Department of Culture, Film and Media Research Seminar
Guest speaker: Helen Wheatley (Warwick)
This talk examines the representation of death and the dead on television. In doing so, it moves off from work on death on film to think about the ways in which television mediates death for its viewers, providing encounters with death which may be disturbing or reassuring, offering viewers the frisson of an engagement with our own mortality or holding death at a safe distance from everyday life. I will explore a series of ‘death genres’ on television, including the ‘human body’ documentary, the anatomy spectacular, and televisual encounters with assisted dying during this paper.
Helen Wheatley is a Reader in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. She has research interests in various aspects of British television history, and has published work on popular genres in television drama in the UK, US, including the monograph Gothic Television (2006). Her ongoing interest in issues of television history and historiography have been the topic of her edited collections Re-viewing Television History: Critical Issues in Television Historiography (IB Tauris, 2007) and Television for Women: New Directions (Routledge, 2016, with Rachel Moseley and Helen Wood). Her monograph Spectacular Television: Exploring Televisual Pleasure (IB Tauris, 2016) this combines research on the history of particular television technologies as spectacular, with analysis of the ways in which, for example, landscape, bodies (both human and animal), and action are rendered visually pleasurable or spectacular on TV. In 2016 she began work on a monograph entitled Television/Death, which looks at television's handling of death, dying and the dead.