ABSTRACT
Broadcast television is largely a form of variety entertainment. However, like radio before it, television differs from earlier forms in that it functions not as a ‘special event’ – although it can create its own sense of event, from royal weddings to ‘Live Aid’ – but is rather accepted as a staple feature of home life. Television is markedly ‘commonplace’, whereas the cinema has from its earliest days invested in the extraordinary, with a proclivity towards spectacle and fantasy. As John Ellis has noted, the purchase of a cinema ticket gives one the right not only to view a particular film but also to participate in the cinema experience,1a specific mode of engagement by sounds, images, and narrative in a ‘theatrical’ context. Although nowadays this experience is quite clearly structured around the single feature film, this has not always been the case; in the ‘classical’ era of the 1930s and 1940s, the feature film was the culmination of a ‘package’ of entertainments, preceded by cartoons, shorts, a serial, a newsreel, a supporting feature, and even live acts. Cinemagoers of the period ‘experienced cinema as an integrated succession of entertainments that went far beyond the simple experience of viewing a film together in a more or less anonymous crowd’.2 In this sense, of course, the mainstream cinema was following in the path of other commercial
entertainments in which the notion of ‘a performance’ was central, but particularly the variety form of vaudeville and music hall.
