ABSTRACT
Cinema and broadcast TV may have different characteristics in their predominant usages, but they are still generally recognised as occupying a similar area of human experience. They are recognised as somehow in competition with each other: in competition for people’s attention, and in competition for commercial and critical attention. A series of similarities between cinema and TV has been registered here, even whilst indicating their dissimilarities. Both are media which combine sounds and images, and are predominantly used to provide narrative fiction, and to a lesser degree forms of information; in their public images both occupy the positions of entertainment, leisure and pleasure, rather than of work, duty and repression. Their particular products are to some extent interchangeable: cinema films are shown on TV, some material made for TV surfaces in the cinema. Ideas circulate freely between the two media. Films give rise to TV series; shooting techniques are transposed from one medium to the other; TV often appears as the implied polemical adversary of many films.
