Spectacular Television: Exploring Televisual Pleasure

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Today, it is tempting to see the rise of HD television as ushering in a new era of spectacular television. Yet since its earliest days, the medium has been epitomised by spectacle and offered its viewers diverse forms of visual pleasure. Looking at the early promotion of television and the launch of colour broadcasting, Spectacular Television traces a history of television as spectacular attraction, from its launch to the contemporary age of surround sound, digital effects and HD screens. In focusing on the spectacle of nature, landscape, and even our own bodies on television via explorations of popular television dramas, documentary series and factual entertainment, and ambitious natural history television, Helen Wheatley answers the questions: what is televisual pleasure, and how has television defined its own brand of spectacular aesthetics? Cover Author bio Endorsement Title page Copyright information Table of contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Author’s note Introduction:What is spectacular television? What is (tele)visual pleasure? The spectacular in audio-visual culture:Debates and problems Categorising spectacular television:Genre, movement or mode? Part I Spectacular Histories, Spectacular Technologies 1 Television comes to town: The spectacle of television at the mid-twentieth-century exhibition and beyond The Festival of Britain The spectacle of television production at the National Radio Show The spectacle of domestic modernity at the Ideal Home Exhibition The legacy of television at the exhibition 2 Spectacular colour? Reconsidering the launch of colour television in Britain Chromophobia and the problem of colour Setting up colour television and selling it On the question of ‘spectacular colour’ vs ‘realist colour’ Making meaning or ‘looking pretty’ Part II Spectacular Landscapes and the Natural World: Exploring Beautiful Television 3 At home on safari: Colonial spectacle, domestic space and 1950s television Colonial Kenya Armand and Michaela Denis: At home on safari 4 Visual pleasure, natural history television and televisual beauty Inserting natural history into the quality debate Visual pleasure and public service broadcasting Beautiful television 5 Television’s landscapes, (tele)visual pleasure and the imagined elsewhere The landscape programme and the contemplative viewer Holidays, the tourist gaze and the imagined elsewhere Part III Spectacular Bodies and (Tele)visual Pleasure 6 Fascinating bodies: Looking inside television’s somatic spectacle Gazing inside the body: Mysterious places and wild rides Freak shows, fascinomas and the medical economy of spectacularising the televisual body The dead and the dying: The limits of corporeal spectacle on television 7 The erotics of television The proliferation of television sex The proxemics of television – televisual desire up close Mapping female desire and the erotic spectacle of television Intentional vs accidental erotic spectacle – flows of televisual desire Conclusion: Sites of wonder,sights of wonder Notes Introduction 1 Television comes to town 2 Spectacular colour? Reconsidering thelaunch of colour television in Britain 3 At home on safari 4 Visual pleasure, natural history televisionand televisual beauty 5 Television’s landscapes, (tele)visual pleasureand the imagined elsewhere 6 Fascinating bodies 7 The erotics of television Conclusion Bibliography Index