Regional Aesthetics Mapping UK Media Cultures

Although there is an increased awareness of the relevance of space and geography across humanities disciplines (the so-called 'spatial turn'), its applicability to UK media history has hitherto been largely overlooked, partly due to the prevailing interest in the discursive formation of national or globalised identity through media. This anthology sets out to redress this, through specially written chapters which explore regional media cultures, the communication of place, the influence of location, and the idea of geographically located identity. Regional Aesthetics has a historical (as well as geographical) and a cross-media focus, examining the aesthetic and political dimensions of regional representations in film (feature films, amateur film and educational film); novels; television (drama, comedy, documentary and educational programming); music; radio; and digital media. In mapping UK media cultures across the C20th and beyond, this books functions as an 'academic GPS', designed to introduce and encourage the study of regionally located media in the curriculum.

Ieuan Franklin is Lecturer in Film and Media at Wiltshire College and Bournemouth University, UK. His PhD explored the relationship between oral history and radio broadcasting in the UK. Between 2010 and 2014 he worked as Research Assistant on the AHRC funded 'Channel 4 and British Film Culture' project at the University of Portsmouth.

Hugh Chignell is Professor of Media History and Director of the Centre for Media History at Bournemouth University, UK. He is Chair of the UK Radio Archives Advisory Committee. His published research is mainly on radio history including news, current affairs and radio drama.

Kristin Skoog is Lecturer in Media in the Faculty of Media and Communication at Bournemouth University, UK, where she is the Assistant Director of the Centre for Media History. Skoog has an interest in the social and cultural impact of broadcasting, media history and popular culture. Her research is focused on radio and post-war reconstruction, and in women's radio, and women broadcasters in Europe.

Introduction; Ieuan Franklin
Part I: Living on Location
1.Living on Location: Amateur Creativity and Negotiating a Sense of Place in Yorkshire; Heather Norris Nicholson
2.Arcadia in Absentia: Cinema, the Great Depression and the Problem of Industrial Wales; Daryl Perrins
3.A Poetics of the North: Visual and Literary Geographies; David Sheffield and Sue Vice
Part II: Urban Subcultures and Structures of Feeling
4.The Sons and Heirs of Something Particular: The Smiths' Manchester Aesthetic, 1982-7; Peter Atkinson
5.Away and Raffle Yourself! Still Game, Craiglang, Glasgow and Identity; Mary Irwin
6.Topological London; Kris Erickson
Part III: Broadcasting and Belonging
7.A Region in Microcosm: Brandon Acton-Bond's Post-War BBC Radio Features; Ieuan Franklin
8.Gi' it some 'ommer: ITV Regional Programming and the Performance of the Black Country; Julie Robinson
9.A Post-War History of Radio for the Asian Community in Leicester; Gloria Khamkar
10. The Teliesyn Co-operative: National Broadcasting, Production Organization and TV Aesthetics; Dafydd Sills-Jones
Part IV: Borders, Devolution and Contested Histories
11. Sam Hanna Bell and the ideology of place; Hugh Chignell
12. Resisting redefinition: the portrayal of Northern Irish identity in Ulster Television's schools output, 1970-77; Ken Griffin
13. 'Nothing Similar in England': the Scottish Film Council, the Scottish Education Department and the Utility of 'Educational Film' to Scotland; Mandy Powell
14. Impossible unity? Representing internal diversity in post-devolution Wales; Simon Gwyn Roberts