Sensing the City through Television

Peter Billingham

Description

An investigation of the fictional representations of the city in contemporary British and American television drama, assessing their political, sociological and cultural implications. The book draws on the following five key case studies for specific and detailed analysis:

* Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City 

* Homicide & Life on the Street 

* Queer as Folk 

* The Cops 

* Holding On

Each is discussed in terms of structure, content, characterisation and narrative, and each is placed within its specific ideological context. The case studies are intended to represent an interesting range of British and American cities and city sub-cultures. The author extends his analysis to investigate the intrinsic issues related to the implications of popular and high drama and culture.

This study includes exclusive interviews with the writers and directors of some of the series discussed. This new material provides new insights into the intended presentations of "city" identities for the television. As one of the first substantial investigations of the city in television drama, this book reflects and contributes to a growing general interest in the politics of representation. It is also designed for accommodation into the very popular academic courses on drama and in film and media studies: as a textbook and for supplementary reading.

Sujets

• Sciences appliquées
• Ingénierie
• Sciences appliquées
• Sciences appliquées
• Ingénierie
• Architecture
• Télévision
• General
• Engineering
• Politics
• Technology
• Television
• General officer
• Sciences et techniques

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2003
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841508214
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Sensing the City through Television
Urban identities in fictional drama
Peter Billingham
First Published in Great Britain in Hardback in 2000 by Intellect Books, PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK
First Published in USA in 2000 by Intellect Books , ISBS, 5824 N.E. Hassalo St, Portland, Oregon 97213-3644, USA
Copyright 2000 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
Copy Editor: Peter Young Consulting Editor: Robin Beecroft Production: Sally Ashworth

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Electronic ISBN: 1-84150-821-7 / ISBN: 1-84150-018-6

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cromwell Press, Wiltshire
Contents
Sensing the City - Navigating a Journey
An Introduction
1 Policing the Imagination
Tony Garnett s The Cops
2 The City as a Site of Redemptive Struggle
Tony Marchant s Holding On
3 The Fabled City
The San Francisco of Armistead Maupin s
Tales of the City
4 A Manchester Heterotopia?
Queer as Folk
5 Homicide - Life on the Street
Sensing the City - Centres and Margins
A Conclusion
Acknowledgements
There are many people whom I would like to thank and acknowledge for their support in the research and writing of this book.
I would like to begin by thanking certain former colleagues in the School of Dance and Theatre at Bretton Hall College, University of Leeds. My special thanks are extended principally to Linda Taylor, a close friend and provocateur who opened up certain post modernist discourses to me in a way that really stimulated my work on Queer as Folk and Tales of the City . I also want to thank Dougie Hankin, Maureen Barry and Mitch Mitchell for their friendship and support. Furthermore, sincere thanks are extended to Tony Green and Paul Cowen, Wendy Johnstone and Arthur Pritchard for helping me to arrange my teaching commitments in such a way that facilitated the writing of this book to a very tight schedule.
I also wish to thank Dr Neil Sammells, Dean of Faculty and other new colleagues in the School of English and Creative Studies who have supported my transition into my new post at Bath Spa University College with such warm support and interest.
Other colleagues and friends whose help and interest is very warmly appreciated include Professor Beverley Skeggs and colleagues at the University of Manchester, Professor John Bull of the University of Reading, Dr Susan Painter of the Roehampton Institute and Bill McDonnell of the University of Sheffield.
Overseas colleagues and friends who have given warm support and help are Professor Percy Hintzen of the University of California and Carole Christensen (Copenhagen).
My deepest and sincere thanks must also go to Tony Garnett and Tony Marchant whose generosity of time and interest were essential for the successful researching and writing of the chapters on The Cops and Holding On . Thanks are also due to David Snodin and the BBC, World Productions, Red Productions, Channel 4, Productions de la Fete and Armistead Maupin for their interest, help and support of this project.
Finally, I must thank Sally Njampa Ashworth for overseeing the successful completion of this book for Intellect and Robin Beecroft for his faith in commissioning it from me.
This book is dedicated to Marilyn for her love and belief and to my wonderful family: Eve, Chris, Thomas, Sally, Leo, Ruth and William. Heartfelt thanks to you all for your love, patience and unending good will. May you all work towards building cities of love, justice, tolerance and equality.
Peter Billingham
Bath Spa University College
September 2000.
Sensing the City - Navigating a Journey
An Introduction
In this book, my central analysis concerns the relationship between contemporary ideological concerns relating to the experience of living within the city, and their construction and exploration in five case-studies from contemporary British and American television drama. From the vigorous examination of these television dramas, several issues have arisen which to varying degrees foreground the central discussion of this study. They are: sexual politics, gender, ethnicity, economics, urban alienation and - as a meta-frame - the global post-modern. In this introduction, I intend to define my core methodological and investigative approach. In so doing, I shall necessarily seek to identify and discuss the following key elements: My own ideological viewing position . The problematic constructs of the viewer or audience . The implications of the concept of the geo-ideological . The implications of the concepts of dramatic value and dramatic realism .
I would like to begin in a slightly more informal mode by outlining the early stages of this book s inception. Sensing the City began its gestation as a concept that arose from research that I was conducting into Tony Marchant s Holding On, an eight episode television drama commissioned by BBC2 in 1996/7. The series is set in contemporary London and explores the ways in which its diverse range of characters hold on through the pressures and traumas of city existence. The territory of television drama was, at that time, relatively new to me, although I had both taught and published on the television dramas of Dennis Potter. 1 As I carried out multiple close readings of the performance texts of Marchant s powerful dramas, I became aware of the ways in which a multi-vocal narrative structure - foregrounded in some finely written central characters - seemed to expose and reveal a refracted, kaleidoscopic sense of the city. Subsequently, a central component of my methodological and investigative approach has been the thesis that, though the deconstruction of character formation and the dialectical matrix of narratives, a sense of the city is exposed in which the politics of location is inextricably interwoven with the politics of identity. It became clear to me, therefore, in an increasingly vivid and compelling sense, that this award-winning drama might be interpreted as exposing and examining certain crucial ideological anxieties about the city, and related issues of urban identity and the politics of place. Excited and challenged, I began to search for other examples of contemporary British and American television drama that might, in their own complementary ways, be also engaged in a similarly dynamic dialectic of investigation, exposure and revelation. Through the systematic excavation of these ideas, I then developed the concept of the geo-ideological as a means of defining the dialectic of literal notions of place and location, transposed with their ideological marking, signing and delineation. I shall discuss this concept and its implications for my analysis later in this chapter. Through my investigative research and the simultaneous questioning of my criteria and frame of reference, I began to question the means by which the process of this refracting of the city was motivated and mediated. This in itself stimulated me to interrogate and extend my own understanding of the critical model on which my analysis and viewing position was based. From this came the slightly disorientating sense of vertigo that accompanies the navigation of new territories. Extended discussions with my good friend and former colleague, Linda Taylor, at Bretton Hall College, provoked me into what proved to be the most creative encounter with the theories of Michel Foucault and Julia Kristeva. This in itself provided me with a kind of compass with which to delineate the territory of Queer as Folk and Tales of the City, as well as opening my broader gaze of vision in other creative and challenging ways.
Before writing this book my background was, and remains, Drama and Performance Studies. Therefore this study is focused upon the five cases studies as dramas and performance texts. In the early stages of my research and preparation, I recognised the requirement, challenge and value of engaging in certain crucial issues arising out of the eclectic disciplines of Cultural Studies. In this respect, I wish to extend my thanks to Professor Beverley Skeggs and colleagues at the University of Manchester for sharing ongoing discoveries with me arising out of their Dangerous Erotics research project. Following helpful advice from my former colleague, Dr Kelvin Taylor at Bretton Hall College, I have been particularly enriched and helped by such excellent anthologies such as Post-modern Cities and Spaces (eds. Watson and Gibson, Blackwell) and Place and the Politics of Identity (eds. Keith and Pile, Routledge). Also immensely helpful in terms of my chapters on Queer as Folk and Tales of the City was Lesbian and Gay Studies (eds. Medhurst and Munt, Cassell).
Viewing positions and audiences
It is clearly necessary, before I begin to offer some brief introductory discussion of the five case-studies and the principal issues arising out of them, to try and identify my own ideological, interpretative viewing position. I should first of all state that I am a white man in my early middle age who grew up in a close knit, British east midlands working class family and environment. I am now, through education, profession and income, middle class. I am heterosexual. I subscribe to an ideological position that is broadly Marxist in a left pluralist context. I also acknowledge associated constructs and perspectives from liberation theology and Quaker value systems, essential elements in my ongoing struggle with the problematic metaphors of the subjective and transcendent.
In any study of television as a medium of mass communication, the question of the viewer or audience is central, problematic and the site of ongoing ideological debate. In terms of my developed understanding of the term viewer/viewing, I believe that the phen