La BBC 1922-1995

BRITISH BROADCAST MEDIA AS A FIELD OF INVESTIGATION IN BRITISH CIVILISATION STUDIES IN FRANCE .....................21

REPÈRES

AUX ORIGINES DU TRAITEMENT FICTIONNEL DE L’INFORMATION
THÉÂTRE ENGAGÉ ET RADIO ..................................30
  Le théâtre engagé .......................................31
  Hybridation générique ...................................34
  BBC Radio et ballade radiophonique ........................36

LE JOURNALISME FILMIQUE : AUX ORIGINES D’UN GENRE
THE MARCH OF TIME (1935-1951) ............................41
WORKER AND WAR FRONT (1942-1946) .........................44
BBC VS ITV : LA BATAILLE POUR LE TRAITEMENT DE L’INFORMATION ..........46
  Information télévisée : quelle valeur ? .......................46
  Panorama vs World in Action ..............................47
  L’Affaire des Birmingham Six .............................49

SÉRIES ET TÉLÉVISION DES ORIGINES
ENVIRONNEMENT TÉLÉVISUEL :RAPPEL HISTORIQUE ...............52
  Captation et conservation .................................55
  Séries et fidélisation .....................................57
  Donner à voir le réel .....................................58
LA SÉRIE COMME ARCHÉTYPE DES PRODUCTIONS DES ORIGINES .......61
  Esthétique de la série ....................................62
  Dixon of Dock Green et Z-Cars : points communs .............64
  Séries et modernité ......................................66
  La série : un genre prometteur .............................68

PUBLIC VERSUS PRIVÉ : UNE RIVALITÉ FÉCONDE
BBC ET FIDÉLISATION DU TÉLÉSPECTATEUR ......................73
  “To make popular programmes good and good programmes popular” .75
  Sydney Newman ........................................76
THE WEDNESDAY PLAY (BBC 1, 1964-1970) .....................79
  Une certaine idée du service public .........................82
  Tony Garnett ...........................................

Renée Dickason, professeure des Universités à Rennes, spécialiste de l’audiovisuel britannique sur lequel elle travaille depuis une trentaine d’années, est l’auteure de nombreuses publications dans ce domaine en France et à l’étranger. Dans le présent volume, elle a rédigé les parties en anglais.

Georges Fournier est professeur à l’université de Limoges, où il conduit des recherches en civilisation britannique. Spécialiste des médias, il a publié de nombreux articles sur les représentations filmiques des enjeux politiques et sociaux. Dans le présent volume, il a rédigé les parties en français.

Soap operas first saw the light of day on radio in the United States in the 1930s, taking their name from the financial help (broadcast sponsorship) offered by manufacturers of washing and home care products, “soapers” in the jargon of the time, such as Procter and Gamble, or Colgate. The most notable characteristics of soap operas broadcast on British television are their frequency, their regularity and their format, as broadcasting a programme in a fixed time spot improves chances of it attracting a regular audience: since the 1980s, British- produced soap operas have been transmitted every weekday. Unlike other series, soap operas start from a story that links all the episodes together. The subtlety of the genre is that the story has no obvious end in sight, which allows viewers of all ages to join the band of fans at any moment. The world of each “soap” has so strong a culture and attraction that viewing can become a regular habit, the more so as, if a viewer misses an episode, he (or more usually she, as indicated below) can find a summary on the internet or watch the “omnibus” edition, the complete run of the week’s programmes rebroadcast at weekends.

Watching one’s favourite soap(s) becomes a daily activity, a task like all the other household duties, doing the shopping, taking the children on the school run or going to work. This passion close to an addiction results from this societal phenomenon whose trick is to bring the characters and their families to life in real time. As a result, in long-running programmes like Coronation Street and EastEnders, to take only two examples, viewers grow old with the characters, or vice versa, and, as a result, as Christine Geraghty puts it: “the longer [soaps] run, the more it seems impossible to imagine the ending” [GERAGHTY, 1991, 11].

British soaps are grounded in the realities of the world as viewers know it: the characters are ordinary people like themselves or their neighbours and their lives may be blighted by the scourges, new and old, of modern human and social life, such as seropositivity and AIDS, debt and unemployment. Media specialists and theoreticians generally consider soap operas as a genre that appeals most to a female audience, men allegedly preferring to watch action or adventure programmes or sports broadcasts.