The chapter addresses: What Is a Motion Picture?; What Is an Instructional Video?; What Is the Role of Instructional Video in Education and Training?; Are Instructional Videos Effective? And How Can We Design Effective Instructional Videos?

This chapter examines Elizabeth Bowen’s relationship to audiovisual art forms. Given Bowen’s own relative lack of interest in film, one may wonder why adaptation should be included in an overall analysis of her work and its impact. One argument is largely commercial: be it through television, film, or radio, dramatisations of Bowen’s works contribute to increased public scrutiny of her fiction. For those already familiar with Bowen’s fiction, adaptations revitalise readings of her fiction. How her texts correspond to traditions and tropes of other media tells us much about the interplay of genres – from novel of manners and social satire to spy story or historical fiction – as they manifest themselves in the traditions of those media. Ultimately, an adaptation is also an interpretation and analysis of its source text. This examination of adaptations focuses on The Last September and The Heat of the Day, two of Bowen’s most-read works. These adaptations are the best known and most accessible audiovisual adaptations of her fiction.

‘Non-Anglophone Arthurian cinema’ is a diffuse collection of films held together only by the fact that they are not in English and they all bear some kind of nominal or narrative relationship to the tradition of Arthurian story-telling. Despite scant evidence of continuous tradition, including between films in the same language, and long gaps in the corpus, three main strands can be identified: cinematic versions of the Tristan and Iseult legend, films about Perceval and the Holy Grail, and films centred on Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere. The third strand is minor: one of the most notable aspects of non-Anglophone Arthurian cinema is the relative paucity of films about Arthur himself, suggesting a distinct relationship to the Arthurian tradition. This corpus of Arthurian screen texts differs from Anglophone cinema in its narrative emphasis, avant-garde techniques, and in its engagement with cultural, historical and ideological concerns that extend well beyond the Anglosphere.

Chapter 4 considers how race and racism were presented in post-war television and film. Much of this chapter focuses on blacking-up practices on television, the success of The Black and White Minstrel Show with white audiences, and its defence by white producers, audiences and the press, when Black audiences in Britain protested against it in 1967 through the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD). It also traces the post-war life of the empire film content discussed in Chapter 2, when these films were consistently broadcast on both the BBC and ITV before the watershed and at ‘family viewing times’. The chapter also examines the broader enduring popularity of blacking-up practices on screen in the post-war period.

Chapter 1 examines the ‘discovery’ of the audience in twentieth-century Britain and sketches out the anxieties about the audience’s impressionability which were voiced in government and non-governmental committees on films and television throughout the century. The concept of a highly impressionable British audience subsequently took hold, paving the way for new, self-proclaimed experts on audience wants and needs that emerged, including Stephen Tallents and Robert Silvey, as head of a new department of ‘Audience Research” at the BBC. This chapter unpicks the racialised assumptions that informed the creation of this field and the audience it presumed to measure.

Throughout the 1970s, audience research conducted at both the BBC and ITV affiliates consistently overlooked audiences of colour, even as these institutions began to hesitantly acknowledge and consider institutional mis-steps in their approach to Britain’s own ‘race problem’. Several extended audience research reports were conducted on shows about ‘race’ in the period, including Till Death Us Do Part in 1973, which began to produce a coherent picture of persistent racial prejudice among white viewers. Alongside this, audiences of colour were finally brought into audience research but in quite exceptional ways, including a 1975 study for ITV, when 21 West Indian television viewers offered their thoughts on Love Thy Neighbour and the broader television landscape, and in 1979 at the BBC for a potential programme on “multiracial Britain.” The chapter examines the shape of this belated inclusion within these institutions and considers the highly circumscribed ways in which Black and south Asian audiences were allowed to speak about screen content and racism.

The conclusion of this book considers the argument that is often brought out when considering the racist content of historic film or television as being ‘of the time’. It notes both the central planks of this argument, that Britain was widely racist in the past and this was broadly accepted, and what that means in the present, for our understanding of racism in twentieth-century Britain.

This chapter traces the role of folk music in the changing mediascape in North America from the 1940s to the 1960s. Beginning from Jürgen Habermas’s well-known notion of the ‘public sphere’, the essay locates the folk revival at the intersection of new spaces (Greenwich Village) and new media (the long-playing record). It shows how the technology of the LP made possible juxtapositions of songs from all over the world. With the Weavers, the Kingston Trio, and Peter, Paul and Mary, we see the emergence of folk music for a largely white college-educated public. This history shifts with the emergence of folk ‘stars’ Joan Baez and then Bob Dylan. At the same time the manipulation of the recording studio, in the work of Paul Simon and the Byrds, gives folk a new relationship to rock music. We then see how the comedy duo of the Smothers Brothers picks up on the political energy of folk music and blends it with the new medium of television at the end of the 1960s. These technological developments shape folk music as a force in the political culture of the era, from Martin Luther King to the Women’s Movement.

Chapter 3 moves into the post-war period and the Audience Research Department in the BBC archive, examining two of its ‘special audience research reports’, on a 1952 documentary series about race relations in Africa, and a 1968 study of audience responses to the BBC’s first fictional television series focusing on a Black family, Rainbow City (1967). In doing so, the chapter examines both the department’s conception of racially innocent British audiences and its loose definition of ‘race’ on screen within its own methodologies, and its uncomfortable encounter with the existence of measurable racial prejudice among ordinary Britons in 1968.

The bulk of this chapter is devoted to the family as part of a dynamic system that includes the child, but also the community and the larger society. In the latter part of the chapter we examine the role of formal schooling, neighborhoods, and media, especially online media, as socializing agents for children and adolescents.

The Wire is an example of the way that new technologies and methods of dissemination have made realism possible on television. Where broadcast TV required episodes that could be watched independently and that were structured by the need for commercial interruptions, pay networks such as HBO and the more recent streaming services allow for long-form narratives that develop over many weeks and stretch on for years. The Wire has been widely recognized for its realism, which, however, is usually equated with what is seen as the program’s accuracy. I show how it makes use of conventions of realism inherited from nineteenth century fiction, which are enabled by its structure as a long-form program. The Wire makes use of genres not typically associated with realism, including crime fiction (the police procedural), TV’s police melodramas, and the ancient genre of tragedy as a plot form in Hayden White’s sense. The series incorporates this variety of genres in the service of a vision of ordinary life that continually surprises the viewers. The Wire thus demonstrates the power of new forms of television to represent social complexity to a degree not found in media other than print.

Radio, television, film, the phonograph, wire recorders and mechanical instruments are but some of the technologies that Arnold Schoenberg wrote about or utilized during his lifetime. Infinitely curious and inquisitive, Schoenberg invented all sorts of things, some of which, including a typewriter for musical notation, belie his interest in technology. Rather than provide a broad survey of Schoenberg’s engagement with technology, this chapter focuses more specifically on how Schoenberg interfaced with technology as a means of presenting artistic ideas, particularly musical ideas. Though Schoenberg’s views on technology may appear ambivalent or, at times,even contradictory, something approaching consistency emerges when his writings about technology are considered in the context of his writings about how the musical idea is transmitted from composer to listener.

While stand-up comedy is conventionally thought of in terms of liveness and live performance, it is also the case that recorded media – such as radio and television – have a long, intertwined relationship with stand-up. Beginning from a historical perspective, this chapter outlines how recorded comedy media drew on live forms from its inception, taking inspiration from music hall and vaudeville. Recorded stand-up remains a fundamental component of contemporary recorded media, via stand-up specials on platforms such as HBO and Netflix. But the grammar of recorded media offers challenges to the pleasures associated with stand-up – especially in terms of liveness – and this chapter therefore explores the particularities of stand-up on radio and television, and its ongoing relationship to the live forms that predated it and continue alongside it.

What is Chinese hip-hop? How is its authenticity negotiated and contested in China? Instead of seeing Chinese hip-hop as a given cultural form that follows a singular trajectory, this chapter conceptualizes it as a precarious cultural formation suspended by competing claims to authenticity and overdetermined by divergent forces, such as the hip-hop communities, the state, and commercial forces. The broadcast of The Rap of China in 2017 was a decisive moment in the massification of hip-hop in China, in which the subcultural genre was domesticated, commercialized, and re-infused with hegemonic ideology. Focusing on the televisual remediation of hip-hop in China, this chapter illuminates how battles for authenticity have been fought out among different actors or groups, how tensions between the ethos and the techne of hip-hop unfold, and how censorship and propaganda imperatives delimit the contours of the genre’s representation to the mass audience. It problematizes the line between “the underground” and the mainstream, while foregrounding the process in which different horizons of hip-hip negotiate with one another, co-shaping what is visible, audible, and commendable. The issues discussed in this chapter will likely remain central to the development and dilemma of Chinese hip–hop in the years to come.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Pierre Boulez collaborated as a commentator and conductor on a series of challenging and distinctive BBC Television programmes about twentieth-century music. This chapter discusses the range of Boulez’s appearances on British television but focuses principally on this group of visually innovative broadcasts that combine musical analysis and performance to illuminate the creative processes of composers including Debussy, Berg, Schoenberg and Webern. Boulez’s own compositions, including ‘Improvisation II sur Mallarmé’ and Le Marteau sans maître, are also imaginatively visualised, with highly distinctive camerawork and cutting-edge graphics. Created initially for the television studio and later as individual film documentaries, these broadcasts often exploit the full potential of the medium of the time. Little seen since their initial transmission, these programmes remain provocative creative resources for all those engaged with combining music and moving images.