Haunted Television: Trauma and the Specter in the Archive

On television, the ghost enables a revisitation of traumatic histories and a revelation of injustice beyond death in genres as diverse as the ghost drama and the public service announcement. However, if television haunts us in its ability to reanimate the dead, then the recent resurfacing of Jimmy Savile, a dead television celebrity and serial rapist, might be seen as a more troubling and problematic form of televisual haunting. This article explores the ideas that television itself can be "haunting," that television companies and their archives might become haunted, and that the production of programming, from documentary to drama, can sometimes act as a form of exorcism, or at least a working through, of the traumas and hidden histories that the spectral figure represents.