[ecrea] Television explores the Hinterland: A Symposium, University of Derby, Saturday 13th November, 10-5.

At 16:14 29/09/2010, Charles Lee wrote:

> Television explores the
> Hinterland: A Symposium, University of Derby, Saturday 13th November,
> 10-5.
>
> A preoccupation with exploring Britain has become increasingly central in
> British television. This extends from the work of Jonathan Meades to
> celebrity-presented travelogues by the likes of Griff Rhys Jones to
> popular magazine formats such as Countryfile and Coast. Such explorations
> still often return to traditional oppositions between urban life and
> unchanging archaic versions of rural England. Yet they can also adopt a
> wider perspective, impinging upon renegotiations around the so-called
> ‘national regions’ of the United Kingdom, or manifesting evidence of
> response to growing concerns with social diversity, being prepared to
> visit urban, industrial and suburban settings alongside imposing
> landscapes or the picturesque. While playing an important role in
> defining the relationship of the television audience to ideas of national
> space, these programmes can also explore trans-national relationships. At
> the same time, they attempt to reach out to a more immediate sense of
> everyday belonging, providing a link between the pleasures of images of
> the landscape - often rendered in High Definition - and individual
> leisure activities. They thus play an important role in representing ways
> of inhabiting the spaces of the hinterland in a web of cultural meaning
> that has national, local, personal and sometimes trans-national
> dimensions.
>
> • What do these programmes say abouut current broadcasting
> policy?
>
> • How doo they relate to ideas of nation and the nations in
> Britain?
>
> •> Is there a new politics of the hinterland developing?
>
> • Are the places to be explored necesssarily peripheral?
>
> • What is the relatiionship of these programmes to previous
> cultural analyses which have been preoccupied with the relationship
> between the urban and the rural such as those of Raymond Williams?
>
> • What do theese programmes say about the contemporary
> institutions of television in an age of audience fragmentation and
> pressure to respond to a diversity agenda?
>
> • Is television attempting to reconstrruct our viewpoint on the
> landscapes of Britain in reaction to this diversity agenda?
>
> • To what extent do they telll the whole story in this or are
> there significant stories untold?
>
> •< Do they escape the bias towards the metropolitan that is so
> often associated with British television?
>
> • What is the effect on specific areas that are represented?
>
> 　
>
> The symposium will bring together academics, TV producers and directors,
> taking a cross disciplinary approach, drawing on geography, cultural
> studies, television studies and tourism studies to address the current
> interest in exploring the hinterland on British television.
>
> Conference team: Professor David Crouch and Dr Felix Thompson, University
> of Derby.
>
> Speakers:
>
> Mike Dibb, Television Director and Producer, on working with Raymond
> Williams in his 1979 film on The Country and the City
>
> David Dunn, Television Director and Producer (work includes the Gaelic
> language Machair and Castaway, School of Media, University of
> Paisley
>
> Steve Evanson (to be confirmed), BBC, Producer of Coast
>
> George Revill, Geography Department, Open University and special adviser
> on Coast
>
> Joe Smith, Geography Department, Open University and advisor to
> Coast
>
> Felix Thompson, Film and Television Studies, University of Derby, author
> of recent articles on television travel programmes.
>
> Rhona Jackson, Film and Television Studies, University of Derby, joint
> editor of The Media and the Tourist Imagination 
>
> David Crouch, Cultural Geography, University of Derby; author of Flirting
> with Space 2010, Advisor to several TV documentaries and Producer, The
> Plot BBC2. 
>
> David Crouch, Felix Thompson and Rhona Jackson Jackson edited The Media
> and the Tourist Imagination, Routledge 2005
>
> For further details, registration and means of payment please contact
> Felix Thompson on (F.M.Thompson /at/ derby.ac.uk).