Americanization of British Television's Psychological Impact on British Identity, media accompaniment to the capstone paper.

1. Americanization of
British Television‟s
Psychological Impact on
British Identity
Christina Friis
MSPP
Capstone Project

2.  “There was some irony, perhaps, in the fact that the same
satellite technology that brought the Moon landing from
Houston to London, had four years earlier sent to an
expectant American audience live images of the funeral of
„the greatest Englishman‟ – the End of Empire versus the
Dawn of the Space Age.”2
July 1969: (Photo by Evening Standard/Getty Images)

3. Moon Landing
 “For Americans, this was Britain of the past, heritage
Britain, an anticipation perhaps, amid the media hype of
„swinging London,‟ of the coming decade‟s fascination not
with British Pop but with transatlantic nostalgia. For the
British viewing the Apollo mission, satellites brought an
America of thundering Saturn rockets, of power and
modernity, and if Britain could reciprocate by at least
receiving those signals, as a plugged-in partner, the closest
it itself could actually get to space travel was the London
studio where the American director Stanley Kubrick had
turned Arthur Clarke‟s fiction, 2001, A Space Odyssey, into
at least celluloid reality.”2

4. Close, yet Far
 “The Moon landing, viewed from Trafalgar Square, is then
a moment that can be unpacked in a number of different
ways. Most obviously it made a graphic statement about a
common humanity – but also about a shrinking Atlantic and
American technological hegemony. If Anglo-American
viewing was coparticipation, as in so much else it was the
British receiving and the Americans giving. It was an event
that celebrated, if in those flat American tones, the common
language of a medium that made each accessible to the
other as never before, and yet it highlighted a difference.”2

5. The Listener
 “’[T]hey export an awful lot to us,’ the British author
Gillian Freeman observed in 1969.”2
 “‘We may well end up peeling the protective foil from a
TV dinner as we watch a re-run of Those Were the Days
which weren’t even our days in the first place.’”2
© 2007 Cengage Learning

6. Ambitious, but rubbish
 “„American jokes [on
television] were
incomprehensible.‟”2
 - William Hardcastle
 “’I don’t think there is any
particular pro- or anti-
American attitude in regard
to imports. If the British
public like a programme,
they will like it; if they don’t
they will call it “American
rubbish”’”2
 - Alan Howden
Photo credit: dailymail.co.uk

7. Alistair Cooke
 “As the decade wore on, it and many other nostalgia-
drenched programs were crafted to appeal, like Alistair
Cooke‟s avuncular, Edwardian voice on PBS‟s Masterpiece
Theatre, to an American audience that, as Antoinette Burton
has observed, „has been and remains the audience perhaps
ripest for performances of Britain‟s eternal Britishness.‟”2
 Masterpiece Theatre Intro

8. Masterpiece Theatre
 “The press release announcing the coming series called it
„intelligent television for people who don‟t ordinarily watch
television.‟”2
 “Cooke himself was unimpressed („The script was not a
masterpiece, either original or adapted‟), and it had not been
especially successful in Britain. But, introduced by the
„quintessential Englishman,‟ it found viewers ready to
respond, not only to „powerful signifiers for an American
audience.‟”2

9. Upstairs, Downstairs
 “Staff interviewed director, writers, and actors and in the
end were persuaded by the promise of [Upstairs,
Downstairs]‟s „split sociology‟ (what Cooke called
„a foolproof formula for
ensnaring a mass
audience‟) – Upstairs
for „the snobbish kick‟
of elegantly costumed
aristocratic elitism,
Downstairs for
the cozy realm of
humanized
ordinary folk.”2
Photo credit: amazon.com

10. Back-flow
 “Programming designed to advance a stereotypical version
of historic national identity and class relations that would
sell in the United States was also consumed at home.
Paradoxically, the British search for a challenged national
identity was in some degree reinforced and encouraged by
products crafted for the transatlantic market. As Dominic
Strinati has perceptively if tentatively suggested:
„Americanization may also take the form of Britain selling
to Americans “Americanized” representations of itself, and
bringing back American produced and validated versions of
“Britishness”‟”2

11. Transatlantic Tourism
 “By and large… tourists… came to find what they
romantically imagined England or London to be –
Dickensian, small-scale, quaint, class-defined; different,
that is, in aspect and character from the modern familiar
back home… „Heritage‟ perfectly resonated with their
expectations.”2
Photo credit: David Perdue

12. Credit Where It‟s Due
 “Americans themselves not only played a part in the
recovery of a struggling British economy but had a
significant and unappreciated role in the redefining and
retrenching of Britishness itself. American tourists expected
to experience a Britain that was historically familiar and
perhaps bring some of it back home, and the „industry‟
accommodated their expectations. At the same time, British
media were more vigorously exporting to the States (or
hoped to) and needed to present themselves in a language
the American market expected and would understand.”2

13. Duke of Bedford
 “„I find this reverent interest in Englishness rather
comforting nowadays, when mourning our decline has
become such a fashionable pastime.‟”2
Photo credit: Royal Collection

14. „You may not get ratings,
but think of the prestige.‟
 “Though it has been estimated that ATV‟s production of
„prestige programmes‟ made expressly for the international
market was a small part of their total output, there were
many more productions made for domestic consumption
with an eye for selling on to the States. By the seventies it is
not possible easily to distinguish those productions, whether
BBC or ITV, that were intended for the domestic market
from those meant for export.”2

15.  “Among at least the relatively affluent, white, educated PBS
audience, the historical and social detail of the long-running
series wove an attractive representation of Britatin-as-
Edwardian-London. And as with those fantasists who
sought out the Baker Street residence of a historical
Sherlock Holmes, „American tourists were seen wandering
up and down Eaton Place, just off Belgravia Square looking
in vain for number 165‟”2
Photo credit: Ayrton Wylie

16. Us vs. Them
 “Jeffrey Miller has pointed out, such heritage
programming involved an additional problem of „a
negotiation of “otherness” and “our-own-ness”).‟”2

17. Doctor Who and
Englishness
 “„We‟ve not been obliged to observe the strictly
commercial criteria that say a producer on American
television has had to observe when everything has to be
reduced and ironed out and made to actually work…
We can toss in things that don‟t have to be totally
explained. We haven‟t got somebody saying, (“Hey,
what‟s this line about?”)… That‟s not the way British
television works… Certainly not the way the BBC
works…‟”3

18. Keeping DW English
 “If the Americans had been given the basic format of
the Doctor they would have given you a wonderfully
logically worked out “quirky” hero who was always the
same, and you would have been able to see around
all the eccentricity and predict it; whereas what we
have done is leave it a bit rough around the edges…
The reason we get away with it is because our
audiences are more indulgent… there was something
in this sort of Englishness that was valuable and was
prized by the audience… (quoted in Tulloch &
Alvarado 1983:178)‟”3

19. We interrupt this program…
 “the BBC had been importing American entertainment on
film since very early in the existence of the television
service, as perhaps most famously demonstrated by the fact
that it was a Mickey Mouse cartoon that was
unceremoniously cut off by the abrupt shutting down of the
Alexandra Palace transmitter at the outbreak of the Second
World War”2
 Re-opening of BBC Television - 1946

20.  “But what the idea of American popular culture provided
was particularly appealing to the lower classes, as John
Fiske has pointed out, „American popular culture in the
1950s and 1960s was eagerly taken up by British working-
class youth who found in its flashy streamlining a way to
articulate their new class confidence and consciousness.
Such symbolizations of their identity were simply not
available in ‘British’ culture which appeared to offer two
equally unacceptable sets of alternatives – the one a
romanticized cloth-cap image of an „authentic‟ traditional
working class culture, the other a restrained, tasteful, BBC
produced inflection of popular culture. The commodities
produced by the American cultural industries were
mobilized to express an intransigent, young, urban,
working class identity that scandalized both the
traditional British working class and the dominant middle
classes. The cultural alliance between this fraction of the
British working class and their sense of American popular
culture was one that served their cultural/ideological
needs at that historical moment‟ (Fiske 1980: 321)”1

21. How the tables have turned
 “Many have criticized the decision by Arthur A. Levine
of Scholastic to translate the Harry Potter books from
British English into American English. …For his part,
Levine has said, „I wasn‟t trying to, quote,
“Americanize” them. What I was trying to do was
translate, which is something different. I wanted to
make sure that an American kid reading the book
would have the same literary experience that a British
kid would have.”4
Photocredit:CNN
Photocredit:Amazon

22. Using American Britishly
 “[Kelly Boyd] argues that „the choices made suggest the
BBC employed foreign content not only to bring more
variety to its schedule, but also to reinforce the strength of
British culture in a period when the rise of the United States
implied a decline in British power‟ (Boyd, 2011: 233). In
other words, by using American material in a British way,
surrounded by programming that was British, showed that
British culture was still able to master and control American
product, and to make something different of it, something
more British”1

23. Conationalism
 “Another scholar has argued that the apparently
incompatible national myths of England and the United
States (good breeding and rugged success) in an era of
Western decline, and offered lessons in the „manners‟
necessary for running a (perhaps declining) American
empire. Without completely accepting that such
popularizations of high culture offered exactly an
„ideological commodity‟ of this nature, we can appreciate
that [the show Jennie, Lady Randolph Churchill (with the
lead actress being American and the director being
Welsh)]‟s fusion and its forward-looking premise (that
American savvy and British class would combine to
produce a twentieth-century hero for both „Anglo-Saxon
peoples‟) represents a transatlantic conationalism flattering
to many.”1 Photo credit: Taylor Rockwell

24. References
 1Johnston, D. (2012). „Strange Visitor From Another
Planet‟: Genre, Corporate Identity and the Arrival of
American Telefantasy on British Television.
Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA-PGN,
5 (2).
 2Malchow, H. (2011). Special relations. Stanford,
California: Stanford University Press.
 3Shimpach, S. (2010). Television in transition.
Chichester, West Sussex, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell.
 4Whited, L. (2003). The ivory tower and Harry Potter.
Columbia [u.a.]: Univ. of Missouri Press.