Is Screen Studies a Load of Old Cobblers? And If So, Is That Good?

Sometimes doing things well can be the cause of eventual disaster. The doleful cobbler was a case in point:

The stouter I cobble the less I earn,
For the soles ne'er crack nor the uppers turn.
The better my work the less my pay,
But work can only be done one way.

—The Cobbler's Song (1916)¹

The better the cobbler mended people's shoes, the less they needed him; but he could only do it well. IBM is another example. Big Blue made mainframe computers, and because it did that well, Microsoft's PC all but destroyed the company.

People have been doing screen studies for some time now, often very well. Is this a recipe for disaster? In the new edition of Global Hollywood, Toby Miller and his colleagues ask the question this way: "Is screen studies serving phantasmatic projections of humanities critics' narcissism?" And more simply: "What would it take for screen studies to matter more?" According to this view, several decades of screen studies has achieved self-loathing and uselessness. Miller et al. counsel that we should avoid the "reproduction of 'screen studies' in favour of work that studies the screen, regardless of its intellectual provenance."²

Is the same true for television? Is there such a thing as television studies, or should we stick with interdisciplinary "work that studies television" (hereafter WTSTV)? Either way, is WTSTV the cavalry, riding into town just in the nick of time to rescue screen studies from self-loathing? Will WTSTV solve the problem of uselessness? But before we celebrate what Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky might have called "the canonisation of the junior branch,"³ we might pause and ask where the study of television came from, because it would not be wise to continue to study it if it is "a load of old cobblers"⁴ —people doing something well that guarantees them eventual despair.

I first thought of television as a discipline in the 1970s. The idea came from TV itself, from a show called University Challenge. It was a quiz show modeled on the even more venerable U.S. College Bowl.⁵ For twenty-five years, beginning in 1962, University Challenge was hosted by Bamber Gascoigne.⁶ Gascoigne exuded posh, urbane scholarliness during a time when universities were unchallenged as finishing schools for top people and professionals. Gascoigne "came up" to Magdalene College at Cambridge in 1955 to "read" English,⁷ and he always introduced contestants on the show by saying what they "read" at university. From about 1978 on, I always hoped to hear him introduce some scion of learning as "so-and-so, University of Somewhere, reading television." This was because I had just coauthored a book with that very title. But of course it never happened.

Sometime during University Challenge's run, British universities were themselves challenged to adapt to the changing social and economic circumstances of the affluent welfare society. After the publication of the Robbins Report (1963),⁸ universities succumbed to an irreversible trend to open up to the masses. Some of the latter—I was one—learned a little about universities by watching the show: "For many of the viewers, it was their first contact with that alien beast, the student, and did much to make university more accessible to people who hadn't been to Eton."⁹

Audiences persistently liked know-it-alls, whether highbrow, as featured on University Challenge or Mastermind, or the other sort, on shows such as Double Your Money or Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? It may even be said that this light-hearted entertainment softened up the general public for the "knowledge economy" by showing it as a competitive advantage.

But the influx of plebeian students could not "read" television in the way that their predecessors may have "read" Greats (classics) or PPE (politics, philosophy, and economics). The times were...