Abstract
A blog post on the website for British newspaper The Guardian saw TV journalist Stuart Heritage (2012) vent his disdain towards a recent poll conducted among the British public where the sequence involving James Bond’s (Daniel Craig) arrival to accompany the Queen to this summer’s Olympic opening ceremony was voted ‘the greatest TV moment ever’. Heritage’s anger – questioning why this moment was deemed more significant than events such as the 1969 moon landing – neatly summarises the anxieties that Amy Holdsworth outlines in Television, Memory and Nostalgia to contextualise her monograph concerning television’s role in remembrance practices. These concerns foreground television’s paradoxical characterisation as an ephemeral medium continually prioritising the present, on the one hand, and as a form prone to acts of remembering via its ongoing working through of important social, cultural and historical events, on the other.
Responding to these associations, Holdsworth opts for a medium-specific interrogation of how television enables and constructs forms of remembering, distinguishing her work from preceding scholarly engagements that debate mediated memory at a general level (Garde-Hansen, 2011) and television studies scholars prioritising issues of history and historiography (Wheatley, 2007).
Holdsworth’s approach towards medium specificity brings many advantages: her decision to consider television in terms of both its materiality and textuality means that the medium’s insertion into practices of remembrance is explored diversely. For example, Chapter 1’s conceptualisation of television as a ‘black mirror’, reflecting yet distorting the domestic setting into which television is placed, allows Holdsworth to move beyond dominant ways of discussing television and memory by considering how the aesthetic experience of the medium can trigger autobiographical memories of the viewing experience. Similarly, Chapter 5’s analysis of television’s place within the context of museums raises interesting points concerning how a popular form associated with the everyday becomes re-narrated as ‘spectacular’ within these locations. Exploring television-as-material-object alongside its aesthetics of intimacy allows for a complex and dynamic understanding of the medium’s myriad roles in subjective and cultural remembrance. Moreover, television’s ability to look simultaneously towards the present or future while reminding audiences of personal and/or sociocultural pasts is neatly encapsulated in Holdsworth’s recurring metaphor of television’s characterisation through rhythms of ‘ebb and flow’. This argument is explored further in Chapter 2 at a textual level, through examining patterns of echo in specific programmes and how these provide viewers with affectively memorable moments via replaying recurrent images and tropes. Displaying sensitivity towards television’s aesthetics both textually and experientially allows Holdsworth to construct a multifaceted argument that explores the medium’s myriad strategies for enabling reminiscence.
However, while the range of theoretical positions into which television is inserted throughout is impressive, Holdsworth’s exploration of specific examples could benefit from time to time from greater signposting to clarify why certain cases have been chosen. This would give coherence to the overarching arguments of individual chapters. Chapter 2 demonstrates this point since the programmes selected for analysis, such as the acclaimed writer Stephen Polliakoff’s Perfect Strangers (BBC 2001), Grey’s Anatomy (ABC 2005–) and HBO serial The Wire (2002–2008) feel a little incongruent, given that each series is produced according to dissimilar industrial and generic contexts and work with different imaginings of their intended audiences. These problems of coherence come into focus when the aforementioned chapter is juxtaposed with its successor. Chapter 3 analyses the celebrity genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC 2004–) as a standalone case study. The chapter insightfully locates the programme among a variety of institutional issues to provide an in-depth analysis of how it utilises generic conventions, television aesthetics and specific broadcasting structures to outline how the series’ mediations of family history are shaped by different national television cultures. If read immediately alongside each other, these chapters suggest that future text-based explorations of memory provide the greatest insights by combining a case study approach with textual analysis and a focus upon institutional issues, to provide nuanced readings of how and why such representations of remembering are constructed.
Additionally, the monograph could have benefited from a more developed exploration of television nostalgia. Holdsworth works from a fairly normative understanding of nostalgia itself, despite referencing theorists such as Susan Stewart (1993), and ‘nostalgia TV’, as her examples are limited primarily to clip and countdown shows. A consequence of the latter decision is that although the analysis of drama series Life on Mars (BBC 2006–2007) interestingly synthesises and extends existing analyses of the programme, instances where nostalgia becomes identifiable in different television genres remain underexplored. Allusions are made to how the rebooted Doctor Who (BBC 2005–) has returned continually to themes of temporality and loss, or how Who Do You Think You Are? articulates feelings of spatio-temporal change by juxtaposing past and present sites of family heritage, but these are not developed further and linked explicitly to nostalgia. Consequently ‘nostalgia’ remains stuck here, associated predominantly with ‘cheap’ television and ‘recycling’, rather than becoming opened out to consider its overlaps with less expected genres. This is a shame, as Holdsworth’s wider arguments are interesting, concerning how television articulates and mediates nostalgia in a manner that enables affection and critical distance equally. What is suggested, then, is that further research is needed to consider how nostalgia emerges in unexpected generic contexts.
In summary, Television, Memory and Nostalgia provides an engaging range of arguments that locate mediations of memory and remembering among the medium’s aesthetics, and so suggests directions for further research into television recall both on-screen and beyond. The book makes important contributions to the field of cultural studies, especially for scholars engaging with debates concerning television and/or memory, by providing insights as to why television provides us with memorable moments, both big and small.