Popular Music and Television in Britain

Listening to popular music and watching television have become the two most common activities for postwar generations in Britain. From the experiences of programmes like Oh Boy and Juke Box Jury, to the introduction of twenty-four hour music video channels, the number and variety of television outputs that consistently make use of popular music, and the importance of the small screen as a principal point of contact between audiences and performers, are familiar components of contemporary media operation. Yet there have been few attempts to examine the two activities in tandem, to chart their parallel evolution, to explore the associations that unite them, or to consider the increasingly frequent ways in which the production and consumption of TV and music are linked in theory and in practice. This volume provides an invaluable critical analysis of these, and other, topics in fifteen new contributions from some of Britain's leading scholars in the disciplines of television and/or popular music studies. Through a concentration on four principal areas in which TV organizes and presents popular music - history and heritage; performers and performances; drama and comedy; audiences and territories - the book investigates a range of musical genres singers and styles, factual and fictional programming, historical and geographical demographics, and the constraints of commerce and technology to provide the first systematic account of the place of popular music on British television.