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Christine Grandy, "Race on Screen: Audience Racism in Twentieth-Century Britain" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
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Dave
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Interviewer
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Dave
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Interviewer
It's one of the most powerful interviews I've ever done in over 20 years as a journalist. Search Disorder in your podcast app to listen right now.
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Dave
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Interviewer
Welcome to the New Books Network. On this episode, I'm talking to Christine Grande about race on audience racism in 20th century Britain. So welcome to the podcast.
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Dave
Thank you. Thanks for having me, Dave.
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Interviewer
This is a fantastic book. It's both, I think, a really important contribution to kind of media and comms television studies, but also, I think it's a really important history book. And part of its importance, I think, comes from the quite really deep construction it uses to say sort of what story it's trying to tell. One of the lines that comes up quite early on in the book is that the book is a history of not knowing racism in 20th century Britain. And I'm sort of intrigued really by this in two ways. One is what are you kind of talking about when you talk about a history of not knowing something? And then What, I guess, kind of inspired you to be talking about that in the context of. Of television?
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Dave
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, for me, I think when I started out with the project, I was thinking of a sort of a much simpler project that was about, you know, trying to trace what. What audiences really wanted and, you know, not. Not necessarily what audiences should be seeing or what producers or broadcasters thought they needed to see, but just sort of audience desire for certain. For certain messages. And that kind of that came out of my first book, which was my doctoral work, which was on interwar film and sort of best selling novels. And there was a thread in that that was about, you know, ordinary people really loving Empire films, those ones from like the 1930s and the 40s, the sort of the big classic Korda films like the Drum and Four Feathers and Elephant Boy, but also American films set in the British Empire that British audiences really loved. And it was sort of, you know, the popularity of those films really sort of stuck with me as something sort of worth exploring. And as I started to research into them, I realized they had this whole sort of like, afterlife in the post war period in terms of being broadcast again on television in the uk, broadcast on both the BBC and ITV affiliates and broadcast not in moments that were sort of like 1am on a Tuesday, but broadcast in sort of like key sort of moments of sort of consensual family viewing. So around Easter or around Christmas, around the holidays, or sort of, you know, prime slots on a Friday or Saturday or Saturday morning when kids are watching. And I started to sort of, you know, see this kind of bigger project about just about race on screen. And that bigger project has kind of, you know, been done by people like Sarita Malik and others. But I wanted to get at the sort of the pleasures and the wants of people for that kind of content. And so I was, you know, I think looking at sort of the history of not knowing racism became this way of sort of bridging two different types of archives that kind of sit within the project. So one is that kind of film and television archive of particular films and sort of television programs or racial sitcoms and all of these things what people were actually viewing. But then there was this other archive that was sort of, you know, the written archives at BBC and ITV that didn't really talk much about the decisions to kind of keep broadcasting that material even into the, you know, this age of sort of growing immigration and the post war period. And I started to see that, that lack of discussion when there was so much discussion about everything else that British audiences could see. What, you know, in terms of sexuality on the screen and swearing and things like that. There was so much fretting on this particular subject. There wasn't real sort of concern about, you know, continuing to broadcast, broadcast images of, you know, white actors blacking up and sort of, you know, quite sort of racist film and television content. So then I just started to sort of think, like, actually this project is about that sort of space in between and it's about that sort of the history of that collective effort to not acknowledge racism within film and television, but also, I think, more broadly sort of within British society. And that. That. That effort to not acknowledge it or to sort of call racism something different, like. Like tradition or sort of other names that are kind of applied to it that became, I think, you know, it kind of took a life of its own at that point and. And became much clearer to me as like, the main sort of focus of the book.
