Current Research Projects

- VideoActive
- No Such Thing as Society
- Acting with Facts

Video Active is a major EU-funded project aiming to create access to digitised television programme content from archives around Europe. It involves collaboration between the Department of Media Arts at Royal Holloway and Utrecht University, and eleven European archives including the BBC to provide access to content and supporting contextual materials via a specially designed web portal. The team from the Department of Media Arts, who are John Ellis, Cathy Johnson and Rob Turnock, are responsible for developing content selection strategy and policy for the project.
For further details of the project see: http://videoactive.wordpress.com/


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‘No such thing as society’?
Broadcasting and the public services 1979-1992
A study of the ways in which the changes made by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative governments were reflected in the broadcast media.

This is a two year research project, which will be funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Beginning September 2007, it is based within the Centre for Broadcasting History Research, and will be led by Patricia Holland and Hugh Chignell. It will also involve liaison with other Universities through the Southern Universities Broadcasting History Group.

‘No such thing as society’?

It is generally accepted that the Thatcher governments of the 1980s brought about a radical restructuring of the politics and economics of the UK, moving away from the post-war, social democratic settlement towards ‘rolling back the state’, de-nationalisation and giving greater power to the market.

This research will consider how the changes were reflected in, and mediated by, the broadcast output of the time, particularly in relation to social policy and the health service. Programmes ranged from documentaries and current affairs programmes to drama and docu-dramas, from soaps to sitcoms and satirical shows, from lifestyle programming to quiz and game shows. Many of the social changes involved institutions –such as hospitals and schools- which made very attractive as settings for dramas and observational documentaries.

We will monitor the project of deregulation, privatisation and the move towards free-market economics, both as it was explicitly presented on radio and television by Prime Minister Thatcher herself and her associates, and as it was presented across the genres in both media. We will expect to find a very broad range of opinions, reactions and programme styles. A specific case study will focus on the area of health, looking at drama, comedy, chat shows etc as well as news and current affairs.

One outcome will be an inventory of programming in the period 1979-1990 across all broadcast genres and all national terrestrial television and radio channels.

Bournemouth Media School has many existing, research resources, on which this project will draw, including an archive collection of video and audio tapes, scripts, production documents, audience research data and a complete set of Radio Times. Researchers at the Media School’s Centre for Broadcasting History Research have created a group of databases. They include:
· Television Times (TVTip) up to 1985;
· Radio 4’s Analysis current affairs series;
· ITV’s This Week recently completed with an ARHC Resource Enhancement Grant (award no RE/AN11812/APN19470).
· a newly created database of the long-running BBC flagship current affairs series, Panorama.

This study will contribute to a historical understanding of the circulation of ideas and attitudes, as well as the mediation of factual information. It will throw light on the ways on which the public debate was conducted within the national broadcast media of the 1980s.

Patricia Holland
June 2007

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Acting With Facts

This research project, which runs from 2007 to 2010, is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project team is Dr Derek Paget (Principal Investigator), Professor Jonathan Bignell and Lib Taylor (Co-investigators). Dr Heather Sutherland is Postdoctoral Researcher for the project. The programme of research is one of the activities of the Centre for Television Drama Studies.

The project aim is to study the demands made specifically on actors by the factual dramas that have burgeoned on British television and in British theatre since 1990. After interviewing a selection of actors in order to investigate their specific contributions to and views on theatre and television docudrama, the project seeks to assess the research and performative demands of a fact-base in the realisation of specific examples of theatre and television production.

In particular the project researches any comparisons and correspondences that actors find between their work for docudrama and for fictional drama in theatre and television. It also examines the ways television docudrama and documentary theatre have responded to the big changes of recent years: for television, the 1990 Broadcasting Act, increased international co-production, the digital revolution; in theatre the resurgence of 'Verbatim' and 'Tribunal' modes; and for both media, accelerating social and political change. Theories of docudrama form, genre, format and audience address will, it is hoped, be significantly developed as a result of this research project.

For further details of this project, see www.reading.ac.uk/ftt/research/ftt-actingwithfacts.asp