Contrary Regionalisms and Noisy Correspondences

This essay examines the limits and possibilities of the mid-century broadcasting field in Northern Ireland, by attending to the dynamic interplay at the BBC's Belfast station of three competing regional formations: the political regionalism of the Northern Irish state; the cultural regionalism of a coterie of Northern Irish writers and intellectuals; and the broadcasting regionalism instituted as part of the BBC's policy of national programming. These contrary regionalisms each had different and, at times, competing criteria for what constituted particular and typical details of life in the North, and broadcasters had to negotiate the inexact correspondences among them with ears tuned to the political relations triangulated by Belfast, Dublin, and London. Beginning with a consideration of how broadcasters in Northern Ireland produced forms of mediated actuality both in and beyond the studio, the essay concludes with Sam Hanna Bell's This is Northern Ireland (1949), a feature that explores the tension of overspill and containment effected less by the partition of Ireland than by the contradictions inherent to the broadcasting field

Broadcasting (networking · Democracy · Ethnology · Irish · Media studies · Negotiation · Northern ireland · Partition (number theory · Political science · Politics · Regionalism (politics · Sociology · History · Irish and British Studies · Law · Philippine History and Culture · Scottish History and National Identity

• Television Drama and Northern Ireland

  Open Access•JOHN HILL•Journal of British Cinema and…•2023

  Add to list

• Dimensionality of Policy Space in Consociational Northern Ireland

  Open Access•John Garry, Neil Matthews et al.•Political Studies•2017

  Add to list