Experimental British Television is a collection of essays uncovering the history of experimental programmes on British TV, edited by Laura Mulvey and Jamie Sexton, and first published in 2007.
Experimental TV denotes productions which go against how TV is normally made, therefore expanding how productions are made in the future. This happens more in the forms of drama and documentaries about the arts, however, there are experimental shows that have been created that have yet to be investigated.
Even though TV has not been around as long as cinema, it has always been unstable and constantly changing through its institutions, technologies, contexts, and influences. This has caused its aesthetics to change also. Medium specificity has been frequently used to determine experimental aesthetics, and thinking about this for TV, its specificity is characterised by its place in the home.
As Roger Silverstone stated, TV can act as 'a contributor to our security', due to its place in our homes, which is why, as stated by John Ellis, it can also be 'a central point of control', because of its schedule determining the schedule of everyday life around it. This schedule was also characterised by Raymond Williams as producing a flow of programmes, meaning the programmes made a continuous, whole sequence.
The place of TV in the home, along with flow, are said by John Ellis to create a glance, where the audience are distracted by the goings-on of everyday life around them. In contrast it is said the undistracted cinema audience have a fixed, focused gaze. However, experimental TV is able to create a double look, as it disrupts the sameness and normality of the flow, fixing the glance, but not making it a cinematic gaze as the viewer could still be distracted. This creates a strange receptiveness to the programme, which along with the ideological tensions sometimes created by the graphic content allowed to be sent straight into homes by experimental programmes, challenges what is acceptable. In 1963, this caused Mary Whitehouse to begin fighting for TV to be cleaned up.
When Channel 4 began broadcasting in 1982, the way experimental TV was commissioned and received changed. Before Channel 4, at ITV and the BBC experimenting with the medium was determined by those who controlled the channel and the creative talent available, the survival of the show depending on where it was placed in the schedule. However, Channel 4 was created to encourage experiment, and provide programmes not like the ones shown on the BBC and ITV. Because of their commissioning process, independent production companies led this new wave of experimental programming.
In the 1950s, TV had come of age as the Torys gained power in British government, creating a new, wealthier society than the previous post-war Britain governed by Labour. This made TV a product that consumers, even from working-class backgrounds, could acquire and have in their own homes, meaning the working-class had the opportunity to take in new ideas, and cultures that they had not had access to before. TV responded to this, as for example, in Armchair Theatre (1956-1974), plays were created that made an effort to showcase and reflect the issues of the lives of the working-class, creating a new imagined unity for the nation. However, Armchair Theatre could be classed as experimental in the way that it experimented with and changed the difficult nature of editing live broadcasts and videotapes, broadening TV aesthetics.
Also in 1956, the Langham group was put together due to a BBC strategy with the goal of determining the problems with experimental TV, as well as wanting to change the language of TV, so it was further from that of cinema and theatre, constructed for the medium itself. Experiments undertaken by the group were not taken seriously but said to be too artsy and reliant on adaptation from literature, creating plays which changed the original source to a more working-class piece.
During the 1960s, due to the loss of British colonialism, culture became the new symbol of British life, in which TV had an important role. Therefore, the public displayed boredom with the concept of English realism, and the cultural elite of the 'Establishment'. When the Berliner Ensemble visited London in 1956, the influence of Brecht's naturalising of realism affected TV's established aesthetics. This idea of naturalising connected the radicalisation of aesthetics and politics, encouraging TV to start creating dramas that were reduced only to their essential elements.
Brecht also believed in distancing the audience through the 'Verfremdungseffekt' (distancing or alienation effect), so that they were not able to identify with the characters, but instead made to think about their actions and the consequences these had, consciously. This was shown in Kennedy Martin's Diary of a Young Man in which stills and montages were used, along with voiceover which challenged the separation of the forms of drama and documentary. This launched the six-part series in 1964, which became the widely used form of drama in the 1980s, whilst combining shooting on location and in a studio, reflecting TV's segmentation, and drama's episodic nature.
In Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective, the audience were required to think about the character's actions, actively taking part in the show and interpreting much like in Brechtian theatre. However, parallel worlds were travelled through, creating layers, as well as recurring themes and motives, which were able to be included because the drama was split into six parts. This allowed the show to create its own world, which could be referenced and reflected on.
When 16mm film reached TV, the medium's aesthetics drastically changed again, as they were experimented with in the 1960s. 16mm film meant that shooting could leave the studio and enter the real world outside, but film was different from the immediacy achieved by filming in the studio, making the audience aware they were watching the past. However, a fake sense of the present tense could be created by using the ways in which TV was usually made, such as direct address's immediacy, and the hand-held camera's indication of being in the middle of real goings-on. Being outside of the studio allowed well-known locations and issues to permeate the private sphere of the domestic space, meaning drama made with 16mm film was affected by shows that dealt with current concerns, such as World in Action.
Because of this reflection of issues and culture, programmes made in this way were also able to merge form and content, creating shows like Visions on Channel 4, which covered cinema on TV. The merging of these two forms, for example showing film clips on the smaller screen of TV had to be contemplated, but this show enabled experiments in film to begin on TV.
Channel 4's involvement with the independent film movement in the 1970s was concerned with the commissions made being relevant and significant to the nation at that period in time. These commissions were played only late at night to avoid them crossing with music, but a aesthetic based more on video, and more specific to TV evolved. However, this aesthetic crossed with music eventually, affecting how pop music videos began to be created.
Having originated in radio, Chris Morris' career is reflexive of the fact many radio programmes were remade for TV when the medium first developed. However, Morris began to blur the line between what is fact and what is fiction by creating fictional situations, which then invaded the lives of celebrities who had no idea that these situations were not real. Therefore, he tampered with fact, creating a constructed reality, which reflected that the media could have now replaced reality, rather than only showing it.
The origin of experimenting in TV was public service broadcasting's acknowledgement that voices of opposition led changes in society through it's complex representation of politics where all of society still felt valued, respected, and catered for. Experimental TV now comes from larger independent companies, which have replaced the smaller companies which were more successful whilst Channel 4 was fairly new. During this period the excitement for the newness of TV was reinvigorated, but the fact that old TV shows were retransmitted as 'classics' on the channel showed signs that the medium itself was not new anymore. Nowadays, audiences have more channels to choose from, and can stream and buy shows on DVD, broadening the space affected by the medium from being only the broadcast and the home. Although, TV is still broadcast live, continuing to reflect the tradition of shooting in a studio and its immediacy. Because of new technologies merging all the time, the opportunity to experiment is becoming more and more achievable if money is made available to do so.
References:
Mulvey L. (2007) 'Introduction: experimental British television' In: Mulvey, L. and Sexton, J. (ed.) Experimental British Television. Manchester: Manchester University Press. pp. 1-15.
Comments
Post a Comment