ABSTRACT
Brunsdon and Morley write enjoyably; readability is much enhanced by their nose for lethal quotes from the programmes themselves and from descriptions of their aims by broadcasters. I am going to spend the rest of this review being mildly critical, so I should make it clear right away that the monograph should be of great interest to all Screen Education readers, as well as being a valuable new teaching resource. Indeed, it’s my sense that most readers of this review will want to read the monograph itself which frees me from needing to summarise it more thoroughly. More useful, I hope, will be a few remarks on the limits within which B&M’s own discourse operates. In one sense this hardly constitutes a criticism of this monograph at all, since the limits have enabled the job to get done and indeed maximised its polemical force. But it seems to me that further work will need to recognise more fully the contradictoriness and uncertainty of the phenomena in question (as opposed to their ‘one-dimensionality’ and success).
