Geographies of popular TV comedy and drama.

Keen to take seriously popular cultural media and the way it informs, and shapes imagined and real landscapes and ideas about the world, this research is interested in the “tiny revolution” (Orwell 1945) that popular comedy productions can initiate and how they variously ask audiences to question the established ordering of the world. How comedy achieves this across a range of formats and comedy genres complements broader research into the geographies of popular media, such as satirical cartoons, the historical legacies of music hall and popular comedy dramas on TV.

Holding a personal passion for comedy and a professional interest in historical and cultural geographies, the confluence of shared interests between myself and Professor Innes M Keighren led to a creative and organic attempt to experiment in writing historical and cultural geographies for wider audiences by writing about the way a sitcom – in this case, Detectorists – articulates ideas about the English landscape, histories, belonging, ecological times and life in an England in the first two decades of the 21st century.  Of how this comedy drama sits in broader cultural and political narratives and how its global popularity over lockdown has served to voice a quiet dissenting representation of Englishness and English landscapes from the dominant narratives pushed by mainstream media and news outlets.

Landscapes of Detectorists was the published output.  it was first published in 2020.  a second print run took place in 2021 and it is being reprinted for a 3rd time in the autumn of 2022.

 

With much gratitude and thanks to contributors to the book including a foreward by Mackenzie Crook and an Aferword by originating producer, Adam Tandy.  Thanks to Innes Keighren, Andrew Harris, Isla Forsyth and Joanne Norcup for essays and to Innes and Joanne for writing the introduction. And to Colin Sackett at Uniformbooks for approaching us to turn our 2018 RGS session into a publication that is a thing of beauty.

BBC4 original comedy drama, Detectorists (BBC/PlanetX image)
BBC4 original comedy drama, Detectorists (BBC/PlanetX image).