TV Critics and Popular Culture

`This excellent study reveals the little-known story of the taste-makers, commentators and pundits who have evaluated television outside of the specialised world of academic writing. The book charts the shifts in journalism and reviewing from the beginnings of television criticism when a new discourse had to be invented to deal with the emerging medium, into developed commentary about television by figures such as Raymond Williams, Dennis Potter and Clive James. Feature columnists and specialist television critics are now facing the new challenges posed by online viewer comment, blogging and virtually instant response to programmes. Rixon's book takes the reader through this cultural history with assurance and insight.

The book shows how comment about television shapes the ways viewers come to programmes, how hierarchies of taste and value are constructed, and how critics function as mediators in national debates about television culture. Referring to a wide range of well-known and lesser-known writers and programmes, Rixon weighs the significance of television criticism as a cultural practice and asks how media convergence promises to change our relationships with what we watch. This study is an essential contribution to histories of British television, popular culture and media analysis.'

Ever since the first scheduled television broadcasts began in the 1930s, newspapers and magazines took quickly to reviewing this revolutionary and popular new medium. The task of television criticism in the public domain initially fell to radio critics and journalists, but the 1950s saw the rise of the dedicated TV critic. Such critics appeared at a time when Britain was undergoing dramatic cultural and social shifts and television was widely perceived to play an important role in this change.

Over the years, critics such as Peter Black, Philip Pursor, Clive James and Mark Lawson have played an important part in shaping the public discourse about television. Studying the discourse of such critics provides a unique insight into public attitudes to TV, the values by which TV has been judged, and adds to our understanding of the way in which TV has become such an integral part of modern British culture.

TV Critics and Popular Culture is the first book to examine the evolution of television criticism in Britain, exploring different types of TV critics and reviewers, the form of their work, the critical language used, the programmes reviewed and the underlying values at work. The analysis is contextualised in relation to wider cultural debates and developments in television and journalism. Alongside this historical-theoretical analysis, the book also explores the perennial question of what the role of the TV critic is, how and why it changes, and whether, with the birth of new technologies, the TV critic is a dying breed. This is an important contribution to the history of Journalism and Television Studies, and to Media Studies and Cultural Studies more widely.

Paul Rixon is Principal Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Roehampton University. He has published extensively on American programmes, British television and the media coverage of war in various journals. He is also the author of American Television on British Screens (2006).