ABSTRACT
Television studies post-television is a project that announces two problems for contemporary media research. First, what is ‘post’ in one place may be current in another; and second, the appellation ‘post-anything’ is generally a signal of intent to revision rather than to abandon an intellectual or political project. It is therefore wise to warn the reader that we may stray immediately into the past in our efforts to explain disquiet with the present. Two examples, politically and geographically removed from one another,
illustrate these points of departure. In China, while the central television service retains strong aspects of social management and governmental control, nonetheless the television as a widespread platform for entertainment and information is a contemporary lifestyle benefit for millions of new viewers or newly modernizing viewers. China is a post-socialist television mediascape, but it is not post-television per se. Although the blogosphere is the foremost domain of sometimes untrammelled discursive mayhem, much of what is debated has been initially communicated via television. The reference points for national and intra-national opinion are televisual. The Opening Ceremony of the 29th Olympiad in Beijing, directed by Zhang Yimou and approved by the Central Committee of the Politburo, was all about the deep past, although it used the cinematic technology of the present and the mass-line aesthetics of the last 60 years of authoritarian rule to make its points. Its meaning and values (discrete qualities – one obvious, the other absent) immediately became the topic of blogs throughout Chinese cyberspace. Everyone watched it because it was a greatly anticipated statement from China to the world, but more exactly, it was a defensive directive from the party-state to its people. Television was at its most relevant, but as a reference point for the rest of the conversation, not as a place where that conversation could develop. Television in (or from) the United Kingdom, which is the main subject of
this discussion, has long moved beyond its ‘public service (BBC) plus easyviewing (ITV)’ model. The set-top box, multi-channel, interactive model of television has been incorporated into households’ daily routines. At the same
time, TV is now a rabid dog in the British middle-class imagination: caricatured as a domain of the tabloid, comprising celebrity nonsense, reality combat and the carnage of a working class allowed to go, oh so utterly, to moral seed.1 As the Scottish essayist Andrew O’Hagan has put it, even while decrying the class cruelties of post-Thatcher New Labour: ‘George Orwell would whiten to address the mob that now scans the Daily Mirror and each night flicks between the bouts of gladiatorial combat happening on every other channel’ (2008: 6). Thus we are dealing with a media platform that is digitally advanced in
delivery options, but mediaeval in the ferocity of its content. TV in the United Kingdom depends on both characteristics for its (anti)-social potency and the maintenance of its ‘mob’ of dedicated viewers and professional detractors. TV in China is about entertaining and informing (to a point) a working middle class, with the maintenance of state power a final priority. British TV is not a managed ideology per se, but it is nonetheless an instrument of class and transitory national cohesions. I do not refer to the many ways in which television may now be downloaded, streamed and merchandised, but to the very old-fashioned box in a home living space. Watching the DVD of the Australian comedy Summer Heights High in a flat in Paris was a hilarious night’s entertainment for my hitherto innocent (of Australian humour) English brother, but it only really mattered when it was screened on British TV later that year, and he could share his discovery with a nation of similarly bemused Brits. Of course, the new hit was debated and played out in new media forums, in the now classic convergence model of multi-platform bridges, broadcast audience figures and after-show spin. So television is neither simply a pliable mouthpiece of Reithian or com-
munist propaganda nor a bastion of democratic principle and informed debate. But it is related to both realms. A somewhat old-fashioned medium, required to literally broadcast symptoms, statements and standpoints of the nation’s ontological system, television draws heavily on the past to stage its grip on the present. Thus, TV lends anachronism a peculiar legitimacy. The great anachronism at the heart of much of what happens on television is the presiding, organizing power of the nation-state. As Zhu (2008) argues in her excellent study of television in the post-reform era in China, even escapist historical drama is often an iteration of the political reality of its viewers (Zhu 2008: 62ff). As determinedly as television drama locates its narratives in imagined and self-confident versions of the past, so does it inevitably articulate the dominant anxieties, hopes and truisms of the national present.
