Came across an interesting forthcoming symposium at the University of Derby on Saturday 13th November entitled ‘Television explores the Hinterland’. The main themes of the conference (appended below) appear to focus primarily on those programs that explore Britain’s countryside – such as the excellent BBC/Open University program Coast (which will be discussed in the symposium) – but also a little more implicit is the juxtaposition this implies between the urban and rural in contemporary Britain. Potentially interesting here is that to a (arguably) significant degree, television might be seen as articulating a relationship between urban life (the everyday milieu for the majority of television audiences) and the taken-for-granted imaginary of Britain, which I’ve always found to be overwhelmingly that of the countryside.

Television explores the Hinterland: A Symposium, University of Derby, Saturday 13th November, 10-5.
A preoccupation with exploring Britain has become increasingly central in British television. This extends from the work of Jonathan Meades to celebrity-presented travelogues by the likes of Griff Rhys Jones to popular magazine formats such as Countryfile and Coast. Such explorations still often return to traditional oppositions between urban life and unchanging archaic versions of rural England. Yet they can also adopt a wider perspective, impinging upon renegotiations around the so-called ‘national regions’ of the United Kingdom, or manifesting evidence of response to growing concerns with social diversity, being prepared to visit urban, industrial and suburban settings alongside imposing landscapes or the picturesque. While playing an important role in defining the relationship of the television audience to ideas of national space, these programmes can also explore trans-national relationships. At the same time, they attempt to reach out to a more immediate sense of everyday belonging, providing a link between the pleasures of images of the landscape – often rendered in High Definition – and individual leisure activities. They thus play an important role in representing ways of inhabiting the spaces of the hinterland in a web of cultural meaning that has national, local, personal and sometimes trans-national dimensions.

What do these programmes say about current broadcasting policy?
How do they relate to ideas of nation and the nations in Britain?
Is there a new politics of the hinterland developing?
Are the places to be explored necessarily peripheral?
What is the relationship of these programmes to previous cultural analyses which have been preoccupied with the relationship between the urban and the rural such as those of Raymond Williams?
What do these programmes say about the contemporary institutions of television in an age of audience fragmentation and pressure to respond to a diversity agenda?
Is television attempting to reconstruct our viewpoint on the landscapes of Britain in reaction to this diversity agenda?
To what extent do they tell the whole story in this or are there significant stories untold?
Do they escape the bias towards the metropolitan that is so often associated with British television?
What is the effect on specific areas that are represented?

The symposium will bring together academics, TV producers and directors, taking a cross disciplinary approach, drawing on geography, cultural studies, television studies and tourism studies to address the current interest in exploring the hinterland on British television.

Conference team: Professor David Crouch and Dr Felix Thompson, University of Derby.

Speakers:
Mike Dibb, Television Director and Producer, on working with Raymond Williams in his 1979 film on The Country and the City
David Dunn, Television Director and Producer (work includes the Gaelic language Machair and Castaway, School of Media, University of Paisley
Steve Evanson (to be confirmed), BBC, Producer of Coast
George Revill, Geography Department, Open University and special adviser on Coast
Joe Smith, Geography Department, Open University and advisor to Coast
Felix Thompson, Film and Television Studies, University of Derby, author of recent articles on television travel programmes.
Rhona Jackson, Film and Television Studies, University of Derby, joint editor of The Media and the Tourist Imagination
David Crouch, Cultural Geography, University of Derby; author of Flirting with Space 2010, Advisor to several TV documentaries and Producer, The Plot BBC2.
David Crouch, Felix Thompson and Rhona Jackson Jackson edited The Media and the Tourist Imagination, Routledge 2005

For further details, registration and means of payment please contact Felix Thompson on F.M.Thompson@derby.ac.uk.