Links for the weekend

17th February 2013

It's got to be Girls for the lead. The most recent episode of Lena Dunham's HBO series, titled 'One man's trash', lit up my Twitter like nothing else last week (except maybe that meteor, on which you need more

Pride and Prejudice: 12 for 200

28th January 2013

I thought others might do this to mark the anniversary today of the publication of Jane Austen's great and glorious Pride and Prejudice. But as I've yet to see such an anthology, I thought I would make one for myself - more

The invisible films of Alan Clarke

23rd January 2013

Why is the work of one of our greatest filmmakers - the director Alan Clarke - all but invisible? This is not a new question. Nor do I have anything original by way of an answer. But the issue is much more

Reprise: Art and artists on pre-war television

22nd January 2013

In another post from the blog's archive (previously published on 17 July 2010) I take a look at the visual arts on BBC Television between 1936 and 1939. I was reminded of this because I am teaching again at the more

From the archive: Il miglior fabbro

16th January 2013

As regulars will know, I occasionally highlight earlier blog posts when they feel newly relevant. My reason today for returning to a 2008 post about the influential documentary maker John Read who died in 2011 is that I am teaching more

#ROLive: our ‘House’

9th January 2013

Hard though it is to believe, it is nearly seventeen years since we went backstage at the Royal Opera House in the BBC fly-on-the-wall series The House. Michael Kaiser, who later became general director of Covent Garden, summed more

A pantomime of errors (in 1947)

21st December 2012

This seasonal post is an edited version of one that I wrote last year for the blog of the research project about theatre plays on British television, Screen Plays. I hope it is sufficiently entertaining to bear repeating here. What more

TVC, the BBC and me

18th December 2012

I was in a kingdom of dreams today - and for the very last time. It was a relatively prosaic - but I must stress most enjoyable - meeting of the Southern Broadcasting History Group that took me once more more