Nature, Culture, Space: The Melodramatic Topographies of Lark Rise to Candleford

Abstract

British television drama has seldom been considered for its aesthetics. Politicized critics have traditionally focused on television’s potential as an Ideological State Apparatus, which could challenge or reinforce conservative hegemonies within a public service broadcasting framework (Buscombe, 2000). The academy studied ‘the politics of dramatic forms and the potentially radical effects of television drama on a mass audience’ (Bignell, Lacey and Macmurraugh-Kavanagh, 2000, p.82). The resulting critical focus on the writer as auteur (Brandt, 1981; Pike, 1982; Brandt, 1993) led to a consequent evasion of television drama’s visual properties or discourses around television’s ‘theatricality’ (Gardner and Wyver, 1983). Television is often characterized as ‘nothing but talking heads … facial close-ups and speech are singularly important to it’ (Seiter, 1992, p. 43). In this formula, sound predominates over image, in part as a compensation for the low-resolution image and small-screen size, and it is deployed to attract the attention of the distracted domestic viewer (Ellis, 1992; Morley, 1992). Critical approaches based in the primacy of the word have assumed that television is radio with pictures (Scannell and Cardiff, 1991; Morley and Brunsdon, 1999; Sexton, 2006). This functionalist approach, with its focus on communication value over aesthetic, means that television’s ‘audio-visual pleasures are often deemed to be limited by size of screen and poor-quality image’ (Geraghty, 2003, p. 33).