Dissident Voices : The Politics of Television and Cultural Change

In the last 20 years, the television industry has changed out of all recognition.

But how have television programmes in the UK reflected the equally seismic political, social and cultural changes in the world at large?

While institutional and structural changes in broadcasting have been exhaustively analyzed, far less attention has been devoted to how the programme makers themselves approached the upheavals of the period. This book shifts the focus from structure to content, discussing how television forms and genres registered a period of profound cultural change, and developed a more reflexive and critical television culture.

In a series of specially commissioned essays - on the Royal Family, police procedurals, documentaries, hospital dramas, satire, and questions of race, gender, identity and nationhood - the contributors develop the idea of television as a complex and enduringly subversive medium.