Performing the Identity of the Medium: Adaptation and Television Historiography

Abstract

This article focuses on how histories of television construct narratives about what the medium is, how it changes, and how it works in relation to other media. The key examples discussed are dramatic adaptations made and screened in Britain. They include early forms of live transmission of performance shot with multiple cameras, usually in a TV studio, with the aim of bringing an intimate and immediate experience to the viewer. This form shares aspects of medial identity with broadcast radio and live television programmes, and with theatre. The article also analyses adaptations of a later period, mainly filmed dramas for television that were broadcast in weekly serialized episodes, and shot on location to offer viewers a rich engagement with a realized fictional world. Here, film production techniques and technologies are adapted for television, alongside the routines of daily and weekly scheduling that characterize television broadcasting. The article identifies and analyses the questions about what is proper to television that arise from the different forms that adaptations took. The analyses show that television has been a mixed form across its history, while often aiming to reject such intermediality and claim its own specificity as a medium. Television adaptation has, paradoxically, operated as the ground to assert and debate what television could and should be, through a process of transforming pre-existing material. The performance of television’s role has taken place through the relay, repetition, and remediation that adaptation implies, and also through the repudiation of adaptation.

Entanglements of Intermediality

“…Moreover, the objects of study are themselves constructions whose apparent self-identity can occlude the ways that they are formed, and best understood not only in relation to one another, but through one another. This intertextual and intermedial process, moving and changing over time, is also a process of adaptation, in as much as adaptation can be thought of as an action of return to and recapitulation of an antecedent (Bignell 2019). The medial identities of film or television, at a particular historical moment, work by taking up a position relative to their comparators, rather than by the expression of a self-sufficient essence.…”

Géneros e formatos televisivos da comunicação em saúde na televisão: O talk show Diga Doutor

“…A identidade do programa (Bignell, 2019: 161) e o gosto do telespetador, a que se refere Mittell (2003), encontram-se no programa, permitindo otimizar a aceitação da comunicação em saúde pelos telespetadores que o programa pretende transmitir. É neste encontro que poderá estar a identidade coletiva, se se usar o termo de McQuail (2003: 336).…”

Specially for Television?

“…The 'source' and its reconfiguration, the medium and its allusions to other media, and the author as one node among a complex of textual sites, are all rendered volatile by an intermedial way of thinking about them. Medial identity is performed through relay, repetition and remediation (Bignell 2019a), and Eh Joe performs a lure of medium-specificity as part of television drama's ongoing struggle to assimilate with and differentiate itself from other media. An attention to intermediality shows that the rhetorical strategies of Beckett's television drama are constituted as much by processes of intersection and hybridity as by individuation and differentiation.…”