File(s) under permanent embargo
Extraordinary television time travel and the wonderful end to the working day
In this article I will present two arguments. First, the argument that the time travel television series historically provided viewers with a spectacular temporal and spatial alternative to the routine of everyday life, the regulation of television scheduling, and the small-world confines of domestic subjectivity. Taking the decades of the 1970s and 1980s, predominantly in a UK viewing environment, I will suggest that the special effect rendering of the time travel sequence expanded the viewer’s material universe, and affectively wrenched the television set free from the strictures of scheduling and realist programming. Further, the time travel series readily and regularly took the domestic space, the ordinary day and the everyman/ person into awesome environments and situations that suggested alternative lifestyles and behaviours, with a different existential tempo and rhythm. At a narrative, thematic, meta- textual, and aesthetically spectacular level, television time travel saw to the wonderful end of the working day. Case studies include Sapphire and Steal, Dr Who, and Quantum Leap. Second, the article will argue that rather than the contemporary time travel television series being an extraordinary alternative to ordinary life, they instead articulate convergence culture, deregulation, multiple channel viewing, and time-shift culture where there is no such thing as an ordinary working day or domestic viewing context.
History
Journal
Thesis elevenVolume
131Issue
1Pagination
54 - 64Publisher
SageLocation
London, Eng.Publisher DOI
ISSN
1461-7455Language
engPublication classification
C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal; C Journal articleCopyright notice
2015, SageUsage metrics
Categories
No categories selectedKeywords
Licence
Exports
RefWorks
BibTeX
Ref. manager
Endnote
DataCite
NLM
DC