Re-viewing Television History: Critical Issues in Television Historiography

It seems that the ‘historical turn’ in television studies is complete and scholars are now firmly on the historical road. Since the start of the new millennium, academic publications, research projects, conferences and online resources on British television history have proliferated. Drama has been one of the first beneficiaries of this interest, but historical research into other genres, such as current affairs programmes, and comparative approaches within the European context have recently borne fruit with important publications.1 The result is a growing body of histories that take a holistic approach, looking at television as a ‘whole way of life’: its aesthetic forms and texts, as well as institutions, policies and viewers. The collection of articles in Re-viewing Television History not only exemplifies this trend but also marks a new, second ‘historical turn’ in the field of television history. I want to argue that the new element this time is an intensified interest in television history at the level of both analysis and methodology. More specifically, it is the systematic interrogation of methods and theories, borrowed from history as an academic discipline, which characterizes this new television research. In other words, history in television studies is now as much the object of analytic attention as it is a method of analysis. Helen Wheatley's introduction to this book is one of the first concerted efforts to open up the dialogue between historians and television historians, and this is further explored in the essays which follow it.2 The introduction contains many references to key texts in history studies, including Edward Hallett Carr's What is History? (1961), Geoffrey R. Elton's The Practice of History (1967), Keith Jenkins's Re-Thinking History (1991) and Richard J. Evans's In Defence of History (1998), in an attempt to engage with the fundamental questions of how and why we do television history.3 But what can television history gain from this approach?