| Popis: |
Although social realism on television has drawn some practices and debates from theatre, cinema and literature, it also exists within specifi- cally televisual frames of reference. Indeed, developments in television’s social realist practices and theoretical elaboration have existed in a parallel and sometimes symbiotic relationship with television’s attempts to define its own specifically televisual discourses. In attending to these interweaving relationships, this chapter examines several programme types across a broad chronology, within their institutional and critical contexts. If realist innovations involve, according to RaymondWilliams, a ‘movement towards social extension’ (Williams 1977, p. 63), and social realism in Stephen Lacey’s phrase ‘reveals the situation of the workingclass at the level of its culture and everyday practices’ (Lacey 2007, p. 5), it is understandable that television has been a key social realist arena, given its ability to address mass audiences in the domestic sphere. As Madeleine MacMurraugh-Kavanagh argued, ‘social television drama’ became ‘a most urgent social tool’ because ‘it had the means to saturate the nation’s consciousness in a way that, with their relatively limited audiences and inhibiting conditions of public reception, theatre and cinema could never achieve’ (MacMurraugh-Kavanagh 2002, pp. 151–2). The point is not only one of numbers, although Harold Pinter ‘estimated it would take a thirty-year run of The Caretaker’ to get the audience he got for A Night Out (1960) (Shubik 2000, p. 77). Rather it is that television, according to Irene Shubik, could ‘broaden the audience’s viewing experience’ in distinctive ways (ibid.). –– |
