"It's Just So Hard to Bring It to Mind"

Abstract

Memory is theorised as constructive and unreliable, while television has been characterised as forgettable and guilty of undermining memory. In a recent series of oral history interviews I asked British women of different generations to tell me their memories of television in the period 1947 to 1989. This article presents some of their memories to demonstrate how, far from undermining memory, television is used a type of memory text for particular life stages.