No full textThis article examines factual programmes in public service television as a specific means of education, exploring and underscoring its educational function within the framework of media and information literacy (MIL) policy discourse. Factual programming forms a multi-stakeholder genre category that has gained relevance in times of democratic insecurities. It traditionally presents a source for cultivating cultural citizenship crucial to democracy but has been less explicitly examined as a source for advancing media education and literacy. in the context of Finland, which has been considered a forerunner both in its educational and media educational system, we inquire into the MIL dimensions of some of the newest multi-platform productions conducted in factual television. The results cast more light on the genre of factual programming and its underlying educational objectives, which paves way for further research on the MIL governance. The analysis also raises questions about their strategic relevance and future development in public broadcasters’ programming content
Poking Fun at the Transformation: Postsocialist TV Satire in the 1990s
No full textThis article examines postsocialist TV satire of the 1990s in the Czech Republic and Poland using the examples of the programmes Česká soda (Czech Soda Water, ČT, 1993-1997) and Za chwilę dalszy ciąg programu (Next Episode in a Moment, TVP, 1988-1994). These pioneering shows were among the first to introduce the format of television satire and news parody to postsocialist screens. The article explores how the programmes’ creators forged a highly particular format stemming from local variety show traditions. It analyses the ways in which these shows articulated criticism of the transformations of postsocialist countries from planned to market economies and reflects on their enduring popularity and function as sites of memory of the 1990s
The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market
No full textBook review of: Nadya Bair, The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020), 322 pp., ISBN 978-0-520-30035-4 052030035