Collective Cultural Memory as a TV Guide: “Living” History and Nostalgia on the Digital Television Platform

Modern audiences engage with representations of the past in a particular way via the medium of television, negotiating a shared understanding of the past. This is evidenced by the increasing popularity of reboots, newly developed history and documentary programming, re-use of archival footage and nostalgia content. This article takes a closer look at television’s abilities to circulate and contextualize the past in the current era of convergence through narrowcasting or niche programming on digital television platforms, specifically via nostalgia programming. Such platforms exemplify the multifaceted way of looking at and gaining access to television programming through a variety of connected platforms and screens in the current multi-platform era. Since the way in which television professionals (producers, schedulers, commissioners, researchers) act as moderators in this process needs to be further analysed, the article places an emphasis on how meaningful connections via previously broadcast history and nostalgia programming are also curated, principally through scheduling and production practices for niche programming – key elements in television’s creative process that have received less academic attention. Furthermore, the article discusses to what extent media policy in the Netherlands is attuned to the (re-)circulation of previously broadcast content and programming about past events, and reflects on television’s possibilities for “re-screening” references to the past in the contemporary media landscape. The analysis is based on a combination of textual analysis of audio-visual archival content and a production studies approach of interviews with key professionals, to gain insight into the creators’ strategies in relation to nostalgia programming and scheduling. Subsequently, the article demonstrates how national collective memory, as understood by television professionals in the Netherlands, informs the scheduling and circulation of “living history” on the digital thematic channel – collective cultural memory hence functioning as a TV guide.

The Drama of Broadcast History after May 1968

This chapter explores selected English-language programs of the Direction des affaires extérieures et de la coopération (DAEC), an affiliate of French broadcasting’s Office de radiodiffusion-télévision française (ORTF). The DAEC supplied historical and cultural radio dramas to U.S. listeners from 1968 until 1973. The DAEC’s dramas used experimental aesthetic techniques and topical provocations to engage a contemporary American audience seeking alternatives to commercial radio. Irreverence, satire, and a willingness to critique French society imbued these exports with a mildly subversive quality rarely heard on U.S.–French radio. DAEC brought non-U.S. radio content to select public stations and marked a final burst of U.S.–French connectivity in the waning days of France’s state broadcast monopoly, which dissolved in 1974.

Across the Waves

This book is a history of U.S.–French radio broadcasting in the twentieth century. Decades before satellite TV and the Internet, America and France interconnected regularly and instantaneously on a mass scale across the Atlantic. The book investigates how transatlantic radio developed into a dynamic field of cross-border circulation, cultural exchange, and geopolitics. Between 1931, when live broadcasts first linked U.S.–French listeners, and 1974, when France dissolved its public media monopoly, international broadcasting developed into a critical communication space that embodied turbulent interwar politics and the expansive tendencies of U.S. commercial networks; the cataclysmic events of World War II, including the German Occupation of France; contentious U.S.–French relations during the Cold War; French postwar international media expansion; and the effects of the 1960s on U.S.–French ties and media systems. The book examines the techno-aesthetics of radio as a technological medium linking two allied, but starkly different societies and cultures in new ways. The book complicates the paradigm of self-contained "radio nations" to demonstrate that throughout broadcast history, the challenges of developing and managing international interconnectivity required necessary partnerships that blurred lines of sovereignty, state control, and national cultural production. Radio’s development and usage prefigured the global, cross-border digital communication technologies, tools, infrastructure, and mediated geopolitics of today.

Permission to Dissent: Civil Religion and the Radio Western, 1933–1960

Radio drama gave Americans a new form of commercial entertainment in the 1930s, but the stories themselves contained time-honored elements. One of these was the rhetorical tradition scholars have identified as American civil religion. Radio Westerns were particularly well suited to promulgate familiar civil religion themes. They described the United States as an instrument of divine will in history, celebrated Americans as pious people, and associated national expansion with the implementation of God's will.The Lone Ranger was the most famous Western to articulate these themes. The show's writers consciously sought to create in their hero a “composite of all men who uphold the laws of God and man.” During its long broadcast history from 1933 to 1954, the show attracted a large audience and inspired publishing, film, and television ventures. By the late 1940s, however, owing in part to World War II and in part to the Cold War, some Americans on both sides of the microphone found the old formula unsatisfactory.Gunsmoke, which premiered in 1951, exemplified a second generation of radio Westerns. Though still civil religious, these Westerns located the United States' religious significance less in national triumph than in personal triumphs of its citizens. In doing so, they critiqued the earlier Westerns and shifted from what Martin E. Marty has called the “priestly” to the “prophetic” form of civil religion. Their impatience with the older Westerns' use of civil religion also paralleled theological critiques of the popular Christianity of the 1950s.

The Q Story: A Broadcast History of Queensland (1945–1946)

In 1945, as Australians unknowingly entered the last year of the Second World War, the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) in Queensland undertook a unique radio history project that ran for two years. The original intention of the programme, as suggested by its title The Q Story, appears to have been propagandist and thus in keeping with official policy: to provide morale-boosting entertainment with a nationalist theme in the context of wartime. As the programme progressed, however, it appears to have developed an alternative legitimacy in response to public demand.