TV and Academia Edinburgh Keynote

Hey beauties,

How are you all? I wanna say ‘roll on March /April but I’m actually very reluctant to put a date on things. There have been so many false alarm ‘it’ll be ‘back to normal by…..’ over the last year, and here we are, the best part of a year later, still in lockdown!

Early on in this, I had prepared myself for it being a long ass ting, so I was sort of resigned to the world pausing for a bit, and hadn’t pinned my hopes on any of the promises of ‘by Summer’ ‘by Christmas’ etc. However with the vaccine now rolling out I do feel a tentative hope, and I’m more then ready to get back out into the world…so ‘roll on March / April’ I guess…

2020 changed me though fr, I went through a profound shift. We live out so much of our lives online now and ‘online discourse’ (with some beautiful exceptions) wearies me. I have no tolerance for the shrill, declamatory distortions that abound, and I feel that the sooner we get back to real world connections with each other the better, because the level of online dehumanization at this point is peak. Although no doubt the influence of social media is even more entrenched now than it was before, so who knows what the offline world will  look like when we re-remerge back out, bleary  into the material realm.

Anyway, as was saying earlier, I gave the Arts and Humanities TV (which is an off shoot of the Edinburgh TV Festival) keynote speech earlier in the week and wanted to share some of what we discussed with you all. The point of the session was to look at the relationship between academia and TV. 

There is some wonderful television that draws on academic research, and certain disciplines lend themselves particularly well to the medium of television; history, art, art history, as well as some sciences; data as facts, years and statistics, I think can be particularly effectively. However, I think that when it comes to more conceptual and theoretical research, things can get more difficult and because of the nature of the visual medium there can a reticence to explore ideas. 

I feel that the success of reality TV is not irrelevant here. The emphasis on the transformative narrative, and the personal journey, seems to have influenced television far beyond that genre and a tension exists between complex ideas, ones that are not neatly bounded, that perhaps throw up as many questions as they answer, and the desire for tidy resolution.

TV certainly has a history of being daring and  experimental. We discussed John Berger’s iconic 1972 Ways of Seeing and influential British- Jamaican intellectual Stuart Hall (who as an aside coined the term Thatcherism and is the founder of cultural studies) who made programmes like Stuart Hall’s Karl Marx: The Spectre of Marxism (1983 Thames Television). Not to mention his role as head of Sociology at the Open University and the mission of the University itself which was developed to help cultivate an educated population.

TV wields a huge amount of potential to share specialist knowledge widely and generously, something Hall was committed to. Where so much weird, poorly informed hot takes, pass as ‘truth’ online, TV could be a space (outside of academia) where we could turn to see comparative rigor and development of complex ideas, that are often misrepresented online/in social media spaces while often inaccessible in the academy itself. Check out this clip from Stuart Hall lecture on representation and the media, it’s trippy af and demonstrates that erudition and complexity do not need to be presented in a stuffy way, they can be anything but.

Youtubers like Contrapoints are exciting to me, because of the way she addresses theories of race, gender, class, politics, popular culture through a framework of philosophy, and sociology, using costume and performance, topped off with an arch, dark humour. It’s brilliant (I could go as far as to say I stan Contrapoints, a phrase you are unlikely to hear twice from me lol) but I certainly can’t see such an idea having been commissioned by a mainstream channel. I also spoke about Play for Today and the necessity of entertaining television that rattles the cages of the establishment.

Adam Curtis work is a contemporary mainstream voice who has the space to be experimental and I love his work. I’m really looking forward to his new series on Febuary 11th Can’t Get You Out of My Head

Take care of yourselves xx