Description

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Television/Death intertwines the study of death, dying and bereavement on television with discussion of the ways that television (and the TV archive) provides access to the dead.

Section One explores the representation of death and dying on television, in historical and contemporary television documentaries. It looks at the early history of this genre as well as contemporary documentaries about a range of death and dying experiences, from home deaths to hospice care and assisted dying.

Section Two focuses on dramas of grief and bereavement and discusses how contemporary complex serial television drama and comedy, from family melodramas to the ghost serial to afterlife dramadies, present emotionally realist representations of experiences of grief, bereavement and death-related trauma and explore questions like 'What happens to us after we die?'

Finally, Section Three proposes that television has been overlooked in critical analyses of how recorded media 'brings back the dead'. It argues that television is the ultimate posthumous medium and looks at how the dead return via incorporation into new television programmes or through projects to bring television out of the archive.

About the Author

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Helen Wheatley is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. She is co-founder of the Centre for Television Histories and works collaboratively with archives and curators to engage the public with the history of British broadcasting. Her most recent book, Spectacular Television: Exploring Televisual Pleasure (2016) won the BAFTSS Award for Monograph of the Year in 2017. She has research interests in various aspects of television history and has published widely on popular genres of television drama, including the monograph Gothic Television (2006). She also has an ongoing interest in issues of television history and historiography, the topic of her edited collections Re-viewing Television History: Critical Issues in Television Historiography (2007) and Television for Women: New Directions (2016, with Rachel Moseley and Helen Wood).