This post continues the ongoing “From Nottingham and Beyond” series, with contributions from faculty and alumni of the University of Nottingham’s Department of Culture, Film and Media. This week’s contributor, Lincoln Geraghty, completed his PhD in the department in 2005.

The recent national media coverage of a very international problem that news broadcasters around the world have termed the “migrant crisis” has highlighted Britain’s conflicting and problematic attitude towards immigration. The words “foreigner,” “other,” or “outsider” have been used in the press as a means by which politicians can lay claim to protecting British interests and sealing off British borders. Alongside the rush not to aid fellow European nations by taking a fair share of refugees lies an increasing amount of euroskepticism that characterized much of the debate about the UK’s relationship with Europe during the 2015 parliamentary election. Campaigns by the three main parties and those such as the UK Independence Party all professed that immigration was a problem they alone could fix. Indeed, this past week has seen lines drawn in the battle to convince Britons to vote “Yes” or “No” in 2017’s promised referendum on whether the UK should leave the EU. Those supporting the “Yes” campaign would more than likely say Britain should not allow Europe to dictate immigration policy. Nonetheless, notwithstanding the EU referendum, Britain has continued to remain aloof rather than cooperate with other European nations such as France and Germany to solve common problems. Determined to take advantage of its island status, it distances itself from the fact the country remains an attractive draw to thousands of migrants who wish for a better life in the UK.

It is with all that said that I recently watched the British children’s film Paddington (2014). In many ways it is a film all about immigration–after all, Paddington arrives in the UK hoping to find a place to live after his own home is left devastated by natural disaster. As a stranger in stranger land, Paddington enjoys a wide-eyed innocence when confronted with prejudice and suspicion. But despite initial fears of this animal “other,” Britain, or more specifically England, represents a utopia–a land of plenty (especially marmalade sandwiches)–where Paddington feels at home and his adopted family feels at home with him. With immigration and the migrant crisis so prevalent in the press today, it seems easy to think that we are only now engaging with the issues that make it such a divisive topic. However, judging by the content of Paddington, how as a children’s film it tackles quite adult themes of otherness and displacement and the fact that the original books were published in the 1950s, it would seem that the figure of the migrant and the idea of Britain as safe haven for immigrants have existed in children’s literature and popular culture for decades. Indeed, using children’s film as a platform for discussing such issues suggests that the genre has had a history of dealing with real-world social problems, of which we should be taking greater account when studying the film industry in its contexts.

Written and directed by Britain’s Paul King, the film was made by the UK’s Heyday Films, the same company that produced the Harry Potter series, and France’s StudioCanal. Based on Michael Bond’s famous English series of children’s books, the film was adapted for an international audience, casting popular and renowned UK actors such as Hugh Bonneville, Julie Walters, Jim Broadbent and Peter Capaldi alongside Australian American Nicole Kidman. For its modest $55 million budget it made $258.6 million at the box office. Its main star, of course, is the CGI Paddington Bear–voiced by UK actor Ben Whishaw (who replaced Oscar winner Colin Firth late in the production)–and it is through Paddington that we are introduced to the Brown family and the eccentricities of British society and culture.

Paddington is befriended by Mr. Gruber (Jim Broadbent, above), who is also an immigrant, having fled Hungary as a child during World War Two to escape the Nazis. Both see London as a utopic space, a place to escape the hardships of their respective homelands. In the film, Mr. Gruber runs an antique shop in Portobello Road and Paddington visits to help investigate the identity of the explorer who came to Peru all those years ago. A scene combining live action and animation allows Mr. Gruber to talk about his childhood when he came to London to escape the war. This strikes a chord with Paddington, who himself is awestruck with wonder at all the items on display in the store. Mr. Gruber treats Paddington with respect, is interested in his stories about the explorer, and sees the bear as wise beyond his young years. Paddington’s youthful energy rubs off on Mr. Gruber, and the pair feel a sense of kinship.

Unlike Gruber, the mean and miserly old man next door, Mr. Curry, is not fond of Paddington. Played by Peter Capaldi, who was cast in 2013 as The Doctor on Doctor Who, Mr. Curry is depicted as a lonely bachelor. His hatred of Paddington could be viewed as xenophobic–an illegal alien from South America living in the privileged surroundings of West London’s Notting Hill–and I would argue is meant to resonate with British audiences as reference to contemporary political debates concerning immigration prevalent in the UK during the run-up to the General Election and the rise of UKIP. Indeed, Kyle Grayson argues of the original books that they illustrate “how political theorising may take place in the vernacular space of popular culture” and that the figure of Paddington as immigrant works to unpack “liberal conceptions of identity, migration and tolerance while drawing attention to specific negotiations of difference.[1] Similarly, Angela Smith maintains that while the stories “are subtle in their articulation of racist and xenophobic discourses which […] present the case for toleration and understanding towards immigrants,” Paddington has to try to fit in just as “the immigrant conforms to the dominant culture’s norms.”[2] Therefore, the film replicates the books in the representation of Paddington as a non-threatening other who eventually wins over Mr. Curry and proves his worth to his adopted family, the Browns, by bringing the family together.

Both Paddington and Mr. Gruber’s search for a new place to call home can be considered nostalgic. This desire for a home is the epitome of nostalgia, whose rhetoric and experience is framed by a feeling of absence and longing: what Susan Stewart says “leads to a generalized desire for origin, for nature, and for unmediated experience.”[3] Nostalgia is also linked with nation, and in Paddington we can see this connection in London’s representation through icons and stereotypes of Englishness: red double-decker buses, soldiers in front of Buckingham Palace, red telephone boxes, the English “bobby” policeman, rain, the city skyline (featuring, for example, the House of Parliament), tea and tea drinking, English reserve and manners, Mr. Brown’s stiff upper lip, and a host of other tropes throughout the movie. Indeed, for Margaret Meek in her study of English children’s literature, nostalgia is a “thread” in the “texture of Englishness.”[4] Thinking about the marketing of the international family film genre, the prominence of familiar icons of England and Englishness can be understood as part of the translation of an English children’s story for an international audience–relying on well-known tourist images of the country to brand the film as English, and using cultural stereotypes to add humor and to emphasize Paddington’s identity as stranger in a strange land. However, more importantly, their use within the narrative exaggerates the sense of nostalgia that both Paddington and Gruber feel for home. It is perhaps the incessantness, their constant flagging (to borrow Michael Billig’s term) as symbols of English nationhood and identity throughout the film’s emotional high points, which in the end transforms the exiles (the bear child and old man) into adopted nationals–assimilated immigrants in a narrative of nostalgia, family and nation.

Children and old people are important components of nationhood. Such emphases in the film make it stand out as a relevant text through which we might understand media fascination for, and problematic coverage of, the “migrant crisis.” In addition, as a children’s film it highlights that from a very early age, young audiences are being introduced to topics that will no doubt resonate when they get older and are able to participate in debates surrounding Britain’s relationship with Europe and the wider world. As a British film in 2014, when the country was bombarded by newspapers and politicians asking us to listen to them and trust their views on important issues such as immigration, it perhaps even more importantly questions the underlying ideologies at the heart of the media we consume and the childhood characters with whom we have grown up.

Notes

[1] Kyle Grayson, “How to Read Paddington Bear: Liberalism and the Foreign Subject in A Bear Called Paddington,” The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 15.3 (2013), p. 391, p. 378.

[2] Angela Smith, “Paddington Bear: A Case Study of Immigration and Otherness.,” Children’s Literature in Education 37.1 (2006), p. 48.

[3] Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 24.

[4] Margaret Meek, “The Englishness of English Children’s Books,” Children’s Literature and National Identity, ed. Margaret Meek (Stoke in Trent: Trentham Books, 2001), p. 96.

Post by Jonathan Bignell, University of Reading

This is the ninth post in our “Honoring Hilmes” series, celebrating the career and legacy of Michele Hilmes on the occasion of her retirement. 

The aspect of Michele Hilmes’ work that has most affected me is her brilliant historical analysis of the related but distinct broadcasting traditions of Britain and the USA in Network Nations (2011). She has documented and evaluated their long-standing links, but also shown how each has defined itself by repudiating the other. The lesson that I have learned from Michele is that when we look closely at the detail of history, there are always more complex and more interesting things to discover. This post is just a brief example of such a discovery. What looks like a British show imitating an American format turns out to be a US production made abroad. Its conventionally transatlantic casting includes a Lithuanian playing an ex-patriate Minnesotan, and alongside the “swinging London” of the mid-1960s we see the decaying Victorian houses of the inner city.

My former colleague Billy Smart kindly gave me Network’s DVD release of the action series Strange Report (1969-70) recently. At first glance, it looks like a rather less successful example of the British action shows that flourished in the 1960s and briefly succeeded across the Atlantic too (as discussed in my 2010 Media History article). British series like The Saint (1962-69), The Avengers (1961-69), and The Champions (1968-69) adopted versions of US industrial organization to make programmes that would be saleable to US networks, by shooting on colour film, on location (British drama was still mainly shot on video in the studio), and with an upbeat “mod” aesthetic.

Strange Report seems initially to conform to the format. Each week a retired British Home Office criminologist, Adam Strange (played by Anthony Quayle), solves sensitive cases in which government departments cannot become publicly involved. Strange is aided by a young US Rhodes scholar, Hamlyn Gynt (Kaz Garas), and Strange’s next-door neighbour, the vivacious model-cum-artist Evelyn (Anneke Wills).

But rather than representing international modernity, Strange Report remains surprisingly bound to its London setting. The series was filmed from July 1968 to March 1969 on location in London and at Pinewood Studios outside the city. To solve cases, the methodical and avuncular Strange uses his personal laboratory at his house in the run-down Paddington district, and his cerebral approach is complemented by Gynt’s physical vigour and Evelyn’s familiarity with London’s trendy bohemian culture. The British Film Institute’s excellent online guide, screenonline, notes that: “Locating the show in a recognisably contemporary London allowed the programme to display a degree of realism and authenticity unusual for its genre.” One episode is an investigation of violent student demonstrations (shortly after the revolutionary events of May 1968 in Paris), while another is about immigration and racism (in 1967 the British Member of Parliament, Enoch Powell, infamously predicted “rivers of blood” after immigration from Britain’s former empire increased). Stylish action-adventure series rarely addressed such concerns. Although the middle-class, middle-aged Strange tamed these issues by the end of each episode, the disparate quasi-family of protagonists seem closely engaged in their milieu.

Two of the featured actors were British: Quayle trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and was a member of the respected Old Vic theatre company from 1932. After army service in World War II he was a leading actor and director at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, which would later become the Royal Shakespeare Company. He featured in the British war films Ice Cold in Alex (1958) and The Guns of Navarone (1961), as well as the epic Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Aneke Wills featured in a TV adaptation of British children’s novel The Railway Children in 1957, and in Doctor Who from 1966-67 as companion to Doctors William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton. These were iconic English actors in significant British film and television roles. But Kaz Garas who played Strange’s youthful American sidekick was born in Lithuania, not the USA, though he based his career there.

The most interesting aspect of this transnational programme is that its executive producer was Norman Felton, best known as the creator and producer of US network series Dr. Kildare (1961-66), The Lieutenant (1963-64), and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964-68). Felton was a transatlantic figure himself; he was born in London, but his family migrated to the US in 1929. His parents returned but Felton stayed in the USA, won a playwriting fellowship to the University of Iowa, and worked in theatre, then radio at NBC. In the 1950s he worked in TV in New York, writing and directing for live anthology dramas like Alcoa Hour (1955-57), Goodyear Playhouse (1955-57), and Studio One (1948-58), and by end of the decade he was executive producer of Playhouse 90 (1956-60). He became MGM’s director of television, and formed the company that made Strange Report, Arena Productions, in 1961.

Felton was in London during production in 1969, and the British ITV network broadcast Strange Report that year. The intention was that production partner NBC would screen it in the USA and that a second, US-set series would be made in which the characters would relocate across the Atlantic. In January 1971, NBC got around to screening Strange Report on Fridays from 10:00 to 11:00 p.m. EST until September, but the second series was never made, apparently because Quayle and Wills did not want to travel. The strange story of Strange Report complicates the history of British drama and its relationships with the American market, offshore co-production involving the US networks, and the innovative collaborations between British and American personnel in the 1960s. And this is just the short version of the story….

First, a definition: transnational television co-production is the practice through which a producer/distributor based in one nation agrees to contribute up-front funding to a program produced by a company based in another nation in exchange for distribution rights as well as for some degree of creative input into the production.  Often the subject matter of such a production reflects or refers to its transnational roots by self-consciously including elements of cultural negotiation within the narrative situation; other times transnational convergence can be seen in elements of style, structure, aesthetics, or address. It is specific to television, with its strong national basis and its unique serial form, as well as its semantic flexibility enabled by practices such as scheduling, presentation, and promotion.  It is a transcultural form.

Though much attention has been paid to the reality format in the scholarship on global television, my focus here is on prime-time drama and documentary, where issues of national culture, media policy, audience specificity, and authorial integrity are more difficult to negotiate and often become the subject of considerable debate.  This type of production also differs from the more traditional “international co-ventures” that scholars such as Serra Tinic, Barbara Selznick, and Timothy Havens have discussed.  There are important and interesting distinctions to be made here, between a co-venture and a co-production, between co-financing and off-the-shelf sales, between format and fiction, but I will skip over these for now to focus on why and how transnational co-productions come about.

Co-production screen credits for Sherlock.

Most explanations go right for the money: co-production is a way of bringing in another source of finance that can have an immediate effect on the production, enabling bigger stars, better locations, and a glossier production all around.  This usually comes with exclusive distribution rights in a specific territory; so, for instance, when WGBH/Masterpiece puts a million dollars or two into a BBC production it expects to have the first, sole window of distribution in the United States.  BBC Worldwide, the BBC’s commercial sales arm, might be slightly miffed to miss out on chance to sell Sherlock more widely in the States (though in this case they participated as a co-production partner as well) but the existence of co-production funding can be the ticket to getting a high-cost production greenlighted when others are not.

Yet because success on the global market means an ability to address and attract broader- than-national audiences, another rationale for entering into transnational partnerships is precisely the opportunity to think trans-culturally.  Inclusion of characters or production teams from both countries (the easiest technique), narratives and subjects that span cultural locations, properties (like Sherlock) that already have transnational recognition and can work that imaginary identification into their narrative focus:  these are qualities that mark the most successful co-productions, and that draw together transnational publics.

Co-production can also help to support other forms of programming that are necessarily more nationally-specific and often of higher priority.  For WGBH, in this example, the investment of a relatively small amount of money in a co-produced prime-time drama, as opposed to sinking many more millions into an original production, means that scarce funding can go into news, public affairs, and children’s programs that are a more central part of PBS’s mandate.

Rebecca Eaton, Executive Producer of Masterpiece, with Benedict Cumberbatch at a season kick-off event in New York.

However, given the strong national focus of television – particularly for public broadcasters, though commercial channels also have their home markets to please – this kind of cultural negotiation can have its drawbacks.  Most notably on the British side this has involved accusations of cultural dilution, of using the television license fee paid by all British TV viewers on programs made for Americans.  Implied here is that making programs that appeal to Americans somehow weakens their essential Britishness.  This has come out in criticism of the recent transnational hit Downton Abbey (an ITV/WGBH co-production) for its substitution of melodrama for historical accuracy, though it has proved very successful with British audiences as well.  More to the point, both the BBC and ITV (Britain’s two central broadcasters) are specifically charged with producing a high proportion of original British programming in all categories – how much co-producer influence can there be before this claim becomes weakened?

Yet co-production is on the rise.  Changing structures in the British TV industry since the 1990s – from the “outsourcing” mandate of the 1990s to the 2004 Code of Practice that acted something like the fin/syn rules in the US – have greatly increased the number of independent producers and strengthened their hold on program rights (Chalaby 2010).  How can the rise in global partnerships be reconciled with mandates for national specificity?  What kinds of creative practices have been employed on both sides of the British/US co-production nexus to work within these constraints?  I’ll pursue those questions in my next post.

But I think it’s time to come out with a bold statement:  somewhere in the British/American relationship, a distinct genre of television has originated, which I propose (tongue in cheek, in the best British manner) to call “Trollywood”:  that transnational creative space created by the collaboration of British and American television producers over the last 50 years.  Furthermore, Trollywood’s operations have called into being a transnational public, not only composed of US and British audiences but assembling others from across the globe, whose members arguably have as much as or more in common with each other in terms of cultural affinities and shared affective experience, across national boundaries, than they have with other audiences in their home countries.  This despite the fact that the extent of the relationship has been downplayed in both nations, has been criticized on both sides, and is exceedingly hard to tease out.

But I will try, with a few numbers and statistics.  Let me assure you from the outset that these numbers are entirely unreliable – they are compiled through the BFI database, a wonderful instrument that nonetheless has enough quirks and omissions that the actual numbers given here should be understood as the roughest of approximations.  For instance, sometimes each episode in a series is counted as a separate production, sometimes not; some productions are counted twice or more since they have more than two co-production partners, etc.  But key patterns and formations emerge.

From 1980 to 2010, BFI tells us, a total of 2,237 programs have resulted from US/UK co-production.  Of those, the BBC has produced 1,345, or slightly more than half.  Other major UK co-producers are Channel Four and the various ITV companies. Since the re-structuring of the UK television industry in the 1990s, a host of independent production companies has emerged, many of them headed by former BBC and ITV co-production execs: Carnival, Left Bank, Kudos, Mammoth, and many others.  One of the most important forces to enter the scene in recent years has been BBC America, now itself often a co-production partner with both British and American companies.

On the US side, the dominant force by far is WGBH/Masterpiece, with 690 co-productions listed by the BFI between 1980 and 2010.  Cable channel A&E and New York public TV station WNET/Thirteen follow, with 287 and 216, respectively, dating from the 1980s.  But more recent cable and pay-cable partners like HBO, Discovery, Animal Planet, and Showtime are moving up, while important historical players, like Time-Life Films, have faded away.

What emerges clearly from these highly tentative numbers, however, is that the BBC/WGBH connection has been and still is by far the dominant one, with 548 prominent co-productions over this period, consisting of more than 200 series (some only 2 or 3 episodes, others running much longer) and many other one-off productions.  This is a considerable output, rivaling all but the biggest studios in commercial TV production, and indicating that this transnational partnership is important for public service broadcasting on both sides of the Atlantic.  And its audience numbers in the millions, across cultural and linguistic borders – all tuned into Trollywood.

Of course, the most popular US commercial programs obtain much bigger audiences through global distribution.  But what is distinct about Trollywood as I am defining it here is that these programs are co-productions:  not made in one place and shipped off the shelf across the globe, but arising from a long-standing relationship of mutual influence, creative input, and distinctly transnational production practices.  They also face unique challenges in their home nations, as well as taking advantage of unique opportunities.

I’ll explore the issues behind transnational co-production in future posts.  But next time you watch Sherlock, or Downton Abbey, or Torchwood, think “I am Trollywood nation” – a transnational public sharing affinities for a certain type of TV, a distinct set of productive practices and concerns, a historic constellation of affective cultural experience.  Not sure what difference that will make, but it’s worth trying on for size.