This chapter considers the ways in which postfeminist discourses have been incor­porated into ‘quality’ drama in the commercial television industry, with a particular focus on Sex and the City (HBO 1998-2004). For Home Box Office, the makers of the serial, ‘quality’ drama has been used successfully to enhance both its visibility and its reputation in […]

During the latter half of the 1990s, Channel 4 as a fully fledged commercial company selling its own advertising sought to capitalize on its ‘alternative’ image in a branding exercise designed to attract youthful and affluent audiences to its platform of channels. These now included E4 and the subscription film channel FilmFour. Caughie’s (2000: 192-7) […]

The institutional space for lesbian and gay drama on Channel 4 is distinct from that on BBC2, the other minority channel on terrestrial television in the UK. It was based from the beginning on a very different conception of public service broadcasting from the BBC. Discussing the Annan report that preceded the formation of Channel […]

The processes of regulation set limits to ensure that mainstream drama conforms to normative assumptions about sexual behaviour. If broadcast before the 9.00 p. m. watershed, it must be deemed suitable for family viewing. For drama this has meant an almost exclusive focus on heterosexual relationships as a result of the expressions of disgust and […]

‘Quality’ drama has been an important institutional space on public service television for the expression of sexual subjectivities that lie outside the ‘respectable’ norm. Oppositional, political dramas have existed alongside the more conformist and ‘respectable’ costume dramas, which themselves have become more sexually adventur­ous in recent years (Nelson 2001b). The leeway in sexual censorship began […]

The roots of a twenty-first century understanding of gay and lesbian sexuality as an ‘identity’ lie in late nineteenth-century medical and sexological discourses in which homosexuality moved from being a category of sin, as defined by the Christian Church, to a psychosexual disposition. As a sinful act it had been assumed that anyone could be […]

Television drama, in many of its genres, picks up on and dramatizes contemporary social and political issues in order to maintain relevance and credibility in a medium whose appeal is founded on immediacy (Ellis 2000). This chapter identifies the political discourses that have regulated the ways in which homosexuality has been represented on television over […]

In Fetishes (Nick Broomfield 1996, broadcast on Channel 4 1997) everything works to reassure the audience that they will not be debased by what they are watching. The markers of ‘quality’ designed to assuage the viewers’ anxiety about watching a programme on sadomasochism include the choice of location (just off Fifth Avenue), the high social […]

There are fears that the competitive pressures on television companies to retain audience share have led to a gradual decline of the kind of current affairs documentary that makes a genuine contribution to political debate in the public sphere. These changes have been termed ‘tabloidization’ in a comparison with the differences found between ‘quality’ and […]

The changing politics of sex work in feminist activism of the past twenty years can be traced across the transformations in Channel 4’s approach to documentaries about the sex industry. Although it is Channel 5 that is famous for it, the majority of ‘docuporn’ on British terrestrial television is shown on Channel 4, as a […]