Table Of ContentContemporary Landmark Television
Life on Mars
From Manchester to New York
Edited by
Stephen Lacey and Ruth McElroy
University of Wales Press
CONTEMPORARY LANDMARK TELEVISION
LIFE ON MARS
Series editors
Professor Steve Blandford (University of Glamorgan)
Professor Stephen Lacey (University of Glamorgan)
Professor Ruth McElroy (University of Glamorgan)
CONTEMPORARY LANDMARK TELEVISION
LIFE ON MARS
FROM MANCHESTER
TO NEW YORK
Edited by Stephen Lacey and Ruth McElroy
UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS
CARDIFF
2012
© The contributors, 2012
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-7083-2359-5
e-ISBN 978-0-7083-2360-1
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asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
Designed and typeset by Chris Bell
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CONTENTS
Series Editors’ Preface vii
Notes on Contributors ix
Introduction 1
Stephen Lacey and Ruth McElroy
Part I Quality TV
Form and Aesthetics
1 Life on Mars 19
Hybridity and Innovation in a British Television Context
Robin Nelson
2 ‘Am I Mad, in a Coma or Back in Time?’ 31
Generic and Narrative Complexity in Life on Mars
Nichola Dobson
3 Immersion versus Alienation 43
Listening to Life on Mars
Rob Smith
Part II Contesting the Past
Television and History
4 Memory Banks Failing! 57
Life on Mars and the Politics of Re-imagining the Police
and the Seventies
Andy Willis
5 Sam Tyler and the ‘New North’ 69
John Curzon
6 ‘Moonage Daydreams’ 79
Nostalgia and Cultural Memory Contexts of Life on Mars
and Ashes to Ashes
John R. Cook and Mary Irwin
Part III Recalling the Past
Television as Memory
7 ‘Up The Wooden Hills to Bedfordshire’ 91
Time Travel, Childhood and the Uncanny Home in
Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes
Peter Hughes Jachimiak
8 The Medium is the Monster . . . or the World? 105
Discourses of Uncanny ‘Old Media’ and Immersive
‘New Media’ in Life on Mars
Matt Hills
9 Consuming Retrosexualities 117
The Past Live On Screen, Online Now
Ruth McElroy
Part IV Life on Mars as International Television
10 ‘American Remake – Shudder’ 133
Online Debates about Life on Mars and ‘British-ness’
Brett Mills
11 The Emigration of Life on Mars 145
Sam and Gene Do America
David Lavery
12 Locating Generational and Cultural Clashes in
the Transfer of Successful Formats between the
United Kingdom, Spain and the United States 153
The Case of Life on Mars
Joseba Bonaut and Teresa Ojer
Part V Debating Production
13 Julie Gardner and Claire Parker 169
In Conversation
Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes 185
Production and Transmission Details
Bibliography 193
SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE
T
HERE IS NO DOUBT that the landscape of broadcasting has been trans-
formed in recent years, and the pace of change shows no sign of slow-
ing. Technological change (satellite and digital television, the rise of
the Internet), the internationalisation of television formats and programmes,
the availability of the DVD box sets, new technologies for recording and time-
shifting viewing, the proliferation of TV channels and the segmentation of the
TV audience – these have all ensured that television, once dubbed ‘ephem-
eral’, is now a major cultural commodity in a global marketplace. The disci-
pline of television studies, although a relative newcomer to the field of cultural
and media studies, has grown confident in its ability to confront and debate
the challenges that the new ecology of broadcasting poses.
Contemporary Landmark Television focuses on one corner of the wider
picture in recognition of its continuing significance for both home and over-
seas audiences. The series offers scholars and lecturers timely investigations
of current broadcasting, especially in the UK context, through a focus upon
television’s prime output: programmes. By being responsive to the contem-
porary television landscape, the series recognises that television scholarship
benefits from engaging with the current viewing experience of scholars and
students. For us, one of the enduring values of television as a mass medium
lies in its contemporaneity with its audience: television exists in the moment –
even when that ‘moment’ is lengthened by new technologies of recording and
distribution – and in so doing, enjoys a privileged position as a creative source
of artistic and social intervention in the world of its viewers.
The choice to engage with programmes themselves is recognition of
the turn towards television aesthetics in recent scholarship, and of the now-
contentious nature of some of the accepted categories. The term ‘landmark’
is used cautiously in the series title to denote programmes that may be sig-
nificant to a variety of people – audiences, critics, programme makers – in
a number of contexts. However, we recognise that landmark, and its syno-
nyms such as ‘classic’ or ‘quality’, cannot be assumed but must be debated,
SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE
and a reflection on key terms is an important aspect of the series’ approach.
Also, broadcasters such as the BBC and Channel 4 in the UK have sought to
meet the challenge of digitalisation by exploiting online programme assem-
blages (the chat room, forum, and programme games and quizzes), and these
have become staples of British television drama, in the process significantly
extending our understanding of what constitutes a television programme.
Therefore, an important emphasis of the series is the treatment of individual
programmes or series ‘in the round’ – in their production and reception con-
texts, and where relevant in their different iterations. It also draws on, where
possible, the perspectives of practitioners and television professionals them-
selves. Programmes – even long-running series – exist in a wider context of
other programmes, and the series will occasionally consider clusters of pro-
grammes linked by a common theme.
Although aimed primarily at students and scholars of television, Con-
temporary Landmark Television intends to be accessible to the general reader
with an interest in how television programmes have been commissioned,
produced, debated and enjoyed, as well as to professional broadcasters.
Whoever the reader, we hope that he or she will be both stimulated and chal-
lenged by the experience.
viii
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Joseba Bonaut is currently an instructor and researcher at San Jorge Univer-
sity (Spain). He obtained his PhD on television and sport at the University of
Navarra (Spain). His research interests are sport and the media and Spanish
cinema and television history, and he has published on these topics in both
Spanish and English. He is a member of the European Network for Cinema
and Media Studies (NECS) and the European Communication Research and
Education Organization (ECREA).
John R. Cook is Reader in Media at Glasgow Caledonian University. He has
written numerous articles on television drama and its contexts of production
for journals such as the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, the
Journal of British Cinema and Television and Critical Studies in Television.
He has recently completed an edited collection with Peter Wright, Critical
Essays on Star Wars (I. B. Tauris, forthcoming).
John Curzon recently completed his doctoral thesis at the University of
Warwick on the representation of the spaces of post-industrial northern
England in film and television drama.
Nichola Dobson completed her doctoral dissertation on the animated
situation comedy genre and has since taught at Queen Margaret University,
Edinburgh and Glasgow Caledonian University where she was also research
assistant on ‘Television fiction, society and identity: Catalonia and Scotland’
with Universitat Rovira i Virgili Tarragona, Catalonia. She has a guest column
in Flow, the online television journal.
Matt Hills is Reader in Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University. He is
the author of Fan Cultures (Routledge, 2002), The Pleasures of Horror (Con-
tinuum, 2005) and Doing Things with Cultural Theory (Hodder-Arnold, 2005)
and is currently completing a monograph on the BBC series Torchwood.
