This is the second symposium arising from the AHRC Spaces of Television: Production, Site and Style project. The project is led by Professor Jonathan Bignell (University of Reading) in collaboration with the Professor James Chapman (University of Leicester) and Professor Stephen Lacey (University of Glamorgan).

The symposium will focus on performance and its relationship to television space, with a particular – though not exclusive – emphasis on UK television drama 1955-1994, the period covered by the ‘Spaces of Television’ project.

The keynote address will be given by Christine Geraghty (Glasgow): ‘Twitchy editing and careening cameras’: the presentation of performance in Bleak House (2005): this paper will comment on the impact of setting on the presentation of performance in two BBC adaptations of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House in 1985 and 2005

The symposium will contain four panels:

• Genre Performance;
• Performing Studio Language and Practices;
• Theatrical Performance; and
• Community Performance.

In what promises to be a very stimulating day, presentations will range wide; e.g. from an analysis of performance and space in dinner-table scenes in Coronation St (1960-)and The Bar Mitzvah Boy (1976) to the criminal location as performance space in Z Cars (1960-78) and Strangers (1978-82); from the influence of the actor’s union, Equity, on BBCstudio drama to the relationships between radical black theatre and television performance in Black Feet in the Snow(1974); and from feminism and studio performance in Rock Follies (1976) to Lindsay Anderson’s Brechtian TV drama, The Old Crowd (BBC 1979)

The day will include an interview with the actor Maurice Roeves ( Tutti Frutti, The Journal of Bridget Hitler, Doctor Who, Danger UXB)