'A Live Film'? Failing to Notice Television

JPTV 1 (1) pp. 105–111 Intellect Limited 2013 Journal of Popular Television Volume 1 Number 1 © 2013 Intellect Ltd Olympic Dossier. English language. doi: 10.1386/jptv.1.1.105_1 Brett Mills University of East Anglia ‘A live film’? Failing to notice television ABstrAct Keywords Why does so much television go unnoticed? This article examines the coverage of Olympics the Opening Ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games to show how some popular television media forms – especially film and music – are a part of everyday debates about film culture, whereas television is not. The Opening Ceremony was often about televi- invisible television sion, and was consumed by billions via television – yet reviews and commentar- media event ies about the event rarely mention television at all. This article shows that those involved in the Ceremony who have worked successfully in television – such as Danny Boyle and Rowan Atkinson – are similarly commonly understood via their work in other media. The article calls for those in Television Studies to be more vocal about the work the field does, in order to combat such erasing of television found in Danny Boyle’s description of the Opening Ceremony not as television, but as ‘live film’. Within two minutes of the completion of the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 London Olympic Games commentators on the BBC, reflecting on the event, were writing television out of their summaries of what they had just witnessed. For example, Gary Lineker – one of the anchors of much of the BBC’s sports coverage – summed up the Ceremony as: ‘Music in this country was celebrated, film was celebrated, the NHS, Great Ormond Street, modern technology; it was a celebration of all the good things about Britain.’ Lineker’s foregrounding of film and music were mirrored in the newspaper reporting 105 JPTV_1.1_Mills_105-111.indd 105 2/8/13 10:01:58 AM Brett Mills that followed the event, with many commentators agreeing that highlighting these cultural forms is an appropriate and internationally intelligible way for Britain to represent itself to the rest of the world. Yet television – as a technology, as programmes and as a social phenom- enon – was vital to the version of Britain represented in the Ceremony. Two of the first cultural references in the Ceremony, as part of the opening video depicting the route of the River Thames, were televisual, with the theme tunes to arts and culture magazine programme The South Bank Show (ITV, 1978–2010; Sky Arts, 2012–) and the soap opera EastEnders (BBC, 1985–) accompanying appropriate visual moments in the journey. But perhaps television was most obviously foregrounded in the section called ‘Frankie and June say, “Thanks Tim”’ which depicted a teenage boy and girl meeting and falling in love to a soundtrack of British pop music from the last sixty years. During this sequence clips from a range of British films and television programmes were projected onto the side of a large house. Prior to that, though, the girl’s preparations for the night out were depicted, with her in her bedroom putting on make-up and trying on clothes while, downstairs, her family gathered on the sofa to watch Harry Hill’s TV Burp (ITV, 2001–12); this was clearly intended to depict a ‘typical’ British Saturday evening, and here television was a cultural form bringing the family together. The narrative of the romance was told via those film and television clips; for example, the conversation between the girl and her parents was accompanied by clips from Coronation Street (ITV, 1960–) and Desmond’s (Channel 4, 1989–94) in which parents expressed worry about their children’s revealing clothes. When the boy and the girl finally kissed a sequence of film and television kisses was shown, including the ‘notorious’ pre-watershed lesbian kiss from a 1994 episode of Brookside (Channel 4, 1982–2003), which commentators on Twitter quickly realized may have been the first such kiss broadcast on television for many countries around the world (Merrick 2012: 41). The use of television was thus vital to the sequence in two ways: clips fulfilled a narrative function in a sequence in which the onstage performers uttered no dialogue; television was shown to be one of key ways families are united, and therefore the medium’s social function was demonstrated. In that sense, this sequence highlighted television’s content and its social role, suggesting that one of the ways in which societies (or just British society?) think about themselves is via television. However, you would not have known any of this from the reports describ- ing the Opening Ceremony both online or in that weekend’s newspapers. The historian and television broadcaster Tristram Hunt said that ‘our shared icons of the National Health Service and Monarchy, of film and music, were rightly celebrated’ (Hunt 2012: 6), poet Jackie Kay said the Ceremony ‘moved from the pastoral to the industrial to the digital with athletic alacrity, using film and theatre and symbols along the way’ (Kay 2012: 9), artist Ai Wei-Wei said it was ‘about events and stories and literature and music; about folktales and movies’ (Wei-Wei 2012: 6), and academic Janet McCabe states the ‘Frankie and June say, “Thanks Tim”’ sequence was ‘a rock romance [that] celebrated British film and popular music’ (McCabe 2012: n.p.). In a two-page article in The Observer, Thorpe (2012a) places the ‘key cultural references’ in the Opening Ceremony into six categories: Shakespeare’s The Tempest; Milton’s Pandaemonium; mortality (in response to the terrorist attacks in London in 2005); children’s literature; peace; and British film. And it seems as if it has become an accepted, commonsense understanding that television was not 106 JPTV_1.1_Mills_105-111.indd 106 2/8/13 10:01:59 AM ‘A live film’? one of the key cultural forms evident in the Ceremony for the Wikipedia entry summarizing its content says: ‘The ceremony, entitled Isles of Wonder, charted aspects of British culture, including the Industrial Revolution and British contributions to literature, music, film and technology’ (Wikipedia 2012: n.p.). Perhaps what is most apparent here is that a cultural form which is repeatedly referred to in these analyses is film. That cinema constitutes a cultural touchstone, and is emblematic of the particularities of British culture, recurs in these articles, as does the assumption that celebrating Britain via its cinematic heritage is appropriate and something to be proud of. Indeed, it is telling that references to Danny Boyle (the Opening Ceremony’s artistic director) construct a particular narrative of his career, all of which omit his television work (for example, see Morrison (2012) and Lawson (2012)). This is even more noticeable considering that Boyle’s theatre work, much of which predates his television work, is repeatedly mentioned in such articles, so a history is being constructed here that pointedly avoids a specific medium. This might not be surprising considering the material in which Boyle and Frank Cottrell Boyce (the Opening Ceremony’s writer) outline their vision for the event similarly fails to mention television, while it does refer to ‘the words of our great poets – Shakespeare, Blake and Milton [...] our unrivalled pop culture [...] our great children’s literature’ (Boyle 2012, quoted in McVeigh and Gibson 2012: 9) and ‘the things we love about Britain – the Industrial Revolution, the digital revolution, the NHS, pop music, children’s literature, genius engineers’ (Cottrell Boyce 2012: 33). That television can be written out of such moments, while other cultural forms are included, can be seen in responses to the sequence in the Ceremony that included Rowan Atkinson. This section constituted the comedian’s contribution to an orchestral performance of the theme music to the film Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson, 1981) conducted by Sir Simon Rattle. Atkinson’s character has little other than one note to play and so is bored throughout the performance, resulting in his mind wandering and his subsequent failure to keep up with the rest of the orchestra. Shoard (2012) sees this sequence as a ‘tribute’ to the British film industry, even though she acknowledges that there was confusion over which of his television- originated characters (Mr Bean or Johnny English) Atkinson was playing, if either. Certainly, Atkinson’s international renown is primarily a result of his performances as Mr Bean in a series of one-off episodes for television (ITV, 1990–95) that have sold more than 14 million videos worldwide (Barkham 2007: n.p.), rather than from the two similarly profitable feature films (Bean (Mel Smith, 1997) and Mr Bean’s Holiday (Steve Bendelack, 2007)) that resulted from that success. It is, then, an impressive piece of cultural inter- pretation to see this sequence in the Opening Ceremony as a nod towards British film culture; or, more accurately, to see it as solely that and not also as evidence of the contribution television has made to British culture that has circulated around the world. I have argued elsewhere that certain kinds of popular television are ‘invisible’ (Mills 2010) because even though they are watched by many people the academy has repeatedly failed to explore them, showing what Television Studies seems to (inadvertently?) construct as its object of attention. However, the failure for critics and reviewers to connect the Opening Ceremony to television works here in more than one way. I have outlined above how those moments where the Ceremony refers to television are repeatedly overlooked, 107 JPTV_1.1_Mills_105-111.indd 107 2/8/13 10:01:59 AM Brett Mills but what was also absent from discussions of the Ceremony was an acknowl- edgement that it was itself, first and foremost, a piece of television.

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