Television handbook patricia holland

Patricia Holland considers the history and structure of British television and, at a time of rapid change, she explores the implications of the digital revolution. The Television Handbookoffers practical advice on many aspects of programme-making from commissioning through to the post production process.

The book brings together a wide range of information on all aspects of television and includes interviews with industry figures such as Tony Garnett and Phil Redmond and with innovative producers, directors and commissioning editors. The Television Handbookbridges the gap between theory and practice. In this new edition, Patricia Holland discusses important genres and concepts such as narrative, documentary and news.

Newly updated chapters from James Curran, Tony Dowmunt and Robin Small consider television journalism, access programming and production management. A new chapter provides a critical introduction to television studies and media theory. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem.

Return to Book Page. The Television Handbook by Patricia Holland. The Television Handbook provides a critical introduction to both the theory and practice of the television industry. Patricia Holland considers the history and structure of British television and, at a time of rapid change, she explores the implications of the digital revolution. The Television Handbook offers practical advice on many aspects of programme-making from commis The Television Handbook provides a critical introduction to both the theory and practice of the television industry.

The Television Handbook offers practical advice on many aspects of programme-making from commissioning through to the post production process. The book brings together a wide range of information on all aspects of television and includes interviews with industry figures such as Tony Garnett and Phil Redmond and with innovative producers, directors and commissioning editors.

The Television Handbook bridges the gap between theory and practice. In this new edition, Patricia Holland discusses important genres and concepts such as narrative, documentary and news. Newly updated chapters from James Curran, Tony Dowmunt and Robin Small consider television journalism, access programming and production management.

A new chapter provides a critical introduction to television studies and media theory. Get A Copy. The book includes profiles giving insight 25 into how personnel in the television industry — from recent graduates to 26 television executives — think about their work. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Television — Production and direction — Handbooks, manuals, etc. Television broadcasting — Handbooks, manuals, etc. Orlebar, Jeremy. Holland, Patricia. Title PN H63 Television Studies is in a continual pro- 20 cess of development, and the ongoing production of new television 21 programmes, made by new and changing institutions under changing 22 conditions and with new technologies, continually generates new ques- 23 tions and ways of answering them.

In this book we aim to take account 24 of recent and current developments in television and in the ways it can 25 be studied, building on the work done by Patricia Holland who was the 26 author of two earlier editions of The Television Handbook. The subsequent parts of the book focus in greater 31 detail on the practices of television makers and the institutions they work 32 for, and on some of the programmes and points of debate that are central 33 to teaching about television today.

British television has aimed to 36 represent a relatively unified culture, even though the nation has been 37 divided into local TV areas like the Midlands, Scotland or Northern 38 Ireland. In a similar way, the shape of the critical approaches to television taught in British colleges and universities is relatively distinctive compared to other nations. Despite the international flow of ideas not unlike the international trade in television programming , there is a strong and healthy interest in television among British students, critics, teachers and enthusiasts.

This book is for that broad constituency of people who want to participate by working in or learning about television. Although there are many books that address aspects of this field some are listed in the Further reading at the end of this part , The Television Handbook balances up-to-date information, ideas and arguments in a distinctive way. Teaching and training Teaching about television falls into two related but distinct approaches. In academic institutions, Television Studies has adopted a focus on the analysis of selected programmes.

Television Studies emerged in the s and s out of several interconnected ways of discussing the medium. Television Studies also adopted some of the more sophisticated discourses of evaluation used in related subjects such as literature, fine art and the emergent discipline of Film Studies. Specialist procedures of analysis, especially semiotics and narrative theory, are used to unpack the patterns of meaning-making that television texts use.

And these procedures are briefly outlined in Chapter 2, and their ramifications are further explored in Part III of this book. The advantage of analysing programmes is that it makes an example accessible to tele- vision students, who can focus on a single programme and discuss selected moments in it.

This approach tends to deal with issues of structure, the meanings created by interactions between images and sound, and context- ualisation in relation to programmes of similar genre and form.

By analysing 9 television as one of the means by which social life is given meaning, and 10 aspects of contemporary society are represented and debated, Television 11 Studies with this sociological focus can contribute to social and political 12 education.

It has been especially important in considering society as a 13 dynamic and changing thing, in which more powerful and less powerful definitions of issues, groups of people and expectations of the future 15 compete to establish themselves as the accepted common sense under- 16 standing of the world.

In this analytical tradition, study of television is 22 one of many ways to discover how social meanings are created, perpetu- 23 ated or modified, and how television representation connects up with the 24 broader media landscape of a particular historical moment, especially the 25 present.

Again, the main outlines of this kind of approach in Television 26 Studies are presented in Chapter 2 of this book, and are debated more 27 fully across the chapters in Part III. However, while this kind of training may sometimes seem merely 33 to be creating a workforce to serve the current state of the television 34 industry, the great majority of television professionals aim for a committed 35 engagement with the technical resources of the medium, a concern for 36 its relationships with society at large, and an interest in the creative possi- 37 bilities that are possible in television production.

Work in television is understood as the deployment of a body of professional knowledge, working practices and technical expertise. But the posses- sion of these competencies is also a means for the expression of ideas and an opportunity to contribute to the evolution of the television industry and also the broader society to which that industry belongs. Television training entails the understanding of social responsibility and the recognition of opportunities for creative intervention.

So television training is close to the agendas of the theoretical studies of television described above, in that it deals with questions of quality, aesthetics and politics. In this book, we take the position that the two strands of television education are mutually compatible and interrelated.

The value of television and television studies The legacy of educational theories developed in the nineteenth century is that education is concerned with imparting knowledge to enable students to discriminate between what is valuable and what is worthless. By means of this discriminating ability, the educated person will be able to seek out what is valuable and reject what is not, thus gaining the means to become a better person and a more valuable citizen.

Clearly, this raises the ques- tion of how to judge what is good. It will also involve the assumption that what is ordinary, familiar and enjoyed by the majority of a population will probably be less valuable than what is enjoyed by an educated elite. So the discrimination between valuable and worthless subjects of study is parallel to, and supports, the discrimination between valuable people and worthless people.

The formation of an elite collection of subjects to study goes hand in hand with the formation of an elite group of people who are more highly educated, discriminating and valuable as citizens than their ordinary contemporaries.

This set of interconnected assumptions about the value of education has had a huge impact on the kinds of attention given to television, and to the academic study of the television medium.

Television is the most pervasive audio-visual medium in contemporary society. Therefore, it is necessarily ordinary, familiar, and subject to the accusation that it is worthless because it is so available and integrated into everyday life.

If such discriminations are to be made, there is also a problem 2 with how to locate the criteria that support this judgement. It seems quite 3 legitimate to claim that The Simpsons is a very important piece of cultural 4 work, because of its textual complexity, its self-awareness as television, 5 and its relevance to contemporary media landscapes and their audiences. There is clearly an unsolved problem at 9 the moment, about how to judge the value of television in general and 10 specific programmes in particular.

Competing arguments are advanced, for 11 and against the value of television and Television Studies, with no agreed 12 criteria for deciding which of these arguments is the stronger, or even the 13 more useful. We develop these ideas and debates further in subsequent chapters, and especially in relation to television drama programmes in 15 Chapter The first media related Act was the Wireless Telegraphy Act in Commercial broadcasting was started by an Act of Parliament in In the UK, successive governments have avoided a cut-throat and unfettered commercial market, such as that found in the US, by setting up broadcasting regulatory bodies to oversee all areas of broad- casting, including cable and satellite.

These bodies maintain technical and programme standards. They ensure that broadcasters provide a mix of programmes for a variety of audiences. They ensure that programmes do not offend against what is generally considered to be good taste or decency.

They require that programmes are fair, and do not incite crime or racial hatred. News should be accurate and impartial. They provide a code on the content of advertisements and regulate when and how often they can be shown. Until recently there were five different regulatory bodies covering the commercial broadcasting of radio and television, with wide ranging powers.

In , the Labour Government under Tony Blair passed a new Communications Act that included the setting up of a new communications regulator for the digital age, called the Office of Communications, or Ofcom. The reason for its introduction was convergence in the media and telecoms industry, and the rise of cross-media companies such as AOL Time Warner and News International. The political landscape 9 Ofcom 2 3 Ofcom is the new broadcasting and telecommunications regulator, with 4 a wide brief.

It replaces other broadcasting watchdogs including the Broad- 10 casting Standards Commission BSC which deals with taste and decency 11 matters on TV and radio, and the Radio Authority. It oversees telephone 12 services in the UK. It regulates the whole area of terrestrial and satellite 22 commercial television. It regulates the use of commercials on television. It is concerned with 24 media spectrum allocation including the allocation of mobile phone 25 wavelengths, and telephone landlines.

It is formulating new rules on the 26 mergers of media companies, such as the merger between Carlton and 27 Granada. It can even comment on the way music is downloaded from 28 the internet. It will police the 9. This is 27 per cent more than the previous five regulatory bodies cost. More Filters. The choice of content and number of technologies that audiences view television with are increasingly expanding in the post-network era, leading those who use the medium to question its definition.

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