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If I have an addiction, it's to work displacement activities, principally to netsurfing. The problem with my netsurfing is that much of it is repetitive; I revisit sites time and time again for no good reason. Meanwhile, potentially uplifting things, such as reading books or other people's chapters, are neglected - as is my preparation for tomorrow's German lesson.
I did spend a good afternoon in the Bodleian yesterday, though, reading up on the background to children's television in Britain in the early 1960s for my forthcoming Doctor Who paper to be delivered in Manchester. This is appropriate as the BBC television and radio children's departments, until the early 1960s, considered that they were forming the tastes of a generation - there was a quotation from the 1940s saying that a child was unlikely to grow up to be satisfied with 'Yes We Have No Bananas' as an adult, if they had been subjected to a diet of Mozart at an early age. The children's departments were disbanded in the early 1960s, and Doctor Who was an example of a 'child-oriented general programme', made by the (adult) drama department in a timeslot previously reserved for output from the old children's department. I'm interested in the assumptions by commentators that Doctor Who was, in its early years, meant to be educational - and yet, located in the wider context of BBC programme policy, it's part of a backlash against what was coming to be seen as a middle-class paternalism.
More work on that will have to wait until Friday - more eighteenth century tomorrow.
I did spend a good afternoon in the Bodleian yesterday, though, reading up on the background to children's television in Britain in the early 1960s for my forthcoming Doctor Who paper to be delivered in Manchester. This is appropriate as the BBC television and radio children's departments, until the early 1960s, considered that they were forming the tastes of a generation - there was a quotation from the 1940s saying that a child was unlikely to grow up to be satisfied with 'Yes We Have No Bananas' as an adult, if they had been subjected to a diet of Mozart at an early age. The children's departments were disbanded in the early 1960s, and Doctor Who was an example of a 'child-oriented general programme', made by the (adult) drama department in a timeslot previously reserved for output from the old children's department. I'm interested in the assumptions by commentators that Doctor Who was, in its early years, meant to be educational - and yet, located in the wider context of BBC programme policy, it's part of a backlash against what was coming to be seen as a middle-class paternalism.
More work on that will have to wait until Friday - more eighteenth century tomorrow.
.