This month’s talk from Manchester’s Public Centre for History and Heritage will take place this Wednesday at the Central Library.
In Search of the Wild: Northern Landscapes on Television, looks at the growing popularity of landscape television, and the development of the flexible ‘docu-lite’ format that gives audiences a magazine-style blend of ecology, geography, literary, agricultural, local, and national history, memoir and anecdote.
Seen most obviously in the BBC’s long-running, and ever-expanding flagship, Countryfile, the rise of this style of programme – produced across all of the major channels – marks an interesting moment in our relationship with rural landscapes, in particular.
Focusing on shows such as Mountain with Griff Rhys Jones, and Walking through History by Tony Robinson, this talk also discusses a much wider cultural interest in concepts of ‘wilderness’, and the ‘North’ that are apparent in much of the genre.
Finally, it examines how the contemporary sense of an ‘eco-loss’ contributes to the ways in which Northern landscapes on television fulfil a complex desire for the rugged, the dangerous, and the industrial.
The talk is given by Nicola Bishop, a senior lecturer in English literature with film and television at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Venue: Archives+, on the ground floor of the Manchester Central Library.
6pm–7pm
Everyone is welcome
