Television’s Moment

We are currently living in a golden age of television. Whatever your taste—crime, soap, period drama, fantasy, sci-fi—there is an endless supply of programmes to choose from. Television occupies an important space in our lives: on the internet, in newspapers and conversations. Given its cultural prevalence it is not easy to imagine a time when people could only choose between three or four channels. Yet television was perhaps even more influential during the ‘age of scarcity’, as television historians call the period until the 1970s. Popular programmes could reach well up to a third of a nation’s population. The age of scarcity was also an era of profound social and cultural upheaval. How the two—television and cultural change—came together, how television reflected but also contributed to the revolutionary 1960s is the subject of Christina von Hodenberg’s new study. Hodenberg tackles her subject in an original way by concentrating on one particular sitcom and its spin-offs in two other countries. This allows for a simultaneously more specific and much broader perspective, the in-depth analysis of three exemplary programmes as well as an international comparison. Hodenberg has chosen as her example the sitcom Till Death Us Do Part, which aired on BBC1 from 1965 to 1975. It was picked up by CBS as All in the Family in 1971 and by German television in 1973 as Ein Herz und eine Seele (One Heart and One Soul). All three shows were extremely popular and marked a departure from the conventional sitcom in so far as they tackled up-to-date subjects and pushed the ‘boundaries regarding sexual norms, gender roles, religious values, vulgarity and bad language’ (p. 3). This makes them ideally suited for Hodenberg’s investigation

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