Inside Television Production

Reviews / Votes

Report 1 - Robert Benfield, Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Westminster, UK - 'The chapters all develop interesting areas and how they coalesce into a view of contemporary television is well argued...Chapter 2 A good commercial view of the commissioning process. Care should be taken with examples...Chapter 3 sounds interesting. A proper study of formatting, format points and the value of moving formats around the world is a good idea...Chapter 4 Distribution lives Again sounds interesting. These are issues that engage the student reader. I'm very interested to see what happens with BBC3. Can it still lead the youth market and create new television from the web.'

Report 2 - Ashley Woodfall, Faculty of Media and Communication, Bournemouth University, UK - 'An explicit bringing together of media practice and theory; practitioner and audience... Gaining access the voice of high level decision makers...Case studies appear appropriate, varied and useful...it intends to cover the whys, whos, and hows or TV...It offers a keen sense of the globalised production economy.'

Report 3 - Thelma Vickroy, Department of Cinema and Television Arts, California State University Northridge, USA - '[Strengths?] That it looks at international broadcast models in the UK, Australia, Denmark and France... I think for universities that do not have real television practitioners teaching in their programs this case study approach might be helpful and enlightening for students...Our department would not adopt this course text. The department has real industry practitioners (network executives, head of Warner Brothers Research and Development) teaching our television management courses...The only possible place might be a supplementary reading in the International Broadcasting course although I don't think the text would cover enough material as a stand-alone text.'

Report 4 - Luke Devenish, School of Film and Television, University of Melbourne, Australia - 'The notion of there being 'five lives' of television is a fresh approach to dealing with the creation/commissioning/production/consumption process. Within the proposed sections there were several promising areas stemming from this concept that suggested a freshness of approach will be sustained...With so much potential and uncertainty attached to VOD and streaming the desire for insider insights on this area of television is very high...Roscoe proposes to examine industry commissioned research conducted by both in-house teams and external consultants. Utilising and analysing such data could well prove highly enlightening, given that such (potentially sensitive) information is in many ways of greater interest to students and industry creatives than traditional academic research for being insider generated...It has much potential as supplementary reading.'