Author: CSTonline

When thinking about TV in relation to horror/SF/fantasy I tend to think in quite simple terms. Its modern incarnation starts with the arrival of Twin Peaks in 1990. There’s not much more than needs to be said about Twin Peaks,...

Rake is an Australian television series that airs on ABC1 on Sunday nights. Now into its third series, it centrally features Richard Roxburgh as Rake Cleaver Greene, a charismatic but anti-establishment, criminal defence...

Why the parentheses? Well, the established argument is that television’s very domesticity and ‘ordinariness’ militates against any capacity to produce ‘stars’ in the sense that cinema is traditionally perceived to have done....

As a TV scholar and a science fiction fan, I enjoyed watching An Adventure in Space and Time, a drama documentary about the early years of Doctor Who when it was broadcast in November of last year as part of the series’ fiftieth...

On 1 January  2014, Greece assumed the rotating presidency of the EU Council. Although it is the fifth time for the county to be in charge of the European Union, holding the presidency comes at a crucial point, a critical...

It may seem odd to suggest that the second series Bron/Broen (The Bridge 2011-) had a purity of narrative line. This was after all a series that began with a crewless tanker with its hidden plague-ridden cargo drifting into the...

The key won’t quite turn in the front door, my hand unsteady in its intoxicated disenchantment. My loose change has already fallen from my pocket, splashing gold and silver into the rusty wide-open drain. I fall in, switch on...

Jason Jacobs and Stephen Peacock  recently published a book on TV Aesthetics – Television Aesthetics and Style – in which they argue that discourses surrounding style and aesthetics are ‘curiously absent from many critical...

BBC-bashing is of course a venerable and well-cherished sport for the British press. A recent example was the ‘furore’ over the Corporation’s overly-enthusiastic use of Gary Barlow, particularly in his performance in Gary...

Who would have thought that the company behind the cuddly Great British Bake Off format would be embroiled in one of the biggest documentary ethics blow-ups of recent years? Love Productions is indeed behind both Bake...

I knew I’d really made it when the New York Times wanted to speak to me about ‘Monocles’ last week. The inquiry was based, said the Grey Lady’s email, on my work about food on television. That in turn derived from something in...

I’m in a new world[1]. I’ve left secure employment at the University of California for London and returned to the kind of life I led for a decade from my mid-20s, when I was a member of what we now call the...

Having since marked several dozen first year essays, Christmas is fast becoming a distant memory. However, one programme that remains in my mind – perhaps more prominently than I’d like – is Michael McIntyre’s Showtime (BBC,...

Kennedy set so much in motion in such a short period of time that the outcome of each narrative was unclear. Journalist and author Evan Thomas in American Experience’s ‘JFK’ (2013) The Kennedy assassination still marks a shared...