Author: CSTonline

I’m now seven months into perhaps my most ambitious viewing marathon, the complete Doctor Who cycle, watched at the rate of one episode every day. Thanks to the completion of the BBC DVD range last year I started in December and...

My front-runner status to be the next Chair of the BBC Trust has been jeopardized, thanks to someone named Sebastian Coe (Lord Coe to his friends). Casting around for an explanation of this otherwise incomprehensible news, I...

Somehow, I always find myself approaching big, multi-media conferences with a faint edge of paranoia. How will television studies fare in the context of a set-up which was originally organised around Cinema Studies and in which...

Canadian TV series Orphan Black (2013-) recently reached the end of its second season. The series airs on Space in Canada, BBC America in the US and BBC Three in the UK, as well as in other countries, and has been a flagship...

The UK broadcast of Supernatural has gone all to hell. I, like many others, was deeply disappointed by the news that Sky Living will not be showing season nine, which has just completed its broadcast in the US on the CW. At the...

The original line of this opening was: ‘It might seem odd to devote a television blog to books’; however, following Billy Proctor’s blog last week it now feels almost like bandwagon jumping. For me, though, the two media have...

[The killing of one black and two white civil rights workers] was an example of what we had really been talking to the volunteers about before the three went missing—that you are going into a murderously violent state and you...

Comedian Louie CK made the statement above as part of an interview with an American radio show recently. And, interestingly, even though he’s someone whose material is high on the list of things being illegally accessed, he’s on...

Last summer, I gave a paper on the shifting star persona of Jennifer Aniston at the Console-ing Passions conference, focusing predominantly on the significance of postfeminist discourses of ageing to the construction of...

The face of independent TV production in the UK has changed irrevocably. 21st Century Fox and Apollo Global Management together have taken over Endemol, Shine Group and Core Media and will transform them into the world’s first...

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms. Muriel Rukeyser This is an intimate account of the ways in which the moving image enters and energises the stories that we tell one another on Facebook. It is not meant to be a...

Television has long been accused of creating zombies….breeding an audience that sits transfixed in front of their TV screens, hypnotized by the presumed-to-be mind-numbing qualities of this ‘mindless’ entertainment. This idea...

In the early days of TV, some people apparently said that television was just radio, with pictures. Now, the general opinion would be that this is by no means the case. So it seems a little perverse to write here about something...

Dear Sajid Javid Please accept this column as my application to become the next Chair of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Trust. I know the monarch ultimately makes such decisions, but between you and me, I believe you...

“Fire up the Mexico” Philip Glenister presents For the Love of Cars I first became interested in cars when I was four. That year my father got his first company car, an Austin Maxi. I can’t remember too much about it...

In light of the recent furore regarding Jamaica Inn (BBC, 2014), this week’s piece takes a look at – or a listen to? – the actor’s voice on television, and how its production and delivery has altered over the years. For those...

NB- Post may contain spoilers regarding Game of Thrones Season 4 Over the past few weeks, CST Online has seen a number of posts discussing the nature (I might say, ethos) of television studies. The question has been addressed...

A furry number 2, perched on a neatly-draped table set with fruit and little cakes, peers at a bowl of strawberries. In the background birthday cards pinned to a cheerful yellow wall spell out the number 50.  But with its...