[ecrea] cfp Re-imaging regional television drama: women as agents of cultural change

Re-imaging regional television drama: women as agents of cultural change

Symposium, Edge Hill University with the University of Liverpool

25 June 2014



In recent years, female writers, producers and directors have emerged as 
central innovators of television fictions. Dramas and dramadocs by Kay 
Mellor, Sally Wainwright and Heidi Thomas belong to some of the 
most-watched programmes on British screens, and they also celebrate 
significant success across the pond and elsewhere. At the same time, new 
production houses, such as Red Productions, contribute significantly to 
the vibrancy of British (and international) television. In America, Ann 
Biderman has taken the realist aesthetics of NYPD Blue to new extremes 
in Southland and more recently Ray Donovan. And in Germany, Claudia 
Matschulla has developed scripts focused on spaces that are embodied, 
lived spaces rather than offering the touristic views of so many other 
German television dramas. Many of these female 
writers/producers/directors have ventured into new territories in terms 
of representation such as the non-ageist depiction of a romance between 
two widows in Last Tango in Halifax, substance abuse in response to 
domestic violence in The Syndicate, or the friendship between a widower 
and a young woman suffering from Downs Syndrome in Moving On. 
Additionally, they connect these new representations to specific 
conceptualisations of space and place, invariably making the most of 
their regional locations. Unlike the first wave of regional drama in the 
1960s and 70s, these women do not use regional space as ‘liminal ground 
on which to criticize its own values, to challenge the “acceptable” way 
of life with other attitudes’ (Newcombe 1979: 158). Rather, they imagine 
these spaces as mundane, lived space, and thereby imagine an embodied 
experience of regional identity that has its own rich patterns of speech 
and everyday life. This crucially impacts on the conceptualisation of 
the regions as touristic spaces (Blandford 2005),  redefining them not 
only as places with their own histories, cultures and identities where 
life is lived in and through local identities but as new centres of 
creative and cultural production that are situating these identities 
centre stage in national life.

Keynote speakers:

Vicky Ball, University of Sunderland
Julia Hallam, University of Liverpool
Ruth McElroy, University of South Wales

The symposium seeks to address what makes these creative women and their 
dramas so popular and successful. Questions that we are interested to 
address include:

-          How do dramas and dramadocs written, produced or directed by 
women re-imagine regional spaces and identities?

-          How do they engage ideas of gender and gendered representations?

-          In what ways are these productions developing new ground in 
terms of gender, genre and regional identities?

-          What are the working practices for/of these female creatives?

-          Are contemporary industrial conditions facilitating the 
development of new regional voices?







Please send your abstract of approx. 350 words by the Friday 14th March 
2014 to

Elke Weissmann ((elke.weissmann /at/ edgehill.ac.uk))

This symposium will be hosted by Edge Hill University and the University 
of Liverpool.

Conference organisers: Elke Weissmann and Julia Hallam

Sponsored by: ECREA Television Studies Section







Elke Weissmann

Reader in Film and Television

Edge Hill University

Ormskirk, L39 4QP

01695 584680

(weissmae /at/ edgehill.ac.uk)



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