Abstract
In the conclusion of Remembering British Television: Audience, Archive and Industry, Kristyn Gorton and Joanne Garde-Hansen interview archival researcher Mhairi Brennan. Brennan reflects on the difficulties of locating ‘new’ historical television footage for inclusion in BBC documentaries: ‘I just don’t have the time and don’t have the money to spend so it is having to rely on what’s available and it makes me worried […] because we just keep showing the same version’ of television’s past (p. 174). This pessimistic view of the production process speaks to a number of concerns central to Gorton and Garde-Hansen’s work. The writers are emphatic that this is not a(nother) history of British television (and it isn’t). Nor does it retread the same analytical and theoretical ground as the leading scholarship on television and memory (see especially Holdsworth, 2011, and Spigel, 1995).
Instead, the central argument is that the collective cultural memories of British television’s past – of old tv as the authors refer to it, citing Christine Geraghty (2015) – are shaped (consciously or otherwise) by a range of ‘custodians’ (p. 5). Furthermore, these cultures of memory are inherited and reworked by successive generations to make sense of their cultural present. The custodians who are the subjects of Gorton and Garde-Hansen’s interviews, and to whom individual chapters are dedicated, include television producers, archivists, museum curators, academics, fans and mothers. It is through an investigation of the quotidian aspects of their jobs/policies/creative labour/lives as sites of meaning that the processes through which television memory is inherited are revealed.
Brennan’s comment is a typical product of the frameworks developed in critical memory studies which the authors deploy to explore how memories of British television are created, curated and circulated. The authors argue that there is a running tension between institutional, cultural and social structures and the agency of individuals operating within those structures. By focusing on the oral testimony of individuals, a space is created in which narratives of, if not resistance, then at least discontinuity, can be articulated. Multiple regimes of memory formation are examined in which the television programmes that are remembered as significant by the interviewees frequently diverge from the ‘official’ structures of strategic remembering and forgetting which are necessary for canon formation or the conceptualisation of a fondly remembered ‘golden age’.
Indeed, the book is just as interested in the way that the numerous challenges faced by those doing memory curation shape what is – and what can be – remembered. Brennan speaks to the time and financial pressures under which television researchers and producers work in a way that is emblematic of the precarious, fragile and contingent nature of the memory frameworks that Gorton and Garde-Hansen excavate. Financial pressures lead to the redundancy of expert curators, encourage processes of institutional forgetting and place archival collections at risk. Consolidation and rationalisation (of production companies, archives, budgets) mean that vital archival and production paperwork – even programmes – are often lost in the reshuffle. The problematic question of national identity is probed throughout the book, but the British political context is pervasive in these accounts, demonstrating how the economic crisis for public services wrought by a decade of austerity has directly shaped the memories of television that are able to be made available. The authors also make a convincing case that Brexit has led to a mobilisation of television memory in the service of competing versions of national identity.
Many of the interview extracts presented throughout the book offer a space for opinion and critical (self-)reflection on the participant’s place within the formation of cultures of memory as much as for a record of actual moments of recall. The most satisfying chapters, however, are those in which personal recollections are intertwined with the book’s central arguments about inheritance: when memory begets memory. In this respect, the chapter on children’s television is most successful, and the account of a mother realising – mid-interview – that the process of passing down the television of her childhood to her son reflects exactly her father’s actions during her own childhood is perhaps the book’s most powerful (and moving) moment. It is also where the complexities of using interviews as a methodological tool are most visible and where the overriding notion of television memory being ‘inherited’ is at its most direct.
That chapter also provides a particularly vivid metaphorical distillation of the book’s delineation of the numerous iterations of ‘caring’ that shape how television is remembered, drawing on Holdsworth and Lury’s (2016) work and continuing the feminist imperatives that drive much of this book. Another respondent had given a doll of the popular children’s television character Bagpuss to her daughter, who is unfamiliar with the original programme (Bagpuss [1974]). The toy, the authors comment, is therefore ‘devoid of significance for the person who has it, but full of meaning to the person who is giving it’ (p. 126). Gorton and Garde-Hansen’s most striking argument concerns the quantity, and type, of labour that goes into caring about television memory (deliberate or not; officially or otherwise). The archivists who have to care for fragile videotape; the curator who is meticulous in the collecting, cataloguing, storage and display of unique collections; the fans who turn their love for a programme into the careful (and time-consuming) creation of paratextual material; the parents who curate their televisual memory for the educational and experimental enrichment of their children – each is an act of caring that bestows (some) old tv with value, demonstrates that it matters and shapes the way in which television memory is inherited in different and material ways. Like the mother who gives the gift of Bagpuss, those responsible for the ‘administration of [television] memory’ (p. 30) take up the role of passing-down old tv and making it meaningful for present and future generations. This book’s most vital contribution, then, is to stress the care-work that is required to show that television matters in the face of precarious resources. Although the question of how the television of today will be remembered (or forgotten) is only implicitly raised, this thoughtful book puts such considerations squarely on the agenda.
Given publication practices elsewhere and this book’s valuable insights for students and scholars in television studies, it is worth noting that this book is being simultaneously published in paperback and as an e-book at a very reasonable price.