Transnational Television History

A Comparative Approach

Andreas Fickers, Catherine Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415698603
• eBook ISBN: 9781135760397
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Although television has developed into a major agent of the transnational and global flow of information and entertainment, television historiography and scholarship largely remains a national endeavour, partly due to the fact that television has been understood as a tool for the creation of national identity. But the breaking of the quasi-monopoly of public service broadcasters all over Europe in the 1980s has changed the television landscape, and cross-border television channels - with the help of satellite and the Internet - have catapulted the relatively closed television nations into the universe of globalized media channels.

At least, this is the picture painted by the popular meta-narratives of European television history. Transnational Television History asks us to re-evaluate the function of television as a medium of nation-building in its formative years and to reassess the historical narrative that insists that European television only became transnational with the emergence of more commercial services and new technologies from the 1980s. It also questions some common assumptions in television historiography by offering some alternative perspectives on the complex processes of transnational circulation of television technology, professionals, programmes and aesthetics.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Media History.

INTRODUCTION: TRANSNATIONAL TELEVISION HISTORY
A comparative approach

Andreas Fickers and Catherine Johnson

‘Going transnational’ is in. While some interpret this latest ‘turn’ in the intricate path of historiography as a challenge to older historiographic traditions like world or international history, others see it as a new paradigm, superseding the national perspective as the founding frame of reference for a ‘modern’ scientific production of history. In any case the vivid discussion of what transnational history is, or should be, witnesses an ongoing interest in and recognition of the importance of the historical phenomena and processes that lie beyond the explanatory framework of the nation-state.¹ One of the most interesting phenomena in this discussion is not the careful handling of the term as the latest buzzword of the scientific circus by most historians (which might have to do with the ‘déformation professionelle’ to historicize the seemingly new and revolutionary), but the manifest theoretical engagement of historians in this debate. History as an academic discipline has often been accused of being hostile to abstract theoretical speculations and most of the latest turns in historiography can clearly be identified as belated theoretical importations from other disciplines.² The debate on transnational history is exceptional in this respect, as the theoretical reflections pre-date – at least to a large degree – the practice of historical research and writing. As the Korean historian Young-sun Hong, Associate Professor of German History at the State University of New York, stated in her essay on the challenge of transnational history, ‘the call for the transnationalization of national histories has been eagerly taken up by many in the past few years, but done successfully by very few’ (3).

What was meant as a hint to the large community of historians applies even more to the small field of television history. The strong tie of media historiography with the national project has its origins, as Jean K. Chalaby has rightly formulated, in the fact that ‘no other media institution was more central to the modernist intent of engineering a national identity’ (1). This intrinsic quality of television as a national institution has tempted most historians of television to analyse the medium using a more or less strict national perspective. The search for the nation in television formats, programmes, institutions or legislation has produced a variety of excellent historical scholarship, reinforcing Benedict Anderson’s thesis of the constitutive role of the media in the creation of ‘imagined communities’. Despite the heterogeneous institutional varieties of today’s television all over the world, one can identify a surprising homogeneity when it comes to the functional similarities of television as an agent of modernization and nation-building – at least during the ‘golden age of capitalism’ in which television developed into the ‘leading medium’ of the mass media ensemble.³ But the breaking of the quasi-monopoly of public service broadcasters all over Europe in the 1980s changed the television landscape, and cross-border television channels – with the help of satellite and the internet – have catapulted the relatively closed television nations into the universe of globalized media channels.

At least, this is the picture painted by the popular meta-narratives of European television history. Yet an emergent body of transnational historical research on television significantly complicates this (albeit deliberately exaggerated) picture. This research asks us to re-evaluate the function of television as a medium of nation-building in its formative years. In presenting some of this research, this volume on comparative television history aims precisely to question these common assumptions in television historiography by offering some alternative perspectives on the complex processes of transnational circulation and national or regional appropriation of the ‘floating signifiers’ that characterize – in the words of Arjun Appadurai (27–44) – the ‘space of flows’ of our mediascape. But before investigating the different places and objects of televisual flows assembled in this volume, it might be useful to reflect for a few moments on the methodological challenges and practical implications of doing transnational television history from a comparative European perspective, which is the shared ambition of all of the contributors to this volume.⁴ The European perspective is of course but one very specific way of dealing with the challenge of the transnational, but it has proved to be a very exciting and intellectually stimulating one – precisely because of the complexity and diversity of European television and of Europe as a geographical, social, political and cultural construction.⁵

In the social sciences, comparative historical analysis – especially when applied as an empirical research method – has been motivated by the modernist belief that it is possible to identify general patterns of historical development.⁶ This, however, is not what we have in mind here when referring to comparative historical analysis. The aim of the chapters in this volume is not to identify a hidden logic of television development, driven either by technological determinism or teleological modernism, but to force us to look at the deeply ambivalent and sometimes paradoxical nature of historical processes. Neither do we intend to add another publication to the rich literature of structural comparisons of media systems in their various juridical, institutional or economical facets.⁷ These comprehensive surveys without doubt offer useful information for the contextualization of different media in their national environment, but rarely offer critical historical interpretations that would help to explain the observed similarities and differences.⁸ In contrast to this tradition of causal generalizations, we want to emphasize the interpretivist approach that – in our view – bears the most interesting and fruitful potential for a cultural history of television. By interpretivist approach we mean the combination of contextual and textual analysis of all kinds of sources, enabling a critical interpretation of television as both a witness to and an actor in economic structures, social change, political power and cultural meaning. In analysing television as a mediating interface between the private and the public, the extraordinary and the routine, the familiar and the ‘other’, we want to emphasize its role as a crucial gateway for our understanding of contemporary history in general – a recognition so far largely ignored in general historiography.⁹

Undertaking a comparative history of European television from a transnational perspective has both theoretical and practical challenges. Theoretically the challenge of such a comparative analysis exists in the construction or definition of comparable objects of study that reflect the different spatial and temporal lines upon which television has developed around the world. Spatially, television can be studied at the level of the local, regional, national and/or global, the rural or urban, and the topographic or geopolitical, yet these levels can be constituted differently across the same physical territories at different times. Temporally, comparison can be synchronic or diachronic, and can offer micro-, meso- or macro-historical perspectives. The intrinsic inequality, or diachronic dynamic, of television development both on a national and on a European level is most evident in what John Ellis has called the ‘age of scarcity’ (39–60). If we were to ask the simple question of when television started, we would get different answers both within nation states and across Europe. However, this unequal development can also be identified during the emergence of the dual system all over Europe in the 1980s. Comparative studies remind us of the ‘simultaneity of the non-simultaneous’ (Ernst Bloch) in history or, in other words, of the breaks, contradictions and resistances in the complex process of cultural modernization both within and between different societies. This becomes even more evident when looking at the regional level. In all countries in Europe, the development of a national television infrastructure was characterized by an unbalanced coverage of urban and rural regions, clearly discriminating against the non-urban regions. When television finally reached out to the regions – not only in terms of coverage but in terms of the development of regional programming and services – it was often motivated by the desire to strengthen the ties with the nation, and not primarily to foster the construction of a regional identity. Disguised national integration and regional fragmentation, hence, frequently went hand in hand. Any comparative approach to transnational television history has to work through these variations and contradictions in the development of television as a medium.¹⁰

While the identification and theoretical legitimization of the historical objects of comparison is an epistemologically daring feat in itself,¹¹ new approaches that appear under the labels of ‘histoire croisée’, ‘entangled history’ or ‘cultural transfer studies’ remind us of the fact that classical comparative approaches have often proved to be too rigid and formalized in the use of their categories. Most significantly, they have tended to neglect the relational and fluid character of the categories and objects of comparison their work has identified. Categories like ‘audience’ or ‘soap opera’ vary depending on the interest of the researcher and the spatial and temporal setting of the research object. When speaking about television audiences in the 1950s do we mean those ‘front row Scotch drinkers’ (McCarthy) watching television occasionally at a British pub or the thousands of French ‘télé-club’ members who viewed and discussed a television programme on a weekly basis at a municipal school somewhere in the countryside (Dumazedier)? Or, when speaking about soap opera, do we think about the open-ended multi-stranded serialized dramas that explore specific (often working-class) communities and fill daytime and primetime slots on British terrestrial television, or the finite melodramatic tales of the Latin American telenovelas so frequently exported to southern Europe in particular? Or, for that matter, do we mean a form of television drama aimed at women and adapted from sponsored serialized radio dramas designed to sell detergents, or a set of formal characteristics (such as an emphasis on the everyday and personal, and a flexible serialized narrative structure) that occur with increasing frequency across a wide range of genres (from cop shows to hospital dramas)?

As recent debates about comparative and transnational historiography demonstrate, the accentuation of the intersection of both heuristic categories and the constructed objects of study has interesting insights to offer historians.¹² In highlighting that entities and objects of research need to be considered not just in relation to one another but through one another, we reorient our view to the complex processes of interaction, circulation and appropriation between objects of study. Furthermore, in doing this, we conceptualize these entities and objects as dynamic and active, rather than stable or immobile as is often assumed in comparative approaches. This process-oriented dimension of modern transfer and translation studies is especially fruitful for a cultural history of the media. It enables analysis of the complex trajectories of television forms and contents as they go through processes of adaptation, resistance, inertia and modification in their circulation between and across different cultural frames and contexts.

The analytical value of the comparative approach to transnational television history is to make us sensitive to the intrinsic contradictions and the deep ambivalences of television; in other words, to see the familiar strange. Looking from a longer historical perspective one sees that the nature of television as a medium was constantly challenged by new modes of production, transmission and reception, affecting the capacity of the medium to function as a national and/or transnational, global and/or local, private and/or public, popular and/or elite mediator of norms and values, beliefs and visions. In addition, television as technology and a cultural form needs to be understood as part of the larger mass media landscape in order to recognize television as just one vector in the complex spectrum of daily life. Television can catalyse or inhibit processes of political or cultural change; it can function as the social cement of a nation and foster collective individuation and participant isolation. When looking at the flows of television – for example at television formats or programmes – television can at the same time stimulate cultural diversity and standardize narrative or aesthetic conventions; it can both – by the way of subtitling or dubbing – promote the other and make it feel familiar. Yet at the same time, television has the power to generate and promote popular myths and metaphors that can mask the inherent contradictions of the medium. Early adverts for television as a ‘window on the world’ pointed to the medium’s transnational possibilities while concealing the attempts to bend television to the will of the nation-state. The invention of transnational programmes under the label of ‘Eurovision’ brought the nations of Europe together, but to fight musical (Song Contest) or physical (Jeux Sans Frontières) battles. Both examples demonstrate the deeply ambivalent nature of television as a cultural agent of modernization. Television history needs to take account of these phenomena if it is to understand the transnational nature of television as a medium.

Seeing the familiar strange is not exclusively an abstract theoretical exercise, but an almost naturally emerging result of practical transnational comparison. The feeling of alienation is certainly one of most inspiring and productive intellectual experiences. When confronted with the richness and complexity of regional and national television cultures one has to qualify one’s own personal television socialization and historical knowledge. Every television historian who has ever worked with foreign television sources knows how hard it is to get even a superficial understanding of the specific characteristics of a foreign television culture. Added to this are the practical difficulties of undertaking comparative European television research. As Rob Turnock explores in his special report on the EU-funded Video Active project, which has made available over 10,000 clips from European television programmes from twelve countries, the archiving of television programmes and written records varies across Europe, while the availability of such archives to scholars is also uneven.¹³ Turnock usefully examines the practical problems and possibilities of creating resources to support comparative transnational television research, reminding us of the ways in which archival decisions affect historical work, while also pointing to the important role that historians can play in the construction of new digital archive projects.

Yet, even if one can access the relevant written and audio-visual sources, and are equipped with the necessary language skills, the very nature of television as a culturally impregnated medium par excellence can easily reveal to the historian his/her own narrowness and limitations. Or, to put it positively: it is exactly this awareness of our own intellectual restrictions that can produce a feeling of creative alienation. An awareness of these difficulties, and their intellectual value, is at the heart of the European Television History Network (ETHN) which since its foundation in 2004 has aimed to promote comparative historical research on television from a European perspective.¹⁴ In several workshops, the Network has managed to survey the current state of television historiography in many European nations and – more importantly – has identified gaps and missing links in the research landscape. The Network aims to promote and support new and comparative research on European television history, demonstrating the methodological, intellectual and social merits of this interdisciplinary and transnational approach. The 2007 conference ‘Rethinking Television Histories’ at King’s College London (from which this volume originates), organized by ETHN-members and the Video Active project, marked a step forward in the promotion of transnational television history, followed by the ‘Television Without Borders’ conference in Reading in 2008. Such initiatives, which bring scholars together to share their research and to encourage and stimulate comparison, are essential to the development of comparative, transnational television historiography. They both enable access to research from different national, regional and transnational contexts and stimulate a sense of creative alienation which can be a powerful force in revealing new insights and areas of study within one’s own areas of expertise.

In many ways, this volume aims to prove the value of this methodological approach in the richness of its different chapters. It aims to demonstrate different ways of analysing the complex processes of transnational circulation and appropriation by looking at different places and spaces of mediation. The general idea behind the selection of the case studies presented was simply to follow different kinds of flows of television from production to consumption, from transmission to reception – across national, political and/or geographical boundaries and borders.

The volume begins with Andreas Fickers’ chapter, which uses the birth of Eurovision (established in 1950 to facilitate e...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Transnational Television History A comparative approach
• Section I Actors and Arenas of Transnational Television: A Historical Re-Assessment
• Section II Roundtable: Perspectives on Localizing the Transnational in Regional Television History
• Section III Special Report
• Index