Centre for Cultural and Creative Research (CCCR)
Visiting speakers
Archive
A regular series of guest lectures by visiting academic speakers and cultural or creative practitioners runs throughout the year. Previous speakers over the years have been:
2011
Branding and the BBC
Dr Catherine Johnson (University of Nottingham)
Wednesday 14 December 2011
The practice of branding has become increasingly commonplace in the television industry over the past 30 years in response to increased competition and the fragmentation of the audience. However, the association of branding with the commercial practices of marketing have made it a potentially problematic strategy for public service broadcasters, particularly a publicly-funded broadcaster such as the BBC. Indeed, the adoption of branding by the BBC has been understood as part of a broader adoption of commercial practices by the corporation in response to the increased marketization and commercialization of broadcasting.
Through an examination of the branding strategies adopted by the BBC since the mid-1980s, this paper will ask whether the BBC’s adoption of branding is indicative of a broader marketization and commercialization of British broadcasting over the past 30 years, or whether branding can be used to support public service broadcasting. In doing so, it will look at the ways in which the BBC has used branding to negotiate its position within an emerging television marketplace as a corporation required by successive governments to generate commercial profits to keep down the costs of the licence fee while not exploiting the privileged position of its protected income.
Bleeding Platforms Dry
Multiplatform production, the future of indies and public service broadcasting
Dr James Bennett (London Metropolitan University)
04 May 2011
Abstract
Both the BBC and C4 have, rhetorically at least, increasingly embraced multiplatform in the last decade. This results in new pressures on, and opportunities for, the independent sector. Traditionally a sector made up of TV production companies, multiplatform means it now includes digital media companies, bringing their own production cultures to PSB. However, such companies must also compete with BBC in-house productions which, as the BBC head of internal multiplatform programming promised, aim to ‘bleed those platforms dry’. This paper examines whether there will be any blood left to be wrung from the multiplatform stone by indies - and what the sector might bring to remediated understanding of public service broadcasting in multiplatform era.
My Journey Together
David Rose (Film and Television Producer)
16 March 2011
Abstract
David Rose is giving an illustrated talk entitled 'My Journey Together', which is supported by CCCR's Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project Channel 4 and British Film Culture.
David Rose had a long career at the BBC which included working as a producer on Z-Cars in the 1960s, and running the BBC's Regional Drama unit at Pebble Mill in the 1970s, where he backed David Hare's directorial debut Licking Hitler and promoted the work of Jack Rosenthal and Alan Plater, amongst others. In 1982 he became Channel 4's first commissioning editor for Fiction and launched the innovative Film on Four slot, bringing hundreds of ground-breaking films to television and cinema screens including: Angel, Letter to Brezhnev, My Beautiful Laundrette, Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice and Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas.
'My Journey Together' is an entertaining and insightful autobiography, drawing on a rich and varied career and showcasing some rare film footage.
Brand Torchwood
Changing TV Drama in the 21st Century?
Dr Matt Hills (Cardiff)
16 February 2011
Abstract
TV Studies has proved highly adept at analysing texts, but how might 21st century shifts towards multiplatformed TV brands -- and the proliferation of paratexts -- impact on this mode of scholarship? In this presentation, I will argue that considering 'Torchwood' as a unified TV text (or diegetic world) is highly problematic, and that in fact the show can be analysed as a number of differently iterated (BBC3, BBC2, BBC1, Starz) realisations of a brand identity. Branding has been central to the show's construction, including the liminal (extra)diegetic use of Torchwood logos, and as such the series has undergone persistent, if not routinised, reformatting and reinvention. I will consider how useful work on TV I, TV II, and TV III may be in this case, as well as engaging with discourses of television's contemporary "transitions". Torchwood may, in fact, be best considered as "a brand in search of a text."
“Now You’re Thinking With Portals”
Media Training for a Digital World
Dr Will Brooker (Kingston)
10 November 2010
Abstract
This paper argues, using a range of examples from contemporary popular culture, that our increasing engagement with the world as data, through digital technology, involves new vocabulary, gestures, conventions and conceptual models: new ways of seeing, acting and thinking. Drawing on the theory that 1920s cinema offered, in Walter Benjamin’s phrase, a “kind of training” (2006) for the new modes of operation required by the modernist city, it suggests that contemporary popular narratives are currently serving a similar purpose, training us in the uses of digital technology and emphasising the social mastery that results from understanding the world as data, and learning to read it, navigate it and manipulate it.
Previous years
Mamoun Hassan (film producer)
The BFI Production Board, the NFFC and British Cinema in the 1970s
7 October 2009
Professor John Izod (University of Stirling)
Lyndsay Anderson
14 May 2009
Dr Paul Newland (Aberystwyth University)
A Child Went Forth: Gavrik Losey’s Career in British Film
29 January 2009
Professor Christopher Frayling (Royal College of Art)
Once Upon a Time in Italy: How Europe Re-invented the American West
1 December 2008
Professor Paul Julian-Smith (University of Cambridge)
Women on the Verge of an Urban Breakdown: City Girls in Almodóvar’s Cinema and Television
1 April 2008
Dominic Sandbrook (freelance writer and journalist)
The Long 1970s
17 January 2008
David Curtis (Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design)
Expanding Cinema
1 November 2007
Professor James Chapman (University of Leicester)
From Amicus to Atlantis: The Lost Worlds of 1970s British Cinema
14 June 2007
Dr Andrew Spicer (University of the West of England)
The Independent Film-Maker in the 1970s: The Case of Anthony Simmons
17 May 2007
Professor Steve Chibnall (De Montfort University)
Sexploitation Films
3 May 2007