ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at television history and its own struggle with visual realism. There are several histories that deal with the social and institutional contexts surrounding the production of television. The chapter links some of these histories together to write a history of television that shows an innovative form that was both constrained by theatrical methods of realist design and liberated by the guerrilla methods of art cinema. Television, deliberately worked as a live medium, whereas film emerged at the same time as theatre was undergoing a crisis in its method of representation. The complexities of television history are inextricable with the various practices which make it and there were arguments to say that studio practice provided a space for actors to explore drama that was neither a 'theatrical transposed to another medium or a primitive precursor to location filming'.
