Abstract

‘Wayne’s study offers an impressive range of readings and critical methodologies within a collection of exceptional coherence... Dissident Voices is consistently compulsive reading and a must for all students and specialists in the field of recent and contemporary television culture.’ Professor Madeleine MacMurraugh-Kavanagh, University of Reading

Two decades of institutional and structural changes in television broadcasting have both informed and reflected profound shifts in British culture. How have programme makers themselves approached the tensions and anxieties of the last twenty years?

Dissident Voices examines the ways in which certain forms and genres have registered a period of cultural upheaval and to what extent they have developed a more reflexive and a more critical television culture. This collection covers a broad range of issues including class, gender and sexuality, the monarchy, identity and nationhood. It examines their representation in a variety of dramas and genres, including police procedurals, documentaries, game shows, sitcoms and satire. The contributors challenge the notion of television as a bland purveyor of the status quo, presenting it as a complex and potentially subversive medium. Television culture is portrayed here as still resistant to the total control of either markets or ideologies. In an age of political consensus, it is an important and popular site where anxiety about and dissent from current social trends frequently surface.