Table Of ContentTele vi sion Cities
A production of the Console- ing Passions book series
Edited by Lynn Spigel
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Tele vi sion Cities
Paris, London, Baltimore
CHARLOTTE BRUNSDON
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS Durham and London 2018
© 2018 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca
on acid- free paper ∞
Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan
Typeset in Warnock Pro
by Westchester Publishing Services
Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available
from the Library of Congress.
isbn 978-0-8223-6894-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-6920-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-7251-6 (ebook)
Cover art: Rupert Davies as Maigret. Moviestore
Collection Ltd/Alamy.
Contents
acknowl edgments vii
Introduction: Does the Flâneur Watch Tele vi sion? 1
1 The Modernity of Maigret’s Paris 24
2 Living- Room London 65
3 Portable Cities: Baltimore 116
notes 165
bibliography 195
index 211
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Acknowl edgments
The bbc Written Archives Centre at Caversham is a wonderful place
to research tele vi sion, and I am grateful to archivist Jess Hogg for her
assistance with the Maigret files, and to Hannah Ratford for her help
with gaining permission to quote from these files. Acknowledgment is
hereby made to the bbc for this permission. Kathleen Dixon and Steve
Tollervey at the British Film Institute w ere, as usual, helpful far beyond
the call of duty in enabling me to watch episodes of the bbc Maigret
in a full range of sometimes fragmentary formats. I hope that one day
these episodes will be available to a wider public. Ginette Vincendeau
lent dvds from her extensive Maigret collection and advised on vari ous
aspects of French culture. She also, with Irene Bessière, Laurent Creton,
and Alastair Phillips, invited me to contribute to the 2012 conference,
Paris au cinéma: Au delà du flâneur, at Paris 3. Aspects of this work have
been presented in a range of other contexts, and I am grateful to all
who have invited me, and for the subsequent discussions, particularly
Michael Curtin and Dick Hebdige at the University of California, Santa
Barbara; Ellen Seiter at the University of Southern California; Lynn Spi-
gel at Northwestern; and François Penz and Richard Koeck at the
Cinematic Urban Geographies conference, Cambridge, 2013.
I met Deborah Rowan when she was crewing a w ater taxi in Balti-
more; she has been a faithful inf or mant about changes to the city’s
waterfront, and I’ve loved getting her photo graphs. I also learned much
from the students who took my gradu ate course “Modernity and In-
novation in the Audio- Visual Media” on the ma in film and tele vi sion
studies at the University of Warwick, 2009–11, and from my colleague
Michael Pigott, who helped with The Wire installations. Nic Pillai has
shared many Maigret enthusiasms, and Richard Perkins, film and tv
librarian at the University of Warwick, has once again offered invalu-
able assistance characteristically inconspicuously. I have been helped in
research and manuscript preparation by Patrick Pilkington, Paul Cuff,
and James Taylor, and in many diff er ent ways by the administrative team
in the Department of Film and Tele vi sion Studies at Warwick, led by
Tracey McVey: Anne Birchall, Adam Gallimore, and Lynsey Willmore.
The Midlands Tele vi sion Research Group has continued to help me
make sense of tele vi sion in transition, while the Projection Proj ect team
has been understanding when I have had to concentrate on the newer
medium. I’m also very grateful for contributions of diff er ent kinds from
Karen Alexander, Jon Burrows, Daniel Callaghan, Christine Geraghty,
Ann Gray, Jostein Gripsrud, David Morley, Rachel Moseley, Alastair
Phillips, Karl Schoonover, Bill Schwarz, Ellen Seiter, Stephen Shapiro,
Lynn Spigel, Rick Wallace, Helen Wheatley, and James Zborowski.
Ken Wissoker, Elizabeth Ault, and Liz Smith have been a great team to
work with at Duke: patient, supportive, and attentive to detail.
The in- house reading ser vice has maintained its excellent rec ord, and
this time also contributed quite a bit of viewing com pany down some
very dark streets. The book would not have been completed without
this support— and distraction.
Thanks to all: and the errors are all mine.
viii Acknowl edgments
Introduction
DOES THE FLÂNEUR WATCH TELEV IS ION?
Peckham, in southeast London, was the setting for the popul ar twentieth-
century British tele vi sion sitcom Only Fools and Horses (bbc, 1981–91).1
The action was mainly studio filmed using a domestic and a public in-
terior: the Trotter f amily’s council flat and their local pub. Th ese tele-
vi sion rooms, reappearing weekly on the tv screens in the audience’s
homes, became very familiar to British, and then worldwide audiences.2
Peckham, through the Trotter family, was established as a recognized
location within London as a tele vi sion city. The exterior location shots of
the Trotter’s high-r ise home w ere actually filmed in Bristol, more than
a hundred miles to the west of London, while the title sequence used
stills of a London street market to establish a milieu in which “only
fools and horses work.” This mélange of ele ments— studio- shot interiors,
limited location- shot exteriors, and place- identifying title sequence—
are the characteristic components of the twentieth- century tele vi sion
city. Although the glamorous heroines of Sex and the City (hbo,
1998–2004) seem so very diff er ent to the Trotter family, and the show
used location shooting in Manhattan for its title sequence, exterior, and
some interior scenes, this tele vi sion city too was created out of a mix-
ture of similar elem ents—as was the now- unmentionable Cosby Show
(1984–92).3 The precise articulation of t hese constituent elem ents—
location, studio, and title sequences—in the creation of tele vi sion cit-
ies to which audiences return week a fter week, becoming familiar with
places they have never visited, is one of the topics of this book.
