ABSTRACT
During the 1980s, ‘popular television’ became a key object of analysis for what Richard Collins has called ‘the Siamese twins of media and cultural studies’ (1990:31). The study of popular television has multiple institutional sites and draws upon various research traditions in Britain. However, the British Film Institute, in particular, had a pivotal role in promoting popular television study1
and, closely connected, the International Television Studies Conferences at London University’s Institute of Education attracted scholars from around the world to address television from a number of different perspectives (Drummond and Paterson 1986 and 1988). Television analysis, nationally and internationally, is extremely diverse: it is not my aim to survey it generally. The specific focus here is on the valorisation of popular modes of television-viewing in mainly British media and cultural studies. Studying television at all, never mind in its mainstream forms and in relation to audience preferences, was tantamount to a populist move for the traditional humanities, which happily left this merely popular medium, characterised by formal hybridity and social mundanity, to ‘numbers-crunching’ sociology until recently. Film studies was about as far as academic cultural critics would go, and then only on the margins. In this intellectual context, Raymond Williams’s Television, Technology and Cultural Form (1974), like so much of his work, was ground-breaking, yet not wholly isolated even in the mid-1970s.
