Event TV
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Event TV

The production and inhabited resistance of images of control

By Wendy Davis.
ISBN: 978-1921214-77-6 B5 246pp
AUD $59.50 + p&p.

About

Australian television comedy has long been a rich source of entertainment and innovation. From Graham Kennedy's irreverent subversion of the tonight show format in In Melbourne Tonight to Roy & HG's colourful reinterpretation of the conventions of sports commentary at the Sydney Olympics and Kath and Kim's peculiarly Australian take on the mockumentary, our TV comedians have demonstrated a spirit of rebellion that has used humour as a means for breaking open mainstream genres and imagining them in new and fresh ways. Event TV presents an erudite and scholarly exploration of these figures, highlighting how besides being very funny their programs offer a culturally significant practice of comic resistance.

Geoff Danaher, CQUniversity

One of the real strengths of this work is the way Wendy has adopted the different post-structural notions such as abstract machines, becoming-surface/becoming-scene, the face, and the grotesque to open up and peer inside television.

Jennifer Elsden, Clifton RMIT University

By drawing on the philosophical and theoretical insights of various structuralist and poststructuralist thinkers this book is able to propose what is in effect a new apparatus theory of television… this is a bold and striking move: its very ambition is breathtaking and it is no small achievement… to carry this through in a sustained and detailed manner.

Jason Jacobs, The University of Queensland

Dr Wendy Davis is a lecturer with CQUniversity's Skills for Tertiary Education Preparatory Program (STEPS). In 2010 she was awarded a two year Early Career Research Fellowship at CQUniversity to further her research into the television mockumentary.

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Contents

  • Preface and Acknowledgments
  • Introduction: The Question of the Televisual Event
  1. Looking At Television: Past Practice and Points of Departure
    • Television and British Cultural Studies
    • Williams: Flow
    • Image problems
    • Fiske: The audience
    • Television:
      • History and the archive
      • Genres and texts
      • Industry and policy
      • Technological qualities and capacities
      • Liveness
      • A historical engagement with the image
      • Theory
  2. The Image As Event: Conceptual Perspectives for Encountering Televisual Control
    • Events — virtualities — machines
    • The qualities of the event
    • Events of discipline and events of control
    • Deleuzian control
    • Tactics, humour and everyday life
    • Inhabited resistance
    • The television image, the televisual event: A mode of analysis
    • Becoming-surface/Becoming-scene
  3. Liveness, the Emergence of Control and the Televisual Potential for Inhabited Resistance
    • Early appearances
    • Television and cinema: Comparative histories
    • Images of liveness: The televisual-cinematic nexus
    • Workers leaving the factory: Flickers of liveness
    • Discipline: The cinematic event
    • Televisual liveness: Between the lines
    • Felix the cat
    • The emergence of control
    • Stookie Bill
  4. Televisual Faces: Direct Address and the Production and Inhabited Resistance of Control
    • Bruce Gyngell
    • Graham Kennedy
  5. The Comedy of Resistance
    • Norman Gunston: The little Aussie bleeder
    • The dream with Roy and H.G.: "When too much sport is barely enough"
    • Kath and Kim: Foxymorons from Fountain Lakes
  • Conclusion: The Television Mockumentary and the Future of the Television Event
    • Watch this space
  • Endnotes
  • References
  • Index

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