(G)hosting television: Ghostwatch and its medium

Steward, Tom; Zborowski, James

Abstract

This article’s subject is Ghostwatch (BBC, 1992), a drama broadcast on Halloween night of 1992 which adopted the rhetoric of live non-fiction programming, and attracted controversy and ultimately censure from the Broadcasting Standards Council. In what follows, we argue that Ghostwatch must be understood as a televisually-specific artwork and artefact. We discuss the programme’s ludic relationship with some key features of television during what Ellis (2000) has termed its era of ‘availability’, principally liveness, mass simultaneous viewing, and the flow of the television super-text. We trace the programme’s television-specific historicity whilst acknowledging its allusions and debts to other media (most notably film and radio). We explore the sophisticated ways in which Ghostwatch’s visual grammar and vocabulary and deployment of ‘broadcast talk’ (Scannell 1991) variously ape, comment upon and subvert the rhetoric of factual programming, and the ends to which these strategies are put. We hope that these arguments collectively demonstrate the aesthetic and historical significance of Ghostwatch and identify its relationship to its medium and that medium’s history. We offer the programme as an historically-reflexive artefact, and as an exemplary instance of the work of art in television’s age of broadcasting, liveness and co-presence.

Citation

Steward, T., & Zborowski, J. (2014). (G)hosting television: Ghostwatch and its medium. Journal of British cinema and television, 11(2-3), 189-212. https://doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2014.0203

• Acceptance Date: Jan 16, 2014
• Publication Date: 2014-07
• Deposit Date: Oct 21, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 23, 2017
• Journal: Journal of British cinema and telelvision
• Print ISSN: 1743-4521
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 11
• Issue: 2-3
• Pages: 189-212
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2014.0203
• Keywords: BBC; Broadcasting; Direct address; Drama-documentary; Flow; Ghostwatch; Horror; Liveness; Television; Television presenters
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/379960
• Publisher URL: http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/jbctv.2014.0203
• Additional Information: Author's accepted manuscript of article published in: Journal of British cinema and telelvision, 2014, v.11, issue 2-3.
• Contract Date: Nov 23, 2017