ABSTRACT
Libraries close, theatres go dark, and webmasters must sleep, but most television channels just keep going. Older viewers remember an earlier age when television stations ended their broadcast day with the national anthem, and some countries such as Iceland used to maintain a television-free day of the week, but increasingly nowadays, television just keeps going.This places the average television channel in the odd position in media history of having to fill every waking and sleeping hour with content. Thus, television experiences an almost unrivalled amount of pressure to be creative. Meanwhile, exacerbating this pressure for many producers is the need to sell. Public broadcasters, such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) or the American Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), in theory have the luxury of concentrating on what is best for their audiences, but commercial broadcasters must always be adding to their audience, scrambling to gain evermore viewers.1 In many corners of the world, and with the likes of News Corporation, Time-Warner, Disney, etc., buying up great swathes of the world’s television channels, cable providers, and production houses (see Chapters 3 and 6), television is one of the world’s most successful and fastest-growing businesses, thereby requiring content production to keep pace.
