Year 11 Q. 2 EXAM REVISION

In today's class, we revise for the forthcoming mock exams.
PREP Revision for q. 2
Please read carefully:

Cuffs is a pre-watershed drama illustrating, for example: the dominance of the police drama genre in contemporary television schedules and the industrial importance of the serial narrative form, the role of BBC1 in the contemporary television industry, how representations seek to reflect contemporary contexts, the offering of uses and gratifications to attract a mass audience in an increasingly segmented market. 

The Avengers is a PG certificate drama illustrating a historically significant media product. The Avengers was a landmark television series in the 1960s and reflects the brand image of ITV as more daring in this era. The media language is comparatively rich for a television product of this era and a monochrome episode has been set to illustrate changing television technology. 

The Avengers TV show helped define the ‘spy drama’ genre in the 1960s and was influenced by events occurring as it was filmed, including episodes that parodied current and historical events. The Avengers also included one of the first memorable examples of product placement (the ‘Lotus Elan’), a technique which has great historical significance in contributing towards the funding of films and commercial television programmes in the present day.

The Avengers also illustrates the industrial importance of the series narrative form in 1960s television, the role of ITV in the era of three channel television, how representations reflect the 1960s contexts, how audience responses and interpretations may change over time as popular television products develop cult status. 

The Avengers series is also a significant product due to its cultural and social impact and reach. The Avengers was a long-running series that was a mainstay of 1960s primetime television. Series four was sold to American television and the series played a role in representing 1960s Britain to the rest of the world – eventually showing in 120 countries – reinforcing stereotypes of the traditional British upper-class. It became a cult programme as an important example of 1960s popular drama and is still aired on British television today. 

We study at least the one set episode of each of these programmes in detail, practising analysis of extracts, and developing our knowledge and understanding of the theoretical framework as it applies to the programmes as a whole. 

We must study the contexts associated with the media products and develop an understanding of the differences between how the two media products illuminate the changing social, cultural, historical and political contexts of the mid-1960s and mid-2010s, enabling us to develop a detailed understanding of how they appear in mainstream drama.

It is recommended that you investigate other similar media products from these periods to reinforce your understanding of how the two products reflect their contexts.You must study the listed episodes in terms of all four areas of the theoretical framework, including the theoretical perspectives, and the media products’ social, cultural, historical and political contexts, listed in the table at the end of Component 01.