The future of nostalgia: Revindicating Spanish actors and acting in and through Cine de barrio

Teleliteracy: Taking Television Seriously, and: Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America

In From Media Systems to Media Cultures: Understanding Socialist Television, Sabina Mihelj and Simon Huxtable delve into the fascinating world of television under communism, using it to test a new framework for comparative media analysis. To understand the societal consequences of mass communication, the authors argue that we need to move beyond the analysis of media systems, and instead focus on the role of the media in shaping cultural ideals and narratives, everyday practices and routines. Drawing on a wealth of original data derived from archival sources, programme and schedule analysis, and oral history interviews, the authors show how communist authorities managed to harness the power of television to shape new habits and rituals, yet failed to inspire a deeper belief in communist ideals. This book and their analysis contains important implications for the understanding of mass communication in non-democratic settings, and provides tools for the analysis of media cultures globally.

From Media Systems to Media Cultures: Understanding Socialist Television

The politics of gay and transgender visibility and representation at the Eurovision Song Contest, an annual televised popular music festival presented to viewers as a contest between European natio...

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The ‘gay Olympics’? The Eurovision Song Contest and the politics of LGBT/European belonging

Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony

Intervision song contests and Finnish television between East and West

No other programme in the history of international TV in Europe can match the nearly 60-year-long unbroken tradition of the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC). Many factors have contributed to the contest’s longevity: the members of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) have been committed to producing a flagship programme for their Eurovision network; the organizers have developed the contest to keep up with changes in media culture; and individual broadcasting companies have been eager to participate, in some cases partly because of the symbolic value that the contest has gained as a sign of European belonging. Another important reason for the ESC’s survival is that it has worked as media entertainment, inspiring a wealth of feelings: viewers have been moved by singers’ powerful performances and uplifted by energetic choreographies, empathized with winners’ emotions, laughed at failed performances, enjoyed an ironic distance from the whole spectacle, celebrated their country’s victory and been outraged by ’unfair’ results and other controversies. Often these feelings draw strength from national loyalties, but they also construct different kinds of relations to Europe.

Europe, with Feeling: The Eurovision Song Contest as Entertainment

In 2006–2007, the romantic affair between Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen and white-collar worker Susan Kuronen received unprecedented attention in the national media. Analyzing the coverage of the affair and its aftermath in Finnish evening papers through Sara Ahmed's notion of affective circulation, the present article investigates the drawing of public and private boundaries through the public reviling of Kuronen for revealing intimate details concerning Vanhanen's private life. As the couple's relationship unraveled, the evening papers began fashioning class differences between the parties both previously characterized as “ordinary” and middle-class, labeling Kuronen as common and trashy. Addressing the dynamics of class and gender at play, the article shows that although Kuronen was accused of continuously revealing her private life, she actually gave few interviews herself. Rather, the popular press reused the same comments and quotes extensively in an intertextual process of circulation throu...

Trashing The Prime Minister's Bride: Public Dismay and Intertextual Media

The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) offers a unique viewpoint to the ways Europe has been imagined on television from the 1950s to the present. This paper looks at the use of a key visual symbol for Europe, the European map, to outline the history of the ESC’s representation of Europe. Whilst the European map was rarely used during the ﬁrst decades of the ESC, it became a central visual element of the show in the 1990s, a period of great political change in Europe. Since then, the ESC maps have pictured an ever widening image of Europe, gradually moving towards a dynamic, moving image of Europe and ﬁnally, dispensing with a coherent map of Europe altogether.

Mapping Europe: Images of Europe in the Eurovision Song Contest

In critical studies on historical television programmes, the affective qualities of televisual memory have been discussed mainly in terms of nostalgia. This article argues that conceptualizing the ...

‘Long live the friendship between the Soviet Union and Finland!’ Irony, nostalgia, and melodrama in Finnish historical television drama and documentary series:

Mari Pajala

Papers

Intervision song contests and Finnish television between East and West

Europe, with Feeling: The Eurovision Song Contest as Entertainment

Trashing The Prime Minister's Bride: Public Dismay and Intertextual Media

Mapping Europe: Images of Europe in the Eurovision Song Contest

‘Long live the friendship between the Soviet Union and Finland!’ Irony, nostalgia, and melodrama in Finnish historical television drama and documentary series: