ABSTRACT
This chapter evaluates theoretical frameworks for studying television programmes, advertisements, etc. as ‘texts’, including methodologies for analysing narrative, intertextual relations between programmes in a flow of different programmes, and semiotic approaches to relations between image and sound. These textual approaches are placed in the context of Television Studies in the 1970s and early 1980s, where they developed, which was underpinned by the assemblage of psychoanalytic, semiotic and materialist approaches. Rather than being devised specifically for the study of television, these ideas began in the discipline of Film Studies. Textual approaches to television are powerful ways of discussing the meanings made of television by viewers, but they also have some drawbacks. They tend to focus on textual detail at the expense of institutional context and history, and to neglect the ways in which television is understood by audiences. The issues to think about here are:
• how meanings can exist ‘in’ television texts • how meanings might depend on relationships between viewers and texts • how knowledge of production context and history ‘outside’ the text might affect
the meanings which television texts have.
