The development of television aesthetics in the 1960s.

What is it about?

What factors determined the use of film as a television technology in the development of aesthetics in the action-adventure television genre of the 1960s? The use of film on television, instead of in the cinema, led to a debate about ‘technical quality’. Celluloid’s superiority to video gave rise to a cultural understanding of TV aesthetics that could be built on notions of fashion, art, and conspicuous consumption.

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Why is it important?

The action-adventure genre of the 1960s deployed these pop aesthetics and a comic strategy to appeal to an audience fascinated by glamour and youth, and amused by the ideological eccentricity of The Avengers and The Prisoner . The absurd narratives of both of these series refused to different degrees to engage with the real world, but The Prisoner represented an attempt to produce entertainment that relied more on notions of ‘seriousness’. The two series reflect the way television, with its endless dialectic of variation/replication, continued to produce new developments in the action-adventure genre.