Exemplarity, Pedagogy and Television History

This paper addresses some theoretical problems raised by the citation of examples of popular television drama in teaching and writing about British programmes of the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that examples shape theorists' and students' understanding because citing an example relies on a notion of a canon whose constitution, inclusions and exclusions represent a larger context and history. Yet an example must therefore exceed the field it stands for, and also be more than typical. This duality between representativeness and exceptionalness is necessarily the case, and the paper ranges widely over recent writing to demonstrate its implications in academic work on programmes including Doctor Who and The Avengers. It also refers to the processes of commissioning and writing in the author's own work and considers the use of examples in different academic publishing contexts. The paper argues for the reflexivity of television pedagogy and publication as situated rhetorical practices, to raise questions of methodology that necessarily but sometimes unconsciously energise the discipline of Television Studies, and especially the study of television history.