Television/Death

Helen Wheatley is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. She is co-founder of the Centre for Television Histories and works collaboratively with archives and curators to engage the public with the history of British broadcasting. Her most recent book, Spectacular Television: Exploring Televisual Pleasure (2016) won the BAFTSS Award for Monograph of the Year in 2017. She has research interests in various aspects of television history and has published widely on popular genres of television drama, including the monograph Gothic Television (2006). She also has an ongoing interest in issues of television history and historiography, the topic of her edited collections Re-viewing Television History: Critical Issues in Television Historiography (2007) and Television for Women: New Directions (2016, with Rachel Moseley and Helen Wood).

• AcknowledgementsList of IllustrationsIntroduction: Television/DeathSection One: Death and Dying on TelevisionChapter One: Everyday death: The early history of death on British televisionChapter Two: Signs of care: Assisted suicide on televisionSection Two: Dramas of Grief, Bereavement and the Television AfterlifeChapter Three: A good death? Death and the afterlife in US television fictionChapter Four: Dramas of grief: television and mourningChapter Five: Haunted houses, haunted landscapes: grief and trauma in the television ghost storySection Three: Posthumous Television Chapter Six: Entering the mausoleum: Posthumous televisionChapter Seven: Ghost town: Posthumous television in the cityNotesReferencesIndex

Television, Helen Wheatley argues cogently and persuasively, is much possessed of death. Her book is a dazzlingly wide-ranging study of the dying, the dead and the afterlife in documentaries and dramas. Exploring questions of television and intimacy, ethics, community and, crucially, the archive, this is a rich, engaging, essential volume.