ABSTRACT
Although television as an institution is dependent upon audiences, it is by no means certain what a television audience is.
However, it seems that this is not the only uncertainty facing those working in the field of television studies. Ann Kaplan, for instance, in her introduction to Regarding Television, remarks:
The structure, form, content and context for British television are so radically different from those of its American counterpart that everything has to be rethought by critics in this country [the USA]. Television scholarship is simply not exportable in the easy manner of film criticism.1
The idea that international television criticism is a contradiction in terms is not confined to the American side of the Atlantic. In fact it has been taken even further by British writer John Ellis, who suggests not only that television scholarship is unexportable but also that one nation’s television is ‘incomprehensible’ to observers from other nations. In the preliminaries to his Visible Fictions Ellis confesses that at the time of writing he had never visited the United States, and continues:
