In a 2021 speech to the Royal Television Society, then #Conservative culture, media and sport minister John Whittingdale announced that the government was widening the public service broadcasters’ remit to produce more content that was “distinctively British”. As examples, he cited Only Fools and Horses, Carry On (never actually a TV franchise) and Dad’s Army: creations of a distant era, loaded with unreconstructed stereotypes of the working class, male-female relationships and Johnny Foreigner.
Meanwhile, in the real world, the diversity of the #British experience is impossible to pin down in a single broadcasting remit. Part of what defines Britain’s distinctiveness on screen is our humour (even in dire straits), our landscapes and cityscapes, and an increasing commitment to diversity and inclusiveness in cast and crew. But there’s another wild card, even harder to define and rarely in evidence on screens today. Some of the greatest and most distinctively British #TV has been just plain weird.
Weirdness depends on the irruption of the unexpected and phantasmagorical into the everyday. Legendary TV is created when weirdness and innovation achieve a rare alchemical bond. In 1992, Ghostwatch generated record-breaking audience feedback thanks to its terrifying blend of documentary, live reportage and domestic haunting. The #BBC flagship Doctor Who, since its debut in 1963, has been a conduit for some of the network’s weirdest and most enduring screen monsters. Its pageant of phantasmagoric creatures and neofascist Daleks, time-travelling pop-astrophysics and offhand humour has proved a winning and exportable formula, while lending the English language a whole subset of terms and expressions, from “Tardis” to “exterminate!”
British TV’s penchant for the weird is not just confined to adult shows either. Children’s television also used to nurture the stranger side of the British imagination, from the hand-knitted cosmic oddness of The Clangers to the megalithic occultism of Children of the Stones. Even shows of a less-fantastical ilk such as Brideshead Revisited and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy moved at an eerily glacial pace by today’s storytelling standards, which only enhanced the strange, aspic universes in which the aristocracy and cold war spycraft used to operate.
Branded Entertainment Executive | Co-Founder of Brandstory
1moCongratulations, so well deserved!