The interview with Polish television writer, Agnieszka Kruk, highlights the experience of format adaptation from the point of view of the writer. Kruk reveals how she gained from the knowledge offered by the foreign consultants and explains what aspects of the knowledge transfer she found particularly useful. Her account demonstrates the positive impact format adaptation can have on professionals in local television industries, in this case, benefitting their scriptwriting and production skills.

This article has two main aims. First, it seeks to contribute to existing research on the mediation of post-communist memory by considering the Polish case and specifically by focusing on audience memories of an iconic television series produced in communist Poland, Four Tankmen and a Dog (TVP, 1966(TVP, -1970, set during World War Two. Second, the article pays particular attention to the generational stratification of audience memories, and thereby makes a contribution to recent literature that examines the links between generation and mediated remembering. The analysis draws on life-course interviews with viewers of two different generations, conducted in Poland in 2014. The results indicate that the ways in which Polish audiences remember communist-era programming, and specifically the extent to which they perceive such programming as propaganda, vary significantly with generation. We argue that these differences stem from generationally-specific experiences in the past, which gave rise to distinct modes of engaging with the communist era and its heritage.

This article focuses on the ways in which socialist television sought to create a sense of extraordinary temporality out of the ordinary through its coverage of historical commemorations, national days, and secular and religious festivities. To do so, it develops the concept of ‘media holidays’, which draws on Dayan and Katz’s seminal notion of media events, and the work of other scholars of media ritual, to show the ways in which socialist television created extraordinary temporalities through scheduling. Drawing on schedule analysis and archival documents, the article compares the cases of television in East Germany, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. It examines a number of different kinds of media holiday on socialist television, and shows how different kinds of holidays and commemoration were marked with different kinds of programming in which entertainment played an important role.

The changing political sphere in 1989 and the subsequent 2004 European Union accession had a profound impact on Poland’s economic, political and social spheres. Both events are considered to have marked Poland’s ‘return to Europe’ and strengthened the relations with its Western neighbours. This article examines the changing patterns of television fiction programming flow in Poland in the post-Soviet era, exploring the impact of those two events on Poland’s audiovisual sector. This article therefore assesses whether, and if so – how, this metaphorical ‘return to Europe’ is manifested on Polish television screens.