Recovering Women’s Television Histories

Recovering Women’s Television Histories This panel brings together scholars engaged in recovering marginalised or forgotten histories of women women’s work in television production. Each of these papers explore the creativity of women in their respective spheres of production. Baker and Ball explore the creativity of women who worked in traditional masculine roles across below and above the line roles (the technician and writer, respectively) while Sahu’s paper brings into view the star labour of Indian talk show host Tabassusm, whose programmes challenged androcentric histories of Bombay cinema. Together, these case studies span from the 1950s to the 1980s, providing flashpoints of women’s history across the Australia, India and UK. As such they provide insight into current challenges and approaches to the study of women’s television histories. Bringing up the picture: Women and technical work in early Australian television The historiography of Australian television invariably centres on ‘pioneers’ – the male owners, managers, and personalities who are portrayed as solely responsible for the success of the new technology. ‘Below-the-line’ female staff, such as central control operator Molly Brownless, who ‘brought up the picture’ on the opening night of television in 1956, are rarely credited for their contribution. Although Australian broadcasting organisations have always been male-dominated and characterised by a strict sexual division of labour, numerous women worked in technical roles in the early years of television, including editing, videotape, telecine, vision mixing, and camera. Feminist media historians have demonstrated that institutional structures and production cultures were themselves gendered. While the equation of technology with masculine labour continues to be a barrier to women’s full employment in the media, there is a lack of understanding about the entrenched structural discrimination and gendered practices that have contributed to this disparity. This paper draws on oral history interviews with former women television technicians to analyse the relationship between gender and technology in Australian television production. In doing so, it redirects our attention from the male auteur and considers women technicians as creative workers within a collaborative production environment. It argues that listening to women’s experiences is crucial for understanding the ways that women’s skills were valued and defined within production communities, and the workplace cultures, practices and structures that have contributed to a persistent underrepresentation of women in technical areas. ‘My God! This is male’: Women’s experiences of writing British television drama in the 1970s and 1980s ‘Play for Today at 50: Women Writers and writing women into histories of British television drama’ is a two-year BA/Leverhulme funded project based at De Montfort University. Commencing in March 2020, the project uses the fiftieth anniversary of this BBC’s flagship play series as a case study to highlight the significance of the single play in the histories of women’s work in television drama, identify the attendant gender politics of television production which have contributed to the high levels of inequality therein and to critically analyse women’s creative contributions to the television play. There has been very little sustained research of these issues, which can be attributed to the male-dominance of play production and the attendant invisibility of women in archives (Moseley and Wheatley, 2008) and television drama histories (Caughie, 2000; Cooke, 2003, 2015). Women made up just 13% writers of the Play for Today slot, which is representative of more general participation rates of women writers in the 1970s in the UK (Ball Forthcoming). Drawing on archival research and oral histories with women writers of Play for Today this paper explores why women’s participation rates fell drastically low in the 1970s, and how these factors shaped and informed women’s opportunities and experience of writing for play series such as Play for Today. Subsequently, this paper historicises those factors which inform the self-sustaining loop of gender inequality which continues to structure contemporary British television drama production. Reinventing the television talk show on YouTube: The case of Phool Khile Hain (1972-93) and Tabassum Talkies (2016-present) This paper looks at the digital revival of the first and longest-running Indian television talk show, Phool Khile Hain. Started soon after television’s inception in 1972, the film-based talk show developed into one of the most widely viewed programs. Its vivacious host Tabassum, a former child artist and struggling actress of 1950s-60s cinema, became a household name and ran the show for two decades. In the early years, PKH negotiated the “legitimacy” of commercial cinema’s place on educational television. It also generated new discourse on cinema at variance with contemporary star culture promoted by fan magazines. Besides stars, Tabassum invited industry’s peripheral figures, such as forgotten icons, supporting actors, stunt actress and dancing women. The testimonial talk show format mounted an alternative cine-ecology of female labour, industrial exploitation, material and technological history of Bombay cinema. Recently, PKH’s episodes from the monochrome years have resurfaced, as a septuagenarian Tabassum once again reinvents herself, through her eponymous YouTube channel Tabassum Talkies (2016-). The channel contains hundreds of ten-minute videos remediating earlier analogue moments of Tabassum with film personalities. As Tabassum chronicles her life and career, media artefacts such as faded old photographs, film posters and clips, television excerpts and stage show video recordings create a genealogy of film history. But besides nostalgia, intrigue and death are key tropes in this archiveology of a bygone era, taking on a renewed spectrality with the onset of the pandemic and Tabassum’s prolonged illness and rumoured death. Looking at such “resurrections” of the host(self) and the Indian talk show from analogue to digital, this paper reflects on the processes of new memory culture and its performative and critical capacities