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Interviewer
Yeah, I mean, we have to be really careful, I think, and what are things the book engages with is this question of, you know, how we think about the past and kind of past behaviours, past cultures. But as a slight spoiler alert, the British audience comes out of this book really badly. It's quite remarkable, particularly, as you say, the attempt to not even kind of deliberately bury the story of what the audience's interests were or, you know, the kind of audience's tastes, but just this kind of sense of like, it's better not to know about this. And particularly, you know, in the kind of contemporary context where many of these discussions about, you know, immigration, representation of a particular community alive in both kind of media and policy discussions. And you mentioned, you know, that kind of point about particular sorts of television programs and films being kind of popular, being quite mainstream. And I guess it'd be kind of useful to know, I suppose, a bit more really about that kind of sense of what an audience kind of was. One of the things that you do quite early on in the book is talk about the way that I'd think of it almost kind of social, scientifically, for things like techniques of market research and stuff like this that audiences at first imagined by television organizations, producers, they're kind of discovered as. As well, you know, through various techniques. But there is also this, you know, kind of sense of early in the century, you know, television production systems kind of knowing what the audience wanted and almost like knowing what's best for them. And I guess it's, you know, a kind of good starting point for the book. To get a sense of that process of imagining and discovering an audience by television production.
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Dave
Yeah, I mean, I think absolutely, like. I think there's sort of a few strands in the book. There's sort of how. How British audiences are imagined by film producers and also, you know, executives or. And even script writers, right. You know, thinking about what would be. I mean, I think in the. In the case of film producers, it's sort of feature film producers. It's like, what will be commercially successful, right? Like, I know what the audience wants, and they want these big, splashy, you know, fantastic, exotic Empire films, and they want the villains to act in this particular way, and they want the white heroes to act in this other way. But then, yeah, I think part of what I sort of trace in the book is a lot of these sort of anxieties about what ordinary people are learning from the screen. And particularly in the interwar period, there's loads of sort of film inquiries, often sort of composed of sort of, like, the local elites in the area who. Who come together to kind of think about the implications of this screen that seems so powerful. And a lot of those concerns are about, you know, British audiences consuming too much American film or, you know, seeing sort of things that the British Board of Film Censors tries to address, like, you know, not showing crime on film things, things like that. And the idea with those kind of interventions and those sort of inquiries is that always positioning the audience is, like, really impressionable, right? Like, what they see, they will immediately do, and that will sort of be imprinted upon them for life. So there's these kind of concerns about the audience. But then you start to also get this other sort of group of sort of audience experts that emerge in the 1930s in particular, people like Mark Abrams, you know, sort of the father of market research, but also other people like Stephen Tallants, who helps create the Empire Marketing Board film unit, and then becomes the direct, the first director of public relations at the BBC, who then hires a man named Robert Silvi, who becomes the director of this new area, this new sort of thing, which was listener research at the time. And then listener research becomes this much bigger thing called audience research, when they start to incorporate television as well. And what that group of men sort of does is they take those anxieties and turn them. Those anxieties about the sort of impressionable audience and sort of turns it into. Actually, this is a place of opportunity for the government, for new advertisers to sort of, you know, shape the audience and shape audience behavior. In particular ways. So they start to sort of, you know, they're still imagining audiences as deeply impressionable, but seeing that not as sort of primarily just a negative point, but something that could be used positively by certain institutions and organs. So there's always a way the audience is being imagined by men like that. But then there's also moments within the book where that measured audience comes poking through and comes through in ways that are startling to even the audience research department at the BBC or it's sort of equivalent at one of the ITV affiliates. And in those moments where the audience itself sort of seems to speak. Yeah, like you say, it's not a really positive story. You get moments of audiences saying quite sort of racist thing and racist things and endorsing really sort of racist statements that are put to them by the audience research department in the sort of expectation that they might not agree with those statements. So there's this sort of tension between that throughout the story. But then also these moments where audiences of color come in as well and sort of know, try to sort of identify screen content as being racist and are sort of consistently kind of pushed back in that process and sort of saying like, no, actually, you're just sort of, you're being too touchy. You're reading this wrong. You're not seeing this properly. So. So that audience, that story of that audience is also quite important within the book.
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Interviewer
Yeah, and I think we'll sort of dive into both of those audiences as we kind of talk through some of the case study moments in the book. I was sort of struck actually by what you were saying about later on in the century, by the time we're in the kind of 50s and 60s, that to an extent we kind of move sleep from depictions of the British Empire and I guess, you know, again, sort of explicitly racist on screen depictions to an attempt to be more, you know, kind of nuanced and positive. But the white audience kind of pushes back in really kind of negative ways. And just to pick up on that kind of theme about that audience, it'd be interesting to know. I. I Guess what sort of push back the middle of the century seas even were there are attempts to move away from some pretty kind of unreconstructedly racist on screen depictions.
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Dave
Yeah, well, I think, you know, there's, I think there's, I think probably what the best example within the book is when the BBC puts a television program on screen called Rainbow City and that, that runs in 1967. And it's, I think it, I think it's the first time that you have sort of a weekly series, a weekly television series that centers on the lives of immigrants. And it's a barrister, black barrister, played by Errol John and his white wife living in Birmingham. And it's about their friends and their family. And it runs for six weeks. And in the aftermath of the show, the audience research department, because it was when they say this sort of in the files, this was meant to be a program that could improve race relations, it's important to be able to sort of measure audience response to it. And what they discover is quite startling to the audience research department themselves. And you know, and they say quite bluntly within the sort of executive summary at the front of the audience research report, that this is, you know, a startling outcome. But, you know, the results are that most of these people showed anti immigrant attitudes and that racial prejudice proved, quote, alarmingly common. And I think, you know, the design of that whole sort of survey of the audiences, you know, can absolutely be sort of pulled apart in many ways. I don't think it would, you know, fly in the contemporary period at all. But all of these Londoners, and it was white Londoners, 164 of them, were sort of presented with this list of pretty provocative racist statements and asked to say whether they agreed or disagreed with them. And they agreed with a lot of these statements. And it was certainly, I think, had this kind of impact in that the BBC, at least if you're just looking at the visual archive, certainly seems to pull back from that kind of programming, right? That sort of weekly presentation of the lives of West Indian immigrants that disappears from the BBC doesn't sort of return until Empire Road is broadcast in 1978. So it's like a 10 year period of kind of nothing that's equivalent. So I think moments like that kind of those are moments where this other archive comes in, that sort of third archive of audience research which I think sort of says. It sort of says the quiet parts out loud. And that's kind of how it functions within the book. It is the space where the sort of Most hidden desires and wants of people when it comes to a range of topics have to have some sort of sort of textual element to it, some sort of like archival trace to it. And for me, finding that sort of research and then a bunch of sort of different case studies of research about programs such as Till Death Do Us Part and Love Thy Neighbor all kind of start to tell a pretty depressing story that sort of doesn't really shift about a discomfort and an adherence to kind of racist ideologies that go, I think much longer than certainly I expected when I started the project.
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Interviewer
Yeah, I mean, one of the examples you give is the Black and White Minstrel show which really kind of not runs all the way through the book because the book goes kind of towards the end of the 20th century too. But it is striking just how long this explicitly racist show is both on screen and kind of popular and enjoyed, but also at the same time has quite a lot of, I guess, kind of elite media critical support, but at the same time has got a lot of like resistance associated with, with it and a lot of criticism. And it's, it's, it's striking kind of how you're really foreground in the sense that even at the time this wasn't acceptable. Which is obviously one of those things that we see in contemporary discourses about racism in the past. And you know, listeners might not be aware of what the Black and White Minstrel show is or was. And to an extent, lucky them. But I guess it's a kind of, yeah, it's both a kind of a good and bad example and I'm yeah, sort of keen to know why. It sort of stands as a summary of lots of the books kind of themes and key ideas both in terms of on screen and television production racism, but also in terms of kind of criticism and resistance.
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Dave
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, yeah, the Black and White Menstrual show. I mean I had, you know, I had to educate myself about this. You know, I'm from Canada but lived here for about 14 years now. And I had to figure out what it was. And it's, I think, yeah, because it runs from 1958 to 1978 on the BBC. So it's, you know, it's a remarkable 20 year run. And I think what's so fascinating about it is, well, that it runs for so long and it's so obviously racist in its conceptualization and its execution. But it is one of those shows where the work of not knowing about racism comes through in the discussions about keeping it on the air. So it faces criticism Most publicly in 1967, when the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination, or CARD, they're kind of bounced into presenting a petition on their behalf to pull the program. And the petition comes from a Trinidadian man living in Britain named Clive west who, you know, gets 200 people together to sign a petition saying that the program should be pulled off the air. And, you know, there's so much I. So much more I would love to know about that story and those 200 signatories. But this petition is presented, it's a lot of CARD members, and west is a member of card, and so CARD sort of endorses it, and it comes into the press, and it's really this sort of open discussion about whether the program is racist or not. And there had been criticisms of the black and white minstrel show in a magazine that was primarily authored by West Indian people, meant for West Indian readers in Britain, called Tropic, sort of part of like the. The black press. I also talk about in the book, and there'd been criticism of the show in 1961, and quite a. Quite a big article about sort of the racist history of minstrelsy. And, you know, why is this program on the air? But in 67, with that petition, it comes into the. Into the press, into the dailies, and it comes across the desk of the BBC as well. And I think, you know, in that discussion, you get all of these kind of. These kind of the sort of the mental gymnastics that have to be gone through to keep a show that is so racist on the air, but with this remarkable defense that it should stay on the air because it's not about race at all, that, you know, the show is not racist and it's just crucially repeated over and over again in the press that it's not about race, it's about tradition. It's about a music hall tradition that can't be viewed as racist. It's just sort of harmless good fun. And of course, anytime the defense goes a little bit beyond that, it gets a bit weirder, right? Like, you get executives saying, well, and also, it shouldn't be a problem because this is a positive depiction of black people who are smiling and laughing and that, you know, you can show that. You can even show this. That this is black men courting and wooing white women. And that's got to be positive to see on the screen. So it just becomes this, you know, this kind of discussion that said, that shows all the effort that people have to go through, the executives, the audiences who write in sort of like vehemently defending the ongoing existence of the show. All of the effort that goes into sort of saying that this isn't racist. Right. And sort of aggressively trying to correct the viewpoint of these signatories who are sort of saying it's racist. So in that way, it became a really good way of unpacking what I saw in lots of other sort of moments across the book with other sort of programs and within discussions, within audience research and. And sites like that. It really, you know, on the one hand, it. It sort of exemplifies the most problematic content of the period, but it also. Because it was the most problematic content that raised responses. It sort of showed all the effort that had to be undertaken to keep this kind of racism unspoken or hidden or denied.
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Interviewer
Yeah. What's striking about that is that it's not just a BBC problem. And one of the things that you do later on in the book is talk about this is kind of a television problem. So you talk about. ITV broadcast a series of sitcoms that the writers were very keen to kind of say, oh, look, this is, you know, kind of satirical. And the racist characters in it always kind of get their comeuppance at the end of the show, despite, you know, them being the leads and quite obviously the kind of heroes of the show. And that sort of struck me as if not a story of consensus, but something that, you know, there's quite obviously the kind of shared, I guess, settled view. But at the same time, you know, obviously kind of commercial television is different to public service broadcasting. So were there any differences between ITV and BBC, between the kind of public service media and then the commercial television station?
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Dave
Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, truthfully, I didn't see a huge difference between them. I mean, I think I talk about the BBC a fair bit more in the book, and that's partly because they have such a wonderful intact archive, whereas ITV's archives are sort of. There's quite scattered, there's a big deposit at the University of Bournemouth. But it's still, it's. It's not the sort of well organized, although often quite opaque machine that is the archive of the BBC. But I think, you know, in terms of their content, like they both are sort of creating these. These racial sitcoms in the 60s and the 70s. And, you know, the BBC has till death us do part, but then ITV and London Weekend Television comes up with very much a program that is pulling on that kind of audience, which is Love thy neighbor from 1972. To 1976 and love thy Neighbor. Both of those programs have this premise that if you have sort of a white racist man at the center who sort of says all the terrible stuff out loud, audiences will just laugh at him and see how ridiculous these racist viewpoints are. And it will help sort of, as Brian Emmett, the head of audience research, it would get rid of that sneaking feeling of racism that an audience might have. And that's sort of the argument that Gavin Shaffer and other historians of media have have noted this argument. It's an argument that's put forth by the script writers like Johnny Speight and Vince Powell of both of those programs. But what else? What I think sort of, you know, the problem with that argument is that, you know, the structure of television means you have a protagonist and you have to kind of, you know, believe in the protagonist and ultimately sort of ascribe to his worldview in many ways. And what audience research showed for both of those programs was that audiences endorsed a lot of those sentiments and didn't see these two characters as figures of fun. They took them more seriously than, I think both London Weekend Television and the BBC expected them too. They were quite reluctant to sort of endorse any of the statements that said, you know, these are just kind of the silly ravings of an out of touch man. So I think, you know, in lots of ways, I think that kind of that messaging and that kind of approach really just was not doing what some of the. The executives thought that it was doing with both of those broadcasters. And then I think, you know, what London Weekend television does in 1975 is they. Because they're sort of getting heat about this sort of argument and people are doubtful about it. And there's a whole bunch of racist language used by Eddie Booth, who's the protagonist of Love Thy Neighbor. And he uses terrible sort of language that even the sort of sympathetic press is reporting that some of this language is being used in playgrounds and people are sort of picking it up. And so what London Weekend Television does under the auspices of the IBA is they conduct some audience research and what they do. This is the first time that audiences have color across. Both broadcasters are surveyed for their responses to a particular program. But this survey is so out of keeping with the rest of the types of surveys that they do, it's almost immediately suspect. So instead of surveying like a thousand people or, you know, 3,000 people, they survey 21 West Indian people. And they never. The survey is sort of happening outside of their usual sort of Surveyors, you don't get the name of the person who's doing the interviewing. And you start to get a sense, really, that, like, they just. It's like they know a guy who said, I know a guy who says that this program's okay. And this. The reports is, you know, it's a different format than the rest of the other reports. It's a lot shorter. It's printed in sort of landscape instead of portrait. Like, it's sort of all these ways where you can sort of see like a. Like an essay being padded out in kind of embarrassing ways. But of these 21 interviewers, you know, the. The summary that would. At the front of the report said, you know, ultimately kind of good news. You know, over half of the respondents think the program's absolutely fine. This isn't a problem with West Indian viewers. But when I. When I dug into the report a bit more, you know, you find out that actually those. Those statements aren't so much an endorsement of the program, but instead an indictment of the contemporary media landscape, which is to say, you know, yeah, Eddie Booth, the protagonist, uses terrible language, but I've been called worse at work in the factory. Or, you know, I watch it because it's the only place you can see two black actors on screen, which are, you know, Rudolph Walker and Nina Baden Semper, who play, like, the sort of the black neighbors next to Eddie Booth. So, you know, those aren't statements of endorsement. They're more just kind of, you know, this is okay, and this is all we have. And so I think there, again, audience research is sort of telling this story about. Well, I think it's another plank in that effort to sort of say. To not see something that's right in front of you. Right. To sort of not acknowledge that this is racism that's being broadcast over and over again on a weekly basis. And indeed, it extends as far as to interpret this kind of material in a way that favors the continuance of that content on screen and then a continuance of those sort of pleasures for white audiences.
- [36:28]
Interviewer
Yeah, it's interesting that towards the end of the book, you talk about the way that clearly, on screen, representations had changed for the better. And there's a couple of examples. One is Desmond's, which is Channel 4. And again, you know, it's not BBC or ITV, it's Channel 4. But also there's the Cosby show and Fresh Prince of Bella as well. And I was struck, you know, both in terms of, like, you know, how. Yeah, they're Sort of better in terms of black sitcoms on screen representation. Obviously one of those shows is deeply problematic now, unfortunately. But I was also struck, actually, you know, and this is something that just kind of came to mind as I was reading it, that two of the three examples are American. And, you know, they are particularly fresh princes, like, hugely successful and makes a superstar of Will Smith the kind of key lead actor. But there is that kind of like, underlying worry, I guess, that the extent to which British television and the British television system had got better. And so my kind of question on the end of the century is maybe a combination of why was this a good moment for on screen representation, particularly compared to the past, you know, sort of 90 or so years that we've been discussing. But at the same time, what does the kind of, you know, the two out of the three shows being American tellers about TV at the time?
- [38:11]
Dave
Great questions. And I think, you know, I'm going to start with the second one first because I think the function of America within this, within the book is quite an interesting one because I think in a lot of ways what the US does is offer to British politicians, British people and British media producers, it offers a very sort of narrow definition of, of racism that is sort of seen over and over again, particularly like in the post war period in the context of the civil rights movement. So I think, you know, people like Rob Waters and Kaneta Hammond Perry, who sort of talked about how, how the American civil rights movement was shown in Britain and sort of concerns about how black power should be put on the screen. But there's also, you know, this other sort of side which is that, you know, the way that the conflict in the US defined racism was in very visual terms. You know, racism is black people being hit by white people wielding batons at a peaceful march, right? It's really sort of shocking image imagery that Martin Luther King himself sort of says, you know, he wants this broadcast in sort of the glaring light of television, right? That this is a really effective way of communicating about the conditions in segregated America. But I think. I think that then becomes this almost as way of closing down a bunch of different discussions about what racism looks like in Britain, right? Because you have such a resting sort of example like that. So America is kind of. It's sort of both the, like, you know, it's sort of like the boogeyman, but also the answer ultimately, right? Because it's kind of like, okay, well, we don't have what's over there, right? You know, there's we. It's okay to have something like the black and white minstrel show run for so long because we don't have America's race problems. And you know, part of that it's implied like we don't have a black population that experienced enslavement. So there's kind of these, you know, that use of America. But then by the 1980s, and really, you know, in the 1970s, you start to get sitcoms in the US like Good Times and stuff like that that are, you know, sitcoms that center on, on black families. And as you know, it becomes clear after the non report that Channel 4 is going to be arriving and that the BBC and even, you know, ITV's affiliates need to start sort of acquiring new audiences because there's going to be another competitor, but also that they should be doing something different about race and that the racial sitcoms weren't really working in the way that they had initially been anticipated as working. So at that point, it's like turning to America for sort of what's happening over there in terms of sitcoms, the creation of sort of comedic, short comedic programs. And I think when the Cosby show is such a huge success in the US as soon as it broadcasts, it's at that point that British broadcasters start thinking, well, can we just import that? Is that going to just sort of play well with British audiences? And I think that's really what you end up seeing. And I think for me, as I got to the 1980s and 1990s, because I was kind of like, I knew there was these three programs that were really popular with British audiences. And I was kind of like, well, what is going to change that's going to make this, what's going to make sense of this? How does this happen? But then as I started looking into it, the argument of that chapter is really that those three sitcoms were popular with both black and white audiences in Britain, but for very different reasons. And the reason why the Cosby show was such a hit. And this is coming from the reviews of television critics at the time in places like the Daily Mail, but also the Times and even the Guardian. It's just people, as those critics saying over and over again, these programs are great. They offer comfortable viewing for audiences. And that words, comfort, comfortable viewing. You start to see that sort of repeated enough and you realize, I mean, quite often they just spell it out in that after they say that, that what they mean is that these shows don't talk about race very much, right? Like that the Cosby's are great because they're black. And I think it's Mary Kenny who says this. One of the television critics, it's great because they're black and they don't make a fuss about it, right? Like, they have nice clothes, they've got a wonderful house, they've got cute kids, and they just don't talk about being black all the time. And that is seen as a sign of success and seen as something that the critics can endorse. They say, you're not going to be challenged by this kind of viewing and instead it's going to be sort of comfortable Friday night viewing at home. And then, you know, Desmond's is constantly compared to the Cosby show, even though it is quite different in so many ways. And certainly, you know, black audiences, but also black actors, like, appreciate the moment. Like Carmen Monroe, who's in Desmond. She says, you know, this show is us just being ourselves. We're not constantly talking about race and doing sort of monologues about race, but it's just us sort of relaxed and on our own. So there's all these kind of, you know, reasons why black audiences and black actors are happy to have this kind of shift in, in the content at the time. But then at a certain point it sort of tips and I think, you know, after the Fresh Prince of Bel Air comes, which again, is also quite a different show, but it's is still compared within biotelevision critics as being like in the vein of the Cosby Show. At that point it starts to feel like, you know, the. The black comedic sitcom is. Is starting to be like, confining. Right. And that the pleasures that white audiences are taking from this, which is that it's these shows where race isn't a huge part of the program, is not the same kind of pleasures that black audiences or black talents are enjoying about this anymore. So, yeah, that chapter was kind of, you know, it wasn't. It just seemed to me it was a different way that white audiences had found to kind of not talk about race, but in a. In a slightly. Through this sort of consumption of material that featured black families in American, but also British settings.
- [46:27]
Interviewer
I mean, there's so much more we could have sort of talked about, not just thinking about the archival research, the, you know, stuff from the kind of earlier point in the century, but also I think really quite explicitly in terms of. Of audiences of color who are sort of present throughout the book in, in various different case studies and various different examples. And I mean, I'd urge sort of everybody to. To read the book to, to really engage with it, particularly in, in this kind of social, political, cultural moment in which we find ourselves. One of the things though that sort of struck me was with, with the book was. And you, you sort of mentioned this or, or alluded to it a little is there are definite like future projects that could come from it. But at the same time there is something of the kind of exhaustion of a particular archive. You know, you mentioned both kind of the BBC archive being, you know, quite rich but you know, slightly kind of problematic to access. ITB being a bit more disparate. I've no doubt, you know, Channel 4 organizations, you know, more contemporary like Channel 5 and sky might have similar challenges. And it strikes me that you might want a kind of completely different brand new project we've moved forward with or onto. So what are you thinking about in terms of what follows this book?
- [48:02]
Dave
Yeah, I, Well, I think it's. You definitely nailed it on the head with the latter part, I think. Well, I'm sort of. Yeah, I mean I did a little bit, I did a little something on sort of data and how data starts shaping how organizations like the BBC, but also others like the sort of mania for dating for data, sorry in the 20th century, but I think I've sort of scratched that itch in some ways. But the next big project for me is, is called Online Britain A History and is really. I'm wanting, I'm chasing the screen, I'm not giving up on the screen but just chasing it into this like from the mid-90s into, you know, I think it's going to end around 2018 and trying to sort of, you know, think about the people, a history of ordinary people coming online and what does this other sort of new phenomena and this new kind of framework of knowledge that comes alongside the web, what does that tell us about the kind of media people want to sort of partake of and what kind of, what kind of messages are they getting when they're sort of going online and visiting blogs or navigating like a new world of pop up spam and things like that. So I'm in really sort of the early days of that project and there are elements of it that still sort of pull on this one because part of it is going to be about sort of, you know, thinking of the ra, the web as a post racial space space or not in that period. But yeah, it's kind of. It definitely feels a little bit easier to get into with this one. The source is very different and I'm, you know, I'M grappling with like, born digital sources, but, you know, historic blogs and historic web pages and things like that. But it's been, to be honest, it's been a lot of fun. And you know, I'm at the part of the project where it's not super painful yet, so I'm enjoying that. This is worth knowing. TikTok shop helps you discover good value products and surprise deals fast. No endless searching, just Smart finds. Download TikTok now.