Beautiful images in spectacular clarity: spectacular television, landscape programming and the question of (tele)visual pleasure

Wainwright's West Yorkshire: Affect and Landscape in the Television Drama of Sally Wainwright

“…This article contributes to the growing engagement with geographic visuality within television studies, which has emerged in response to the booming 'geography genre' of factual programming (Wheatley 2011(Wheatley , 2016, the popularity of imported 'Nordic Noir' crime drama and TV drama's increased investment in location shooting. Helen Piper suggests television's 'once interchangeable backdrops' are now often positioned as spectacular objects of the gaze (2016: 176).…”

Science, Entertainment and Television Documentary

“…The idea is that these shows deliver the same kind of vicarious physical kick-only to a more northerly portion of the anatomy. Like other categories of content, such as coverage of war and terrorism labelled 'war porn' (Parton 2015 ), horror fi lms dubbed 'torture porn' and the presence of 'landscape porn' in documentaries about the countryside (Wheatley 2011 ), the use of this label in relation to the weather indicates a view that the depictions of the subject matter involve an excess of lurid spectacle, sensationalism, gratuity and arousal (as opposed to, say, concentrating on scientifi c information or education). The label has not been restricted to the usual suspects for pejorative judgements as programmes from the likes of Discovery (Gorman 2009 ) and National Geographic (Doyle 2009 ), programmes from the Weather Channel in the USA (Patterson 2000 ), programmes from the commercial broadcaster ITV in the UK ) and even several programmes from the BBC (Gorelangton 2002 ; ) have been described this way.…”

“…Even in Life After People and Aftermath: Population Zero , where humanity disappears entirely never to return, here the presence of scientists explaining the processes of decay of humanity's built environment offers a parallel to the common paradox of many disaster myth narratives: Who writes the disaster story if the world has been brought to an end? The dislocation-of-scientist sequences mentioned earlier in the chapter here serve as a distancing narrative framework, allowing for subjunctive scenes of mass destruction to invoke vicarious pleasure at the spectacle of disaster, rather than fear, alarm or calls to advocacy for that matter (Wheatley 2011 ).…”

Broadcast drama and the problem of television aesthetics: home, nation, universe

“…imagination', 70 and in the UK high definition digital technologies have facilitated the incidence of what Helen Wheatley describes as 'slow television': contemplative, spectacular 'landscape programming' such as Coast (BBC, 2005-). 71 However, almost all domestically produced drama (not least, police/crime fiction) also feeds the national territorial imagination. It may also do so through the inclusion of landscape spectacle, as in the case of Vera (ITV, 2011) or Luther (BBC, 2010) in which once interchangeable backdrops are often now positioned, to borrow Andrew Higson's previous phrase, as 'the spectacular object of a diegetic and spectatorial gaze -something precisely 'to-belooked-at'".…”