'Drawing comic traditions' : British television animation from 1997 to 2010

This thesis examines the shifts within mainstream British television animation between 1997 and 2010 and it discusses how British animation’s close relationship with live-action television comedy reveals a map of contemporary attitudes and tastes. The British animated texts in this period reacted to their shifting industrial and broadcasting landscape. The historical moment of the late 1990s was determined by the successes of the American animated sitcom The Simpsons, which profoundly affected the way British practitioners conceived of the medium’s capabilities within a mainstream television environment